So after the long and slow death of the London Unity Meetup, Russ Morris and myself decided to take it upon ourselves to start out own group. Many people have been asking for something like this over the last few months so we seemed to have an audience. Also, since the last group ran for 6 months from late 2009, a lot has happened since then, including the rise in profile for Unity itself.
Russ also suggested that we didn’t just follow the show and tell route but that we try to bring in newbies as the platform is very new. Looking at the audience signing up to our first one, it looks like he’s on the ball with this one as most people seem to (still) be completely or very new to Unity. I think it’ll take some experimentation, but it will be a very interesting ride…
I’m really looking forward to this (as is Russ) and I hope we can get a great community going in London. Lots of possibilities on the horizon!
If you’re interested, sign up here.
http://www.meetup.com/london-unity-usergroup/
and follow us @London_Unity3D
I recently did a talk at London Flash Platform Usergroup called Social, Casual, Games. It went into the interesting new space that has opened up for game developers recently with the rise of social networks, mobile platforms and inexpensive (relatively) software. It has never been easier to publish and make money as a game developer.
My research found some stunning nuggets of information, some that I still can’t get my head around. Pet Society are selling 90 million virtual goods – a day! Some people spend $1000 dollars on virtual goods in one game alone. I also dug up information on how gender effects how a person perceives and interacts with a game and how we should take this into account when creating and designing.
I’m not going to go into everything here so take a look for yourself…
http://www.lfpug.com/social-casual-games/
Recently I have been getting this message in FDT when I tried to use the debug option. I’m on Windows 7 using FDT 4. I tried all the usual suspects, uninstalled Flash Player, re-installed FDT, tried Flash incubator and 10.1 debug builds. Nothing. I knew debug worked because FlashBug was working fine in Firefox, displaying traces. What could be going on?
I scoured the internet for a solution and raised a ticket with PowerFlasher. Nothing was helping, I went through their help and it didn’t solve it.
Messing around though I found a menu in the Flash debug player that I’d never touched before. Right click on an instance of Flash Player, be it in the browser or standalone and select ‘debugger’. It opens a window requesting where the debugger or host application should be running, with ‘localhost’ selected. I changed this to ‘other machine’ and 127.0.0.1 as I had recently installed WAMP on my laptop and thought the word ‘localhost’ may be conflicting…
HUZZAH!
Now it’s back working again. Hope this helps someone else like it did me!
I thought I’d make a blog post about a quick big time saving tip for anyone who uses the Flash IDE at all. The Control/Command + E keyboard shortcut is by default mapped to editing a selected object however this pulls you out of any timeline based hierarchy and is generally useless and/or annoying. A quick change to map it to Edit > Edit in Place will make this keyboard shortcut as useful as Cmd/Ctrl + Z,C or V. Now when you have a movieclip selected on the stage, you can use this shortcut to open it up rather then double-clicking it. Incredibly useful for moveiclips that have nothing inside them and appear as that fun nondescript white circle on the stage. Also very good for layers that only contain one movieclip as you can just select the layer and use the shortcut to open up the containing movieclip (it will do nothing if there are multiple clips on that layer however).
Try it right now – you’ll wonder how you got by without it!
If there is one question I always get asked when I tell people what I do, it’s how I got into making games in the first place. It’s a similar question to how do you come up with ideas/make games or compose music and it interests me to answer it well right here.
Some people make a hard push to get into some kind of gaming industry by becoming a game tester, others ‘fall into it’. I’d have to say it was a bit of both for me.
There’s always a little bit of luck involved but Seneca states that luck is when opportunity meets preparation and that leaves at least half of the job down to you – preparing. In the end I think you need to have three things to stand a chance to make it. Actually maybe four but I think if you have the first three, you’d have the fourth.
First and foremost, you need to be a gamer. Love games. Breathe games. Understand games. You don’t necessarily have to love all kinds of games (although it helps!). I personally can’t stand Japanese RPGs with endless speeches although I have (infinite) patience for the Total War series and it’s endless champaign.
So if you’re a gamer, you’re on your way but that is definitely not enough. The next big thing is having an insatiable desire to know how these games are made. You’d probably want to know everything and do everything, even if you’re not too good at design, or your code is a little rusty. Playing a game and understanding how it works helps you learn solutions to problems solved long ago. This lust for knowledge will push you along when you get stuck developing your next masterpiece.
The third, final and most important thing if you want to get a job is a portfolio. And I’m not just talking about some half made ideas, demos or prototypes. You should have three or four complete games with a loading screen, menu, high score tables etc etc. You should spent time polishing a game, tightening up animations and timing and adding sound (games are so much better with sound even though I tend to turn it off). Make sure they pack a punch but are in themselves simple games. With a complete, polished game you can show you’re willing to go all the way in development. Gameplay demos are fine to have but I probably spend less than half my time working on gameplay and I can knock a prototype out in a couple of hours. Menu systems, sound and other less fun things really take time but separate the wheat from the pap.
Yes – work in your spare time, I should have been working on my dissertation in my final year but instead I spent a couple of weeks building up a small portfolio. Having something to show will always put you in front of most new candidates out there as you’ve proven you can build something instead of just talking about what you’d like to make. It’s how I got my foot in the door.
