Tom Mejias is a Client Engineer at Space Ape Games and a whiz at prototyping new titles. During the hour Tom gave an overview of the games industry and the engineering roles that exist within it as well as some in depth guidance, tips and tricks for specializing in the role of Creative Engineer.
Promises and Razors: Insights into Rapid DevelopmentChristopher Jubb
Tom Mejias speaks about how we decide which projects to start, and which architectures we use to get them off the ground. He describes our fail fast philosophy on prototyping, and the razors with which we judge our prototypes.
Adam Sullivan heads up UI/UX at Space Ape. He and fellow UI artist Lissa Capeleto take students behind the visual language of games. In their class Adam and Lissa share their insights about how to build meaningful player experiences. UI and UX- much more than buttons or layout.
Adam Kramarzewski is a Game Designer at Space Ape with 11 years of experience in the industry and a new book just about to be published. He gives students an unfiltered insight into the production practices, responsibilities, and challenges facing Game Designers in the modern game development scene.
Andrew shared his extensive knowledge about designing events that foster competition within a game. He also covered the nuances of balancing player feedback with design decisions during development.
In her class Deborah delves into the world of gaming communities - building them, maintaining them, and using content to connect. Join her as she shares her tips for empowering players and setting a community up to thrive.
Promises and Razors: Insights into Rapid DevelopmentChristopher Jubb
Tom Mejias speaks about how we decide which projects to start, and which architectures we use to get them off the ground. He describes our fail fast philosophy on prototyping, and the razors with which we judge our prototypes.
Adam Sullivan heads up UI/UX at Space Ape. He and fellow UI artist Lissa Capeleto take students behind the visual language of games. In their class Adam and Lissa share their insights about how to build meaningful player experiences. UI and UX- much more than buttons or layout.
Adam Kramarzewski is a Game Designer at Space Ape with 11 years of experience in the industry and a new book just about to be published. He gives students an unfiltered insight into the production practices, responsibilities, and challenges facing Game Designers in the modern game development scene.
Andrew shared his extensive knowledge about designing events that foster competition within a game. He also covered the nuances of balancing player feedback with design decisions during development.
In her class Deborah delves into the world of gaming communities - building them, maintaining them, and using content to connect. Join her as she shares her tips for empowering players and setting a community up to thrive.
My lecture for Games Gathering conference about production culture impact on Game Design, and the most common problems which game designer have to overcome during interaction with the team.
Lessons from the Trenches of Learning Game DesignSharon Boller
Interest in learning games and gamificaton of learning is high. But how do you do a good job of designing great learning games? This session walks you through six "lessons" learned from designing digital learning games.
A Primer On Play: How to use Games for Learning and ResultsSharon Boller
Discover the power games have to produce learning and business results. View the latest research and case studies on game-based learning and gamification. See a demo of Knowledge Guru, a game engine your team can use to quickly build your own games.
Digital Learning Game Design: Lessons from the TrenchesSharon Boller
Learning games - and gamification of learning - are hot trends. What does it REALLY take to produce a learning game, and how do you produce a good one? This presentation outlines 6 lessons learned with links to games that offer examples for the lessons learned.
Casper van Est from the University of Applied Sciences in Amsterdam is going to discuss the teaching of fundamental game design structures such as risk/reward, feedback loops and visual cues, using examples from well known games as well as his own succesful indie game SpeedRunners.
Developing your Agile skills through social GamesAgile Montréal
The end state of a highly performing Scrum team is described in the Scrum Guide by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland as follow: ""when the values of commitment, courage, focus, openness and respect are embodied and lived by the Scrum Team, the Scrum pillars of transparency, inspection, and adaptation come to life and build trust for everyone"". Then the authors add: ""the Scrum Team members learn and explore those values as they work with the Scrum events, roles and artifacts."" We simply believe we can fast-track the development of these Agile core values through daily social games.
For the past three years, we have been experimenting with half a dozen of Scrum teams, offering opportunities to play a large variety of games (board games, card games, baby-foot, etc...) during the lunch hour and after hours. The results of this experimentation have quickly exceeded our expectations.
Ludo Bruyere
Éric Boivin
Teaching Game Design to Teach Interaction DesignChristina Wodtke
All educators seek the magic trinity of attention, comprehension, and retention. For interaction design educators, the struggle to achieve these goals is even greater. Hopeful designers enter the field with lofty aspirations, yet they still need to learn the fundamental principles of design and build the core skills of an interaction designer. While keeping design students engaged is undoubtedly a challenge, there is a medium that allows students to internalize the fundamentals of design by experiencing them.
Games.
Games have become ubiquitous in our culture. They are inherently engaging. Some are good and some are… not. By teaching design students how to design games, educators expