All entries for January 2006

Interested in designing games?

Are you interested in designing video games? Whether it be for a living, or just for a laugh, or even if you're just interested in playing games, then we might just have something to brighten up your Monday evening.

As a society, we design (and play…) video games from the ground up, including the concepts, programming, artwork, sound effects, music and scripts – and you don't necessarily need to be able to do any of these to be able to learn, of course. We also provide a lot of resources for members, access to local game companies for tours, talks and whole days where you can come in and spend a day inside a games company and work alongside professionals to improve your skills.

If you're interested, then come along to Meeting Room 2 (in Union North, through the doors to the right of Costcutter, up both flights of stairs then along the corridor on the right) at 7pm tonight (or any Monday) and you can find out more information.

Mathew Mannion : 30 Jan 2006 13:39 |  Tags: VGDSoc |  Comments (6) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Getting into the games industry

There are a number of ways to get into games design. The best way is to build up a portfolio of work and submit it to a number of games companies, who may take you on for an interview. A lot of companies want experience, but some companies will take on good applicants wo have a good portfolio.

The qualifications you'll need depend on which area you're interested in – obviously the qualifications needed to become an artist are different to those required to be a programmer. This is written on the assumption that you want to become a programmer – if you want to be an artist, a script writer, or an audio engineer, then the links at the bottom of this post may be of more help.

Programming-wise, you might not like to hear it but you're probably gonna need maths in there. Most of the members of the Video Game Design Society are doing a degree in computer science, which gives some experience of programming, and (in our course at least) some experience of working in a team on a large-ish project. It also involves yet more maths…

One thing that the Warwick Computer Science degree doesn't have is anything to do with C++, which is the language most games are written in. You'll almost certainly need to learn that, and then create a nice shiny demo cd to give to potential employers along with a CV.

Our sponsors, Blitz Games gave us a number of info sheets on working for Blitz, and here they are:

Warning, each of these files is a 2mb PDF file. It is strongly suggested that you right click them and "Save target as..." or "Save link as..." and read them locally

• General information about Blitz
• What's it like at Blitz?
• Work placements
• Artist careers
• Audio careers
• Programmer careers
• QA Tech and Script writers careers

Many thanks to Phillip Oliver and Simon Smith who came down to give a talk to us and gave us the leaflets. Hopefully we will also be able to distribute the presentation that they gave.

Resources

• Warwick Video Game Design Society
• Blitz Games
• Game On!

Some content abridged from Nick Forrington

Mathew Mannion : 16 Jan 2006 17:38 |  Tags: Articles VGDSoc |  Comments (11) |  Close comments |  Report a problem