Post-Graduation Check Up.

Hey guys, long time no talk to.

It's been a long couple of months since my last post. I've tried to keep most of my frustrations out of this blog because of me feeling like it's "temporary" stress. Life is definitely a roller coaster.

I'm probably going to keep this post rather short. Unemployed? You betcha. What have I been trying to do in the meantime? Draw. Draw, and fucking draw some more. I have a few projects in the works, including a book that I'm illustrating for one of the guys from the Kicked in the Dicebags podcast. Trying my best to keep active and to expand on a portfolio that I'll be excited to show people. Hopefully.

Anyway. Hoo-boy. A couple of Bradley alumni are getting together this weekend for some game work. Just because I'm having difficulty getting work doesn't mean I'm not going to make some work for myself. Since this fall we've been bouncing around ideas for a video game, and Sunday's going to be the first real "get-down-to-work" day we're having.

That's all for now. I want to try to use this as my progress blog for the game. Or at least something. The multitudes of areas I write in seem to be cluttered with other things lately.

A Parting Shot

Looking back is kinda nice, but if you never look forward you're not going to see where you're going...

That being said, I kinda realize a lot of writing (especially blogging) is done looking back or reflecting on certain points in time. This one is about this semester. Or rather, just the last few weeks. I'm not going to try to go into too much detail because I could just as easily fly off and start foaming at the mouth. Frustrating? You bet. Not exactly what I wanted my last semester of College to be like (at Bradley or at anywhere else) but I'm learning to let go of what I can't control, since that seems to be the main breaking point.

I talked with the head of the Game Design specialization a few weeks back. She seemed very receptive of what I had to ask about, and told me about the graphical expansions to the department that were going to take place in the next year or so. I was very happy to hear that. I didn't know if in the beginning they were actually going to look at expanding the "mini department" out but knowing that they're actually putting their minds to it is a great relief off my chest. Now if I could only get my mind onto what I need to do....

That being said, I think working in coordination with the Theatre Department has been one of the most hectic parts of this semester. Not so much working directly with them but through another class, a theory course that at the last two weeks of class wants us to go out and film a bunch of "on the street" footage when I'm trying to write and wrap up working on my damn portfolio that I had to set aside for several reasons and at play practice running commercials all night. The professor running the class once said that the reason he pushed his students so hard was that he wanted them to be able to say out in the field "Well, this client sure is a piece of work, but at least he's not as bad as that asshole we had for X class..." (True to my word, I am not making this up.) But that was for his production course. See my problem? Yeah. So far we haven't written a paper yet for it. Not that I'm complaining about the lack of paper writing. But still. Even if I feel like he's pushing us because of some shitty poster designs I cobbled together, I still think this is rather psychotic to do. (The poster designs fell through because, goddamnit, I had other classes with larger workloads at that point. Modeling always seems to default to my primary concern when I have tasks to complete.) I've tried to get a few of the other students to come with me to put the proverbial foot down, but at this point I've got the strangest feeling that my voice of reason dies with me. Maybe it's because of me failing the shitty poster designs. Whoops, sorry guys. I'm not much for graphic design some days.

That being said, it's definitely an interesting performance we're putting together. The old theatre practicum part of me says I should be there every damn day since we open next week to actually get my timing correct on what I'm supposed to do, but I am secretly grateful for the nights off I get. They don't end up being nights off (surprise surprise), but I enjoy having the extra hours to sit on a padded chair and work on my other classes. Stress and old injuries pick the best times to come and bite my ass. Resolution for the 500th time: MORE YOGA PLEASE. This semester started off okay for it, but now it's just plain nuts.

I know a part of my frustration is that I'm kind of taking the wrong major (Animation and Vis Effects) purely because Game Design wasn't visually based when I started here. But in retrospect I'm glad I've done what I have done with little exceptions. I mean, honestly, even though some semesters I barely get a chance to draw my abilities have improved by leaps and bounds.

That's all for now.

Post-Post GDC Wrapup

Hey look, I know, it's been a few weeks. Stuff has been very, very crazy. So I'm going to try to write most of what I remember from the Expo's last day. I will say that, upon looking back at the event, it would've been really nice for the Game Career Seminar to take place on maybe Wednesday instead of the last day of the Expo, but I can see the logisitics as to why they put each session into their particular places. Maybe if they gave an extra day to the expo opening (Seminars Sun-Monday, Expo opens Tuesday, GCS on Wednesday, etc) it would work out so that the people working the Expo floor aren't fucking floored by the end of the first day, and those of us who had enough money to scrape together to stick around for the Expo passes get an extra couple days to use whatever knowledge that we've picked up from the GCS to talk to folks. Dunno, I might just be hashing the little nuts and bolts.

Shaun and I hit up most of the seminars about getting into the gaming industry for several reasons. Obviously, we're both looking to brush up our portfolios to do this sort of thing, and myself I wanted to see just how well Bradley University has done starting up their "game design" specialty for Interactive Media. Call me crazy, but I know that the next set of freshmen probably has a shit-ton of people who want to do game design (and it's easy to get hooked in by the title), but considering what I'd actually taken of the specialization, I didn't have very high hopes.

Well.....

I was right.

From our first seminar to the very last, one thing was explicitly mentioned over everything else. The gaming industry is not looking for a swiss army knife, they're looking for a scalpel. And lemme explain that further by saying that they're looking for someone that's really good at one thing (be it, say, 3D Modeling) and can do enough of the rest to know how their portion integrates into the whole game. I could go through and list out all of the things I find that Bradley needs to improve upon, but hell, this post is supposed to be about GDC, not my alma mater. (if I can call it that yet.)

The first speaker was Christian Allen, and he talked about how to network in the gaming industry. His was a great session to start off with - humorous, witty, and full of great realistic knowledge about how to actually talk to people in the gaming industry. TL;DR, yes, we can all be very much introverts and forums are a GREAT way to talk to people. It was also chock-full of how to introduce yourself and design your portfolio. Take time to know who you're talking to. It does wonders for communication, especially when everyone's work is so world-known.

The second speaker I took notes for was a professor from ETC @ Carnegie-Mellon. His discussion, from what I remember, what about creating that first independent game and trying to market it. This one was done from the aspect of still being in school. I kinda wanted to actually try to find the guy later and talk with him - their curriculum sounds a hell of a lot better (and more refined) than what we've just started with at Bradley (I know it takes awhile for people to get on the bandwagon, but god, we need to pick up the pace ASAP. Yet another reason why I hate bureaucracy - I'm sure that it has a hand in keeping curriculum bogged down so much.)

The third one was an artists' panel about how to tailor a portfolio (a site in most cases) towards your major, your specialty, etc. I walked away from this one with a HOST of ideas on what to do for changing up my site, and the knowledge that the amazing scenery and design from L4D was designed by one of the guys who put together the conceptual art for the very same trilogy that made me want to do 3D modeling in the first place - Jeremy Bennet. I nearly died when I figured this out. It's a weird full circle - the video game company that I would kill to work for, has a guy who inspired my career choice. Small, freakishly small world.

The last one I have any notes for is a presentation done by Jeff Ward: "20 lessons" a set of guidelines and general bits of wisdom that he's learned from going from his first big job - working at bethesda - to now running part of a start-up indie company. Such simple tasks as "Getting involved" and general common sense issues that can come up as a part of the process of creating a video game. One of my favorites (and something I keep reminding people about) is one he titled "Solve Actual Problems." You might have found a way to streamline something, that's absolutely freaking great. Is it necessary or vital to what you're doing? No? THEN STOP WORKING ON IT.

All and all, got a lot of good ideas to leave with. The trip back home was, sadly, uneventful and nowhere near as nice. I suppose in retrospect it's nicer now with the weather improving, but we went from 62 degrees in San Francisco....to 29 degrees on the tarmac outside of the Peoria Airport. That and it took about a half hour to get our luggage. In a terminal that's one eighth the size of any of the other airports that we were in. Also, after being in so many different airports for this trip, I've got to say that I'm utterly disgusted with O'Hare. Considering that it's an international airport, it's highly disorganized (compared to San Fran, Dallas/Ft. Worth), and no free wi-fi. Why. Honestly. Is IL that much in debt? I guess so.

Overwhelming much?

So it's day two of three of the Expo part of the con and oh my god...there's just so much to do. We're not even full-passes to the Conference and it's nuts. I thought it was pretty insane when I went to Gen Con with my father back in 2008, but that pales in comparison to this. (Probably simply because this is completely my whole interest where as D&D was dad's). There were booths for Google, for Blizzard, ActiVision, Bethesda, Ubisoft, PlayStation....I don't think I could name them all, even if I tried (and I know there were a few even missing!)

Our first day was mind-numbing. Literally walking into the hall, the line from 13th Warrior that was used in Least I Could Do came back to me in fragments. I really need to actually watch this movie sometime:

'Lo, there do I see

The line of my people

Back to the beginning...

'Lo, they do call me.

They bid me take my place among them

In the halls of Valhalla

Where the brave

May live

Forever.

Yes, I know. Super geek.

