thuanta.com

Game Programming vs. Game Design

The new school year is about to get rolling and today was a club fair day at UofT around King’s College and Hart House circles. This year I think I’ll be quite involved with the UofT Game Design & Development Club (utGDDC). I’ll be responsible for admin-ing the website and forums, as well as coordinating the annual game making competition called Game Making Deathmatch (GMD) . That means I won’t be able to participate in this year’s competition since I’ll be making the rules up and organizing things related to the competition… but I already have my hands full with other things.

But wait, utGDDC never existed before did it? How can there already be an annual competition? Well, before utGDDC, it was known as the UofT Game Programming Club (GPC). Note the italics.

Today me and the other exec members were at our booth letting students and first years know that we exist and what we do. Most of the time when I was talking to students and giving them the sales pitch, they were interested but as soon as I (accidently, I think) said programming, it immediately turned off some, especially those who aren’t in Computer Science or who aren’t interested in learning how to program at all. I think they still wanted to learn or know how to make games, but just not jump into the technical details. We had quite a turn out and a good number of students who were willing to put their email down on our announcement list. Some of the students I’ve talked to said they were into game development areas such as art, writing, level design, or even critiquing(!).

In GPC in the past years, the majority of the members were people from Computer Science and were typically male programmers who learned how to program in the Computer Science program. There have been a few female attendees before, but I don’t know if they were really into it or were just tagging along someone else…

So what does this mean?

If we want our club to not be your stereotypical “geek guys club”, obviously the name Game Programming Club had to change. I think we’ve started off on the right track by renaming the club name to Game Design & Development instead. The name makes a big difference and impression on people.

There are students out there who are interested in designing games, but not necessarily implementing them. Design is the craft. Implementation is the technical. Designing, implementing, and making it work beautifully is the art. In GPC, some members would give presentations on technical subjects, which I’m sure turns off the some of people. For presentations and tutorials, I think we’ll want to give an overview of different disciplines of game design and development, and not dive into too much detail, unless our audience wants that. The business side of games I think would be an interesting talk as well.

For the competition, we’ll need to make it easier for non-technical people to get started and get their heads thinking about it. In the future, if they’re really inclined too and have more confidence, I think they can dive further into the details. What would be even better is to team up people with different skill sets so that everyone can show off their different talents and combine them together to make something the team can be proud of.

¶ Posted 09 September 2007 § utGDDC ‡ Comments (0) °

SIGGRAPH 07 Coverage @ GameDev.net

Here’s a nice coverage on SIGGRAPH 2007 by Kelly Murdock at GameDev.net. Having missed half of the things showcased at the Emerging Technologies, he filled in a lot of the gaps. He also summarizes the key note speech by Glenn Entis, Senior VP of EA, which I was there for.

I already miss SIGGRAPH.

¶ Posted 21 August 2007 § SIGGRAPH 2007 ‡ Comments (0) °

Conferences on a Budget: for students

Last month, Adam Goucher wrote some tips for people who go to conferences and are on a budget, which I saw from Greg Wilson’s blog.

One other thing too add to Adam’s budget tips: if you’re a student, consider volunteering at the conference! That’s what I did at SIGGRAPH this year, if it isn’t obvious enough already from my recent entries. In exchange for some of your hours of service, you can usually get things like:

Free pass to the full conference
Free or discounted hotel rates
Potential free swag for volunteers. (See some of the free stuff I got from SIGGRAPH 2007 here)
And best of all: you’ll get to meet other like-minded students and make contacts to advance your career.

I was a little disappointed back in May of this year when most of my friends already graduated while I still have another school year to suffer through but now I’m actually glad that I’m taking my time to finish school. If I hadn’t, then I wouldn’t be able to volunteer at any upcoming conferences. Here are couple that I’d like to volunteer for within the next year:

Game Developer’s Conference 2008: happens annually around March. Student volunteer registration starts in the fall.
SIGGRAPH 2008 in L.A: Student application deadline is Feb 28, 2008.

¶ Posted 17 August 2007 § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (0) °

Day 6 & The End of SIGG 07

Okay so this update is a few days late. SIGGRAPH 2007 is over since last Thursday night and I’m back home in Toronto, but just to finish off what I started…

Job Fair:

I spent about an hour or so of the morning of the last day at the job fair. There were surprisingly a lot of game companies there than there were animation studios, at least from my impression of it. Some of them that were there and had a chance to get around to were Vivendi, Radical, Blizzard, Sega, Monolith, Sony Online, Midway, and Microsoft Game Studios. Activision, which now has publishing rights to Guitar Hero, was there too but I didn’t get around to seeing them.

