Interview With A Vampire/Game Developer

So hello again nobody and this week it so happens that the lovely Adrian/EvilRedEye has just interviewed Shaun and I about our recent Call Connect adventure. There were many questions, all of which we answered. Any press is good when you're as lowly as we are so I'll take it. In other news, I managed to do a leeetle bit of work this week which is very encouraging.

A touch of revision, some unit tinkering and a pinch of organization (plus I fixed my blinds after planning to do it for some two years now) saw me through to Friday with a spring in my crippled step. Actually not so crippled; my weightlifting has gone up a notch and I'm feeling spritely. My knees don't hurt anymore, hurrah.

I picked up a cat today; cats are nice. I'm clearly running out of things to write which is very me. Normally I can flounder for a word in the most eloquent fashion but that capacity seems to have diminished of late (bar this sentence). I have to go now because Ellie's possibly going to come over here and read this drivel and I'd rather not be here when she does. It's embarrassing!

I'm fecking BACK

Callously whips the wind around the bare- oh fuck it. This is the year of Reckoning, as in I Reckon I better fucking do something. Once a week, either with wit or wisdom or likely neither to dispense to an audience comprised of phantasms, hobgoblins and mobfoblins (note: look up mobfoblins). And me, of course. I'm loathe to begin a sentence with the word 'and' but is that not the state of the world? Quietly and grimly shuffle along while your defining characteristics, preferences and loves are forcibly directed along a narrow path to a less than stellar doom. Fuck 'em. It's the year of me. Weekly updates to follow. Also fuck Twitter.

Re-establishing contact with an old friend, or how I learned to stop procrastinating and whatever.

I glanced at the sidebar of this very blog which is mine and noticed the frequency with which I would post something ever dwindling, twirling, twirling towards infinity. I thought it time to try and rectify this, especially seeing as I now have an actual audience rather than a pretend one (hi Kree).

So here I am, florid with an infestation of possibilities. PhD could be going better but I expect that will be the case until I finish it if I ever do. I have been doing some game development which has been both a lark and a nagging pain in my lower back. We (the Crab and I) have nearly finished a game called NEOTANK9000 which is for Deakin to woo prospective revenue sources, otherwise known as students, with. It's not groundbreaking, polished, or even very good, but it is ours and that counts for a lot. We'll create a web browser version and pop it on our website.

Once that is signed off, er, on, we can finally complete our iPhone game which we have spent close to a year (one day a week mind) producing. This is called CallConnect and harks back to the heady days of sticking phone jacks into things. You know, Before The Internet. It seems so long ago now... I used to read books, see films, engage in conversations with real people who occupied the same room or space that I did (though not exactly the same space as that would be physically impossible lest you'd employed some sort of time and space altering device to allow two objects to occupy the same space simultaneously. It's science fiction!). Those days are long gone. I have installed a speaker set inside a real doll and I conduct Skype conversations with it. Sometimes, when the light catches the gossamer thin strands of hair that adorn the soft, undulating edges of her delicate frame (they took ages to put in by hand too), I turn febrile and weep for mankind. None of this actually happened... or did it (it didn't)??

So; PhD, PC game, iPhone game, ongoing battle to hide Genevieve from my housemate. I have done very little in the way of drawing lately, which shames me, but I'll return to that once I have cleared my plate of other more immediately persistent morsels.

Praise atheism

Kree is going to read my blog

Hullo!

Ho ho hum

The difficulty I have when it comes to writing is as follows: I can't do it.

I can actually, if you can call it that, but I tend not to write the things that I really want to write. This may be because I have no precisely no idea what those things are. Do you follow? Anything I commit to paper or screen typically turns all stream of consciousness absurdist surrealism in a can which quickly becomes tiresome. Something character driven would be ideal wouldn't it?

Gathering ideas as fodder is not something I do as a rule, but poor is the man who remembers nothing, or something. Whatever. Making a note of that which I routinely observe for later use will become my new battleground, largely because it'll be a desperate fucking struggle to commit to anything that does not involve remaining quite still and ocularly occupied, or 'occupied'.

This impassioned plea to my brain will not go unheeded. Nay, shall the fruits of my advancing temporal state not be harvested? as I descend into spiralling, fruity madness, craving a gooseberry or similar. Lest the overripe mindfruit grow too fat and fall, I will dock at the base of this vast wooden edifice and arrange my hands thusly to envelop the fallen as they ripple through air and motes and then some more air. See, every damn time.

A New Hope Part 2: The Hopening

OK, it's go time, again. The case study at this stage has been scrapped. This will require a re-write of the methods chapter. It's around 4000 words or so, therefore it shouldn't be too taxing. Since I am effectively replacing the case study with a far more detailed quantitative study, I need to explore literature and guides on how to a) acquire the data, though a survey seems the most appropriate, b) how to analyse the data once I have it (so that is it not only coherent but of use to the stakeholders) and c) how to broach the subject with developers in a way that expresses the value they will potentially derive from this data and how to organize a system so that the data collection is ongoing. I'll need to look at how organizations (such as EEDAR if we're being game dev specific) gather their data and package it.