We spent most of the time trying to get over the classic outsider worry. If you're unfamiliar with this it is, simply put:

OH MY GOD I'M NOT WORTHY OF DOING THIS AS A CAREER, I'M NOT READY AHHHHHHHHH WHAT DO I DO?

Or something very similar. That night was the Indie Game Developer's Awards and the Game Developers Awards, which we ran to immediately. Minecraft cleared house, as well as Red Dead Redemption and Amnesia. I'm happy to see Minecraft win a lot of awards. After all, 10million dollas in revenue for a beta that's been out for a short amount of time is...well, something amazing. Being their first game EVER....it's fucking insane. I somehow managed to with the use of twitter get Shaun and I into a FunCom industry release party, where we spun our heels and saw Jeb from Minecraft. (we were still getting over that nervousness talking to people, so we didn't go up and say hi.)

Today we went and hooked up with an old alumni for lunch. After that we managed to hit up VALVe's booth for a presentation about what to do that will impress game companies. Robin Walker (btw...is he Aussie? British? Very nice accent, regardless) talked to groups of about twenty of us at a time about what to do. They don't want a portfolio. They don't want a resume. They want stuff that you've done, be it game modifications, indie games, developed items for games, or whatever, and the community feedback for these items. If they're popular, if they're designed well, then fuck, why haven't they hired you yet? I think these are good things to keep in mind. Hell, it also validates my want to re-design my Polycount items. I kinda hope that they do another contest for community entries again, I'd love to try to design a sniper set. Maybe even hats. The day at the Expo ended with us talking up the folks at TellTale games about much of the same items. It's nice to have my work reaffirmed that it's going in the right direction.

Tomorrow is the Game Career Seminar, so it's another bright and early hell for us. Thank the various Caffeinated Supreme Beings for the Starbucks in the hotel!

Maybe it'll sink in that I'm here.

Hour five of travels and we're somewhere over the west coast. Decided to pass the time in the cab by working on a blog post on the iPad. Shaun's been using his droid x for podcasts to pass the time.

I'm actually surprised how easy it is to use mobile tech to keep track of traveling. Within minutes of touching down in Dallas, we found out if our plane was on time, where we could go for food, and made posts to various social networks to reassure those thoroughly worried about us actually making the flight that we were doing just fine. For the record: airplane mode means I CANNOT make texts out or surf. Bless the notepad ability on this. The keyboard is actually easy to use too.

Sitting on the plane with this kind of tech makes me about something Jim had us write on last week about the amount of usefulness that mobile technology offers. For traveling's sake, I have to say the smart phone is a MUST HAVE. I kind of wish we would have been able to get on a plane with wifi enabled to check that ability out too. With the way they pack everyone into airplanes like sardines into cans (I might be going overboard a little, then again, I am a little claustrophobic.) the mobile tablet is a good thing to have. And with the game development for mobile, it is a great way to pass the time up here.

I might start working on character profiles for the storyboarding project that I'm working on after I get back from the Expo. God, the amount of work that I have waiting for me when I get back home! Must be looking forward to the rest of this week and getting to talk to gaming industry members about sending in my application before I graduate. Will post this and more misadventures when we finally land....

This is the Beginning

I stop and start so many blogs I'm not sure what's heads or tails. I have so many tumblr blogs on projects and in progress things that I feel like I'm compartmentalizing my stuff a lot. I felt like it was time to have a somewhat reflective blog, but at the same time, try to keep it more positive than sitting in the middle of my room screaming:

"OH GOD, WHAT DO I DO?!"

Productivity is the key. Some of the things I talk about may be depressing. Some not. I will be linking back to my tumblr from here (and vise versa, perhaps.) Had NIN pumping through my head when I started writing this. I just looked up the lyrics to the song, and I think they fit pretty well. I guess we'll see how things go.

Relatively short post to start off with. I'm a Technical Artist, with an insane amount of hobbies and nowhere near enough free time to do it all in. What is this blog for? To write my thoughts out, my feelings on topics, life, the universe, and things that go on in my head. As much of it as I can bear to say. Haven't had a good place to organize my thoughts on the subject of late - mainly because I start to get paranoid about who watches what. I keep sitting on the fence about how much I post on certain places because of who sees what. Kind of funny, actually. A few years ago in high school I would flip a middle finger to anyone who gave two shits about being offended by what I had to say. Now I've become convinced that not everyone wants to hear my thoughts. B'aw.

As I said before, we'll see where this road leads. For now....

Down on your knees

You'll be left behind

This is the beginning

Watch what you think

They can read your mind

This is the beginning

I got my mark, see it in my eyes

This is the beginning

Well my reflection I don't recognize

This is the beginning

We think we've climbed so high

Up all the backs we've condemned

We face no consequence

This is the beginning of the end.