Path: chuka.playstation.co.uk!news From: "Rikki Prince" Newsgroups: scee.yaroze.freetalk.english Subject: Re: What skills required for todays industry Date: Wed, 21 Jan 2009 01:03:58 -0000 Organization: PlayStation Net Yaroze (SCEE) Lines: 88 Message-ID: References: NNTP-Posting-Host: staff-vpn164.ecs.soton.ac.uk Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; delsp=yes; charset=iso-8859-15 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit User-Agent: Opera Mail/9.62 (MacIntel) Hi Greg, Tools programming is another of those programmer specialisations that's appearing in the industry. It's definitely a way into a company. Another one of those, though not as fun as programming is to get a job doing testing or QA. That used to be a key piece of advice a few years back, but I think it's less important these days as there's more jobs for developers coming from outside the industry. Doing an XNA demo sounds like a superb idea. I can imagine getting it onto the Creator's Club community as well would be great as you could demo it on a 360 in job interviews :) Just like people used to with the Yaroze! You may say ripping off an existing game isn't a good idea, but if you do it well and show flair in some other area, then why not? Unless you're applying for a job as a designer who may be expected to come up with fresh and new game ideas, then taking an existing idea an implementing it well (complete, not buggy, with a menu system etc) is still going to be impressive. Often doing all of that on your own can be a lot of work, which is why I think a lot of games industry recruiters suggest making a demo specific to the area you want to work in (eg. do a physics demo if you want to be a physics programmer, or implement some flashy graphical effect if you want to be a graphics programmer, or demonstrate some audio filters if you want to be a sound programmer). Cheers, Rikki On Thu, 15 Jan 2009 19:46:15 -0000, Greg Cook wrote: > Cheers Rikki, > > Yeah Mario was a yaroze person and ive spoken to him and i have a mate > working for him, > > Im looking for coding, im currently a coder in my day job, and playing > around with yaroze, xna etc.. c# is my language of choice though, and > another option was a tools programmer. Could be a foot in the door to > move onto something else. > > I'll take your advice of the 2 player demo on board, might be good to do > an XNA demo of some kind. I guess ripping off an existing game isnt a > good option ;) > > > Rikki Prince wrote: >> Hi Greg, >> I seem to remember Mario from Sidhe being a Net Yaroze guy, so that >> might be a useful common topic to start on if applying for a job there! >> Are you looking for a programming job in games? Or design, testing, >> production or something else? I don't know so much about the latter >> few but for programming it's largely becoming a matter of focusing on >> an area. Ideally you will have a demo to showcase your talent, so >> combining those two games companies like to see a nicely polished demo >> of some element of games, such as physics, AI, advanced graphics >> techniques or gameplay. I think the days of expecting a full game are >> gone, but if you have a complete game to demo, all the better. It has >> to be fun though! >> The best advice I've heard is to make a game demo that is fun for 2 >> people to play: as soon as the person playing through the demos calls >> over their mate to give it a go and they move like it, you've then got >> 2 people in the company that would support your application. >> Cheers, >> Rikki >> On Tue, 08 Apr 2008 10:25:19 +0100, Greg Cook >> wrote: >> >>> So im thinking about a career change, im currently a technical team >>> leader for a MS Windows Mobile dev company, working in the logistics >>> and service industries. Lots of C#, sql, web etc.. >>> >>> Just wondering how one would jump into the gaming industry. Locally >>> we have companies like Sidhe, but just wondering if anyone in the >>> industry could provide some pointers around the skills required now >>> days :) >>> >>> Cheers >>> greg >> > C -- Using Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/mail/