So I've just spent the day making final touches to the presentation that's due in this Friday. When I went back to look at it I realised I had made a text-book, school-boy error, I'd messed up the budget slightly. We're all (the class) going to get shown how to use the Unreal 3 Engine using the Unreal Development Kit (UDK) from Epic with Kismet, it uses object-orientated programming (OOP) which is supposed to make it easier to program but we shall see (I'm sure I saw a snippet of a YouTube video showing it laid out and it kind of looked like a very complicated flowchart!) Anyway, the UDK is 'free' to download and use for development but I completely forget to add to the budget the licensing costs if the game was to be produced, utilising the Unreal Engine. You know, it's 25% of revenue that goes to Epic through royalties, I thought that was a little steep, but perhaps I'm just being naive.(?) So I've been sorting that and adding other bits and bobs to the final presentation, so all good fun.
For the other part of the day I've been trying to finalise my research on the development of games engines, the purposes of the engine, then all the different components that make up the engine, explaining their purpose! I have got to be honest with you, I really thought the hard part would be creating the interactive program in flash, using action-script to display the research, but it's the other way round... Go figure.
Anyway, I've had an awesome couple of days, I spoke with a very helpful person over email yesterday, who's involved in the industry and based in Canada. It's fantastic to hear from people that are already involved in the video games industry because they really do tell it like it is. What you need to learn, what the industry is really looking for, the best ways to get in, etc. But just to top it off I was speaking with some guests at where I work last night and it turns out they work for a local company that distributes digital jukeboxes and arcade machines. They have lots of external games on their machines but they also have an internal team that work on games development. So long story short the chap gave me the email address for the MD. Now, I know that the chances of anything happening from it are very slim given that I'm not qualified in anything yet, but as I've mentioned before in the blog, Networking is really important and just putting your name in their head, coupled with a positive, tenacious and passionate attitude won't damage your chances.
It may sound a bit silly or a bit obvious, but if you keep you're eyes open and feel as passionately as I do about the industry then you'll be surprised how easy it is to meet people and build up a network or friends/acquittance's as well as building a clearer picture about what needs to be done.
Wow, listen to me, preaching about the do's and don't's... I guess I wanted to write this down, because I didn't want people thinking it was just luck when I made those two contacts, but I suppose I'm also talking from experience in the sense that I've tried to make contacts before and shouting excitedly whilst jumping up and down in front of someone important, often has the undesired effect of making them runaway. (You think I'm joking!) So show your true colours, but as they say 'Stay Frosty'
One of my friends made this for me the other day, So cool!
Bye for now
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