This week we enjoyed a talk by Carl Dalton who is the co-founder of Brain in a Jar. Brain in a Jar is a company that mainly deals with contracts and have recently been working on the cars for watchdogs. He spoke about how people see the games industry as a place with few roles e.g. designer, artist and programming where in fact there are plenty of different roles. These include production, operations, business and marketing this list could go on. These areas of the industry can then be broken down into smaller chunks like specialist designer roles or artist roles. With larger games a design role would have to be broken up into specialist roles. Games that are created on a large scale are very complex systems and require a combination of skills. This means that the process of creating a game need’s to be shared between different designers, sometimes this could mean a designer only works on one level of the game. These designers need to be able to communicate and collaborate for the game to come together, this is usually overseen by a lead designer. Game designer roles on a project like this may include; lead designer, games designer, script writer, level editor, object planner, GUI Designer, Storyboard Artist, Illustrator, graphic designer(Creative skillset. N.D.). Having a large multi-talented team enables studios to create highly polished games that appeal to a mass market. It can be an entirely different story for small independent studios that have a very limited budget. These studios need to have people that are themselves multi-talented. A studio that does show this very well is Hello Games with a staff count of four. This studio has proved that it is possible to create great games with a small team by the success of Joe Danger on various platforms from PlayStation to IPhone. They have now wowed the world’s stage with their new game No Mans Sky. All this from a team made up of four people who are all multi-talented. Mode7 is another studio with only four fulltime members of staff. In a blog on their website Paul Taylor writes about how to become an indie developer. He explains that it is his job to do the; business development, marketing, audio, music, writing, art direction, UI design, single player design and other things as well. He also writes that to make a game you will need the following aspects; game design, code, level design, art and animation, audio and music, writing, business management (Taylor, 2012). Mode7 is another example of a small studio that has sold close to half million games and can be successful with very few people.
What all these studios show is that to be successful you need to have a set of skills. At a large studio you need less skills but the skills that you have need to be the best to get the most out of a game that will cost millions of pounds to make. The smaller studios show what is possible to do with a small team. To be a member of these small teams you need to know everything you need to be able to pitch in with all areas of the game for it to be successful. . Taylor, P. (2012) “How to Be an Indie Game Developer” [Online] Available at: http://www.mode7games.com/blog/2012/06/12/how-to-be-an-indie-game-developer/ [Last accessed 20/02/14] Creative Skillset. (N.D.) “Job Roles in Computer Games” [ Online] Available at: http://www.skillset.org/games/careers/article_2768_1.asp [Accessed 20/02/14]
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This week we had a talk from Ben Ward who is the owner of Supergonk. Ben discussed a lot about his time in the games Industry, from working in a triple A studio to now working from his bedroom and making more money than he ever has. This move was forced on Ben when Activision shutdown Bizarre Creations, he decided after this to go indie with the designer of Geometry Wars which was a successful Xbox arcade game. This company sadly did not work out for Nigel but now his new company has four million players on just one of the games. Part of this shift that sees developers moving from triple A to indie is due to the range of platforms now available. These platforms include smartphones, tablets and digital distribution (Brightman, 2013). All these platforms help developers create games with very little overheads. There are also new funding options like crowd funding, which allows companies with a creative idea gain the capital to make the game. It sounds like the right move to make as you can start up a studio and be your own boss and make lots of money. That is defiantly not the case as Ben mentioned as his first company Hogrocket failed with a good game, meaning he did not get paid for nearly two years. This seems a familiar theme for developers going indie, in an interview Borut Pfeifer says he felt the stress of not knowing when his paycheck would come through. This meant that planning for the future is much harder as you will not know when or how much money you will receive (Brightman, 2013). Working in triple A obviously is much safer in knowing that you will be paid at the end of the month and can plan your money around that.
During the talk Ben also mentioned that you need confidence to have your own studio. With confidence also come contacts and people you can lean on for help. This view is also shared by Damian Isla who thinks self-promotion skills are a hurdle for independent companies. He also believes that the company needs to be able to go to conferences, talk to journalist and build relationships (Ligman, 2013). To do all that Damian listed that you need to have confidence and you need to be able to talk to people to get good coverage of your game. There are other shortcomings for indie games and one big one is that the market is being saturated. As said before anyone can make and release a game from their bedroom with little or no skill. At one point any game on Xbox live would sell at least 25000 units within a month, now only games with heavy promotion can get numbers like that. In conclusion going form AAA to indie can be very profitable for an individual. For this to happen you need to create a product that sells you need to be prepared for financial troubles and you also need to be prepared for your game to fail. Brightman. J, (2013), ‘Going indie: “I’m more scared of staying AAA right now”’, [Online] Available: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-10-28-going-indie-im-more-scared-of-staying-in-aaa-right-now [Accessed 8/2/14 Ligman. K (2013) ‘Four AAA share their transition to independence’, [Online] Available: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/204070/Four_AAA_veterans_share_their_transition_to_independence.php Sorens. N, (2013) “Indie Games are due for a downward correction” [Online] Available: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/NeilSorens/20121217/183709/Indie_games_are_due_for_a_downward_correction.php [Accessed 8/02/14] This week’s lecture was by Nigel Kershaw. Nigel is a game designer who is currently working on Broken Sword series for mobile platforms. He has great experience in an industry he has worked in for 25 years, working on numerous games. The main subject of this week’s talk was about what a game designer does. A job that is often misunderstood by people from outside of the games industry. Nigel went on to explain that a designers job is to create something that has interactive unlike movies which are a passive experience. Nigel believes that games hold more in common with activities such as football and card games due to their interactivity. A problem with this is that most things can be described as interactive so a game must have different traits; Participation, Structure, emotional involvement, engagement and flow. Most importantly a game designer must create something that is “FUN”. An article on brianwill.net entitled what is fun describes how “the definition of fun gets hung up on the distinction between fun and entertainment”. Brian believes that fun can be generated by different emotions and that plenty of passive experiences have been described as fun. Brian also believes that games push a multitude of different emotions which is what makes them more engaging than a passive experience. This directly contradicts what Nigel believes in that fun can be sourced from both passive and interactive mediums (Will 2012). Raph Koster has a similar theory of what fun is, in his book entitled ‘Theory of Fun’. He believes that fun is source of enjoyment. The source of enjoyment can range from physical stimuli, aesthetic appreciation or direct chemical manipulation. Raph Koster hits on a different point and digs deeper into the point of what is fun and why games are fun and how they become boring. He believes that fun arises from mastery and comprehension of games and the act of solving the game. What Raph is saying is that learning is what makes games fun. An example of this is noughts and crosses as a new player to the game it provides a challenge but an adult will pick up the pattern very quickly. Once the pattern is mastered the game will become boring and trivial as you are no longer learning and the brain is no longer being stimulated. (Raph, 2012) An article on Nils Blog takes a more direct approach and a clear guide on what games have to consist of to be called a game. The article also gives a list of traits a game must have to be fun. The author believes that for games to be called fun it must have goals that are worth the journey, the journey must not be frustrating; the journey needs to keep the players mind busy. It is touch on upon in the article that if a game is frustrating the player is not going to think that the journey is worth making (Nils Blog 2011).
In conclusion to this week’s talk is that there are many theory’s on what a game is and what a games has to do to be fun. A common theme is that most of these people believe that there are differences between other forms of media and games. They believe that a game has more depth than other mediums. ms of media and games. They believe that a game has more depth than other mediums. Will, B. (2012). “What is Fun” [online] Available at: http://brianwill.net/blog/2012/02/ [Accessed 02/02/14] Nils Blog. (2012). “What Games Are” [Online] Available at: http://nilsmmoblog.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/what-games-are.html [Accessed 02/02/14] Raph, K. (2012) “Theory of Fun”. Scottsdale: Paraglyth Press Inc. P40. Will, B. (2012). “What is Fun” [online] Available at: http://brianwill.net/blog/2012/02/ [Accessed 02/02/14] |
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