Game Programmer Looks In...

Sam Savauge from Melbourne brought 8 years of games industry experience to the game developers in the DIM class - and they had lots of questions.

After being shown some of the class project work Sam talked about how to get into the games industry and described the pros and cons of many of the different jobs available. The combination of design, programming and good people skills earns the most money...

He also said those who worked in the games industry tend to put a lot into their work but sometimes had to learn to let go when projects suddenly took a different turn or were cancelled when the money ran out. It was very disappointing when 18 months of your best work never sees the light of day...

Game production work can get very demanding with long hours for many months as production deadlines approach. You recover for a few weeks after the production "goes gold" (the disk master is sent for copying and distribution) until the next production gets underway...

Sam hopes to return later in the year to see how the projects are going... and answer more questions.

Virtual Work - Real Money

Mike, one of the high school designers in Skoolaborate has made it to the Wall Street Journal.

Have a look at the projected monthly incomes for these guys working part-time in Second Life and Entropia - up to $4,000.

With Gartner Research predicting 80% of active internet users will be in virtual worlds by 2011 there are great opportunities here for enterprising students with the right skills mix.

The kind of skill mix that one might develop in SDI: Interactive Media :-)

You can read more about why Mike got the job here.

Hello from Taiwan

When in Skoolaborate you can meet students and teachers from some of the partner schools in the project - MLC in Sydney, New Zealand, Japan... The following excellent video introduction to Skoolaborate was recently created by students in Taiwan.


Read the story here.

Growing Body Parts

Body parts are appearing all over the place now... We have had a fake severed hand for an ArtVid project, Bugs hand (on the left) created in Blender (hopefully not going into one) and various legs, heads and torsos across several game development groups.

Skoolaborators are also busy with bodies but mostly just dressing them. Several people have now uploaded their own T-shirt designs for their Second Life avatars.

This week's presentation on mentoring was more of a workshop. Everyone present had a chance to mentor and be mentored... Some people found they learned a great deal about other projects, others learned to be a little more structured when reflecting on their own progress and a few were not sure of the usefulness of the exercise.

Uploaded on authorSTREAM by regor2012

The mentoring process is based on GROWTH Coaching and Cognitive Coaching. The latter in particular is designed to assist students with student-directed learning. I did my training in GROWTH coaching a couple of years ago and found the structured approach to reflection very useful - although my workshop was a few hours - not 30 minutes. Nevertheless listening in to conversations around the room I was very happy with the level of reflection I heard.
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From Lame to Game

This is pretty cool...

An SDI student has completely rewritten a web game to introduce advanced physics. It was developed from scratch using GameMaker. This video is silent but sound is coming soon which should greatly improve the gamer's experience.