Tuesday began with a Q&A session with Mark Kobrin an Art Director at Microsoft. It was fascinating to hear his root in to the games industry was through a background in film (he worked at Wetta!)
Then I started another day of talks and sessions. The first was at the independent games summit with a talk from Tyriq Plummer on procedural architecture for platformers. I will admit it was a little progamming heavy for me, but the logic for the system was really interesting. He starts with a grid of squares and through displacement and other mods it ends up with a totally unique map.
This was followed by a talk on the Art of Tengami. Again this was more system heavy and focused less on the art style and development. Though it was interesting to see how the team had a grounding in traditional papercraft before moving into 3D.
Then we had another Intel talk – this time by Brian Upton from Sony Santa Monica. He works as a designer managing the smaller indie teams which publish through Sony – both 1st and 3rd party. He provided great insight into how Sony supports Indie developers and how to publish on their platform.
Zoe and I then headed for lunch up next to the Moscone centre!
I then headed to the AI Summit to watch a talk by Bobby Anguelov and Jeet Shroff about ‘Realizing relaxed behaviours in AAA games’. What’s great is they are trying to solve a similar problem to me in my honours project, but tackling it in a different way (I will go in to more depth on this in a later post when the video is out on the vault and I can re-watch it). Afterwards I had a short chat with Bobby and we decided to meet up later in the week to discuss the project further.
Then it was time for the final Intel talk of the day. Dana Hanna talked us through what we should look for in jobs and how to know if a career is right for us.
Again it was time to grab some food and then head across to the IGDA showcase event, where all of us scholars were invited to showcase our latest games.
Rhys Romero (IGDA Scholar) playing Seek.
From left: myself, Bethany, Katie and Rachel (all Intel scholars)
During this showcase, I got chatting to Yun from SCEA. He invited me to join himself and some other Sony members, plus some of the team from First Playable Productions out to dinner. We had a great time at a Mexican restaurant, and then we went back for bed.
Honours Year 