The majority of the game companies at the job fair are located in the States, and I asked them if they would consider hiring someone like myself from Canada. Most of the responses that I got from the “smaller” firms like Vivendi, Blizzard, and Monolith aren’t too keen on hiring someone from outside the US because of the issues and hassles of getting a work VISA in the US. The other companies like Sega and Microsoft have no problem hiring people from both countries. One of the reps at Sega even told me that there’s a handful of Canadians there right now. Unlike most of the companies, Radical is located in Canada so there is no issues with them.

After having spoken with the companies who don’t hire outside of the US, it did disappoint me a little bit but that’s not really an obstacle for me. There are quite a few game studios in Canada in addition to Microsoft and Sega that I could apply too once I’m done with school. All I need is just to get my foot in the door and I’m set.

The last shift:
Worked the last shift at the store which ended when SIGGRAPH ended at 6pm. The store was almost emptied out by the attendees and I wanted to get a shirt for myself but they were all gone…

No Guerrilla Studios:
Because of my shift, I didn’t get any chance to step in to the Guerrilla Studios. Which is too bad because there was a chance to create a physical miniature model of any of your own models from a file. They were also making custom dog tags which would’ve been cool to have.

Swag for student volunteers (SVs):
Just for volunteering, all students got a free academic copy of SoftImage’s XSI 3D modelling/animating tool! We also got a 2-disc CDROM of the SIGGRAPH 2007 Conference Select, which has electronic copies of papers and some other documentation stuff from this year’s conference. SV awards were handed out to a few, and many students were on the “fabulous list” and were given prizes. I saw a lot of copies Corel PainterX and PaintShop Pro Photo XI, which I think most SVs got but being a hardcore programmer, I decided to get these two books instead:

Next year?
I’m already thinking about volunteering again for next year… we’ll see. It’s been a blast. Thanks to the Team Leaders and Student Volunteer commitee for making it all happen!

¶ Posted 13 August 2007 § SIGGRAPH 2007 ‡ Comments (1) °

Day 4 & 5 @ SIG07

Day 4:

I thought I had a shift today but it somehow disappeared - less work for me, yay. I went to the Mobile3D course in the afternoon and the talk wasn’t as interesting as I thought it would be. They were talking about M3G and how to use it - things which I can easily learn from reading docs online. I’m beginning to think that the technical courses that I went to weren’t worth it because:

They give a good overview and they’ll also go into very technical details which at this point wouldn’t sink in since I haven’t started using them yet
They tend to be long and there’s so much more to see at SIGGRAPH than listening to a lecture”.

The Exhibition Hall opened today, which was really cool too. The Exhibition Hall reminds me of all the E3 pics in the gaming mags, minus the booth babes… although I think I did see one or two of them. I didn’t get a chance to go to every booth there though, only half way.

The Emerging Technologies area was also interesting where different groups of people show cased their latest prototyped devices. Microsoft was there with their Surface device and I got a chance to play with it. It’s pretty nifty even though it’s V1.0.

Also, I think I lost my USB SD card reader.

But here’s a good news: I won a copy of The Sims 2 Deluxe from the EA booth during a Q/A session.

Day 5:

Worked at the store and animation theater shifts, both of which were easier than what I expected. The store had all the M sized t-shirts sold out, which sucked because I wanted to get one myself. Theater was great since I got to watch most of the 3D animated films submitted to SIGGRAPH. Also went to the Electronic Theater which was also similar to the animation theater but had different clips.

One really cool thing I liked at the beginning of the Electronic theater was that they had some old folks in the gaming business (I think) play some vector graphics-based games like Asteroids, and Star Wars. They mentioned something about using lasers and running it via emulation on a 1Ghz machine.

Tomorrow:
Visit the job fair, hand my resume to a few game companies, and visit the Guerrilla studios. I’m also going to be working at the store again.

¶ Posted 09 August 2007 § SIGGRAPH 2007 ‡ Comments (0) °

Day 3 @ SIG07

Day 3 was long but tons of fun at the end.

7:30am - 12pm: worked registration shift again. A line up during opening but after that people came in a steady stream of groups of 3-4. Not as busy as I thought. The extra line up fences were redundant.

1:30pm - 3pm: Featured speaker from EA direction Glenn Entis. Talked about the past and current trends of games and where things are heading (I think). Compared real time graphics in games to CG back in the 80s and said how it was day and night. Today it’s so realistic that’s it’s hard to tell without looking closely. Now that graphics no longer was the “WOW” factor back in the day, people focused on character animation and expression. Today he says it’s about user content, like the Sims games where people would spend hours making their own models instead of using what the developers provide.

3ish to 5:30: Quaternions. Interesting visualization in the first half hour but I was already half a sleep that everything went in one ear and out the other. I left early just because I only wanted to konw the basics, and not the advanced stuff. I’d rather read a textbook than listen to the talk, not that this professor was bad. He was the most animate math professor I’ve seen. (I don’t recall any math professors who teach like him at U of T…)

6pm to 12pm: FJORG work shift. This was the best shift ever. Didn’t do much, but we got some entertainment. There was a Kung fu-Wushu group that came at 8pm to distract all the animators from trying to finish their work. I took a video of it and I may post it (later…).

¶ Posted 07 August 2007 § SIGGRAPH 2007 ‡ Comments (0) °

Night 2 @ SD

Tonight is my second night here in SD at a hostel. I didn’t have much of a chance to update or post some pics and I really should be sleep like right now. I’m going to make this quick so you’ll have to bear with me without any pics for now, sorry.

(Gun’s and Roses’ Sweet Child of Mine playing outside in downtown SD @ 1am right now, nice!!!!)

First day was so fun, I met so many people, starting with my hostel mates which I just happen to ran into as soon as I got into downtown on a trolly. A trolly is SD’s version of a street car in Toronto. All I did was go to orientation later in the afternoon and met some other student volunteers (SVs). Everyone is so friendly and psyched about SIGGRAPH just as much as I am. It’s almost like frosh week back in first year, except 100x better. Everyone’s there for the same reason and have similar interests, whether it’s computer animation, rigging, modeling, graphics programming, and all that jazz. It’s soooooo awesome.

Here’s a pic of the hostel I’m staying at (it looks hippie-ish):

And the orientation office white board:

Day two today was even more of a blast. I had a shift at registration - greeted nice folks and help them out using the computer. There were a couple of ticked off attendees but I don’t blame them since they went around in circles just to try and register but most of us got them help to sort things out.

Then there was an interview/demo reel review session that was really cool too. Lots of useful tips on resumes and reels. I probably will post more details later. Then after that I went to a 20th celebration of this Japanese artist (I don’t have his name on me ATM, will update later…) and they had free sake for everyone!

Then were was a CG part at the Mariot hotel right beside the convention centre. I meet a bunch of interesting people who’re working, but not quite “there” yet but it was still interesting to see what they were up to. I busted out my laptop to show a demo of Chariot of Fire to this guy… it was pretty cool. He seemed to like it (I hope). Then I wanted to use my laptop to see other people’s demo reels but I didn’t have Quicktime installed… and I was shunned upon LOL. We did end up finding someone who happened to have a Mac and asked him to use it to show people’s demo reels. All was fun and awesomeness until…… I accidently spilled beer on the back of the guy’s MacBook… and the end. I still feel bad about it. But aside from that, Day 2 was even more fun than day 1. The week hasn’t even started yet and I can’t imagine how exciting it’s going to be once the show starts kicking. Stay tuned. Time for bed.

¶ Posted 06 August 2007 § SIGGRAPH 2007 ‡ Comments (0) °

On the plane to SD

Earlier we were on flight UA1101 to Chicago and now we’re on the flight UA 0635 to San Diego. Right now it is 11:01 AM Eastern, and it’ll be about another two hours before touch down at SD at 10:09 Pacific.

Having not flown on a place in over twenty years, I was so giddy on the first flight. Rising and landing on the plane reminded me of those “theatre simulators” at amusement parks like Canada’s Wonderland. The view outside the window is awesome and right now I think we’ve above the clouds – something which I haven’t really seen with my own eyes before.

It’s probably been over 30 hours that I’ve been without sleep…

¶ Posted 04 August 2007 § SIGGRAPH 2007 ‡ Comments (0) °

twidling thumbs

I’ve packed up more or less all of my stuff that I’m bringing on to the plane. It’s almost 3am now and I haven’t slept since yesterday morning. Ideally I should get some rest before we head off in about an hour or two but I’m so excited (or ’stoked’ seems to be the word to use for SIGGRAPH) that I can’t fall asleep.

¶ Posted 04 August 2007 § SIGGRAPH 2007 ‡ Comments (0) °

Mighty Morphing Image Machine

My flight leaves in a little over 12 hours and I haven’t gotten around to packing up yet. Speaking of SIGGRAPH, I just finished the last assignment of one of my courses I’m taking this summer: CSC320 Intro to Visual Computing. This last assignment let’s us write a program that can morph two images, from one into the other, using a morphing technique introduced in this SIGGRAPH ‘92 paper: Feature-Based Image Metamorphosis.

The results of the morph are pretty funky. Here’s a morph of Sasuke from his regular self to using the LVL1 Cursed Seal using the program that I wrote in 12 frames (rendering took 45 minutes !)