The trick is discerning which topics to collect data on; age, education, experience, etc. These obvious ones are all well and good, but I need to determine what is going to be of use to industry. This will require some discussion, quite probably during the interview process. I need to be able to gather the data probably by mid year, then spend probably 2 months analysing it. Following that, hopefully the results will bear out on two fronts; one, the interviews should provide enough fodder on the issues of GDE that I can put together recommendations for how to approach building a games course, the importance of internships and real world experience, the need for a more structured approach to education and industry interaction, the value of teamwork and soft skill and the absolute need for a well rounded skill set. This research is the exploratory part.

The quant part is the more practical, immediately useful part. I need to outline what the data will be used for and how long it will before the data will be useful to educators. For example, it may take a year to gather data on not only existing developers but developers who join the industry in 12 months to get a better picture of where these developers are coming from. Regarding how the data will be used, a university games course chair might view the data and note that the majority of programmers new to industry (or within 5 years) all have a strong C++ background, so it would be logical to ensure that students of that course are adequately exposed to C++.

The interview process will still be vital, as a large part of this research is still exploratory.

So, a balance must be struck. The plan has been revised to ensure the outcomes have a greater practical purpose for stakeholders; while previously the data would be largely qualitative, the balance is now more evenly split. I need to knock together a few diagrams to illustrate this new direction for my own edification, then put together a schedule detailing what I'll be doing and when. Following that, I need to revise my methods chapter and educate myself on data analysis methods in place of the case study literature I previously included.

More to come.

A New Hope

It is a period of academic war. Rebel research teams, striking from a hidden office, have won their first victory against the evil University Empire. During the battle, Rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire’s ultimate weapon, A LACK OF STRUCTURE AND FOCUS, an armored space station with enough power to destroy an entire candidature. Pursued by the Empire’s sinister agents, Prince Greg races home aboard his starship/hatchback, custodian of the stolen plans that can save his thesis and restore freedom to the galaxy…

A recent trip to GCAP has proven very useful pour moi. I realised properly that the scope of this thing was excessive, but the problem seemed to warrant all bases being covered until I had a clearer picture of the best and most useful course of action. By useful, I mean useful to the potential stakeholders; students, industry and education. My initial and til recently current plan was to create an overview of the industry and produce, as a key outcome, a set of recommendations about how a games course should be delivered among other things. There was a vague notion of acting as an education liaison in there somewhere but it was not fully formed.

What has become apparent is the importance of 'useful' data; a key goal of this kind of research should be to produce something tangible and ongoing. That was another revelation (of sorts); any data collected should be set up in such a way that it is not just a snapshot of that period, but sustainable. This means designing a data collection method that will be repeated each year or 6 months.

This means a revamp of the research design and, thankfully, a lessening of the amount of interviewing I will have to undertake. 1 hour interview time equates to 4 hours of transcription time if you are an experienced transcriber. The case study, following discussion with a few likely types, would seem redundant as one arrangement between a university and a developer is unlikely to be similar to another arrangement. This means a case study would not really reflect the state of play.

Of greater value would be the conducting of interviews with studio heads and some educators to get their view on the industry and where the problems lie, perform some qualitative analysis on the results, and identify the key themes to construct a series of guidelines or recommendations. This aspect of the research is still valid as this kind of study is still largely formative. These recommendations would be coupled with the aforementioned 'hard data', itself rather more immediately useful to developers, educators and recruiters alike.

To summarize the outcomes: a series of recommendations about how game development education and relationships can be improved, coupled with a data series detailing educational background, age and experience and other fields of as many existing developers as possible. This data would serve as a reference point for a) developers who wish to recruit new employees b) educators who wish to ensure their courses are relevant and c) recruitment agencies.

Ok ok, let's just back the fuck off for a moment shall we? What precisely is happening and will happen in the future? Let's deconstruct, in fact let's tear it all down, analyse, revamp, rebuild. Okay, so I'm dropping the case study element as it seems unlikely to generate useful results. I'm introducing a heavier quant element, that being the sustainable data on game developers. A 5 year limit or thereabouts should ensure that those within that range would have had the option of attending a games course (assuming they have a formal qualification).

So, though I've mentioned it above, who does this new element benefit and how? Let's see. Collecting annual data about new additions to the games industry should allow devs, educators and recruiters to get a handle on who is getting in, who isn't and why. If the majority of new employees are not grads/have experience, this means there are not enough grad positions and steps can be taken to address this issue. If grads are getting jobs but few are game course grads, then there is clearly an issue with the existing crop of games courses. Beyond gathering data on every developer within the preferred range, identifying a group of developers and following their progress over a period of time would be ideal.

Question is, precisely what do I need to extract from the participants? Age, educational background (school, tertiary, short courses), prior experience, position in the company, others? I'll come back to this and flesh it out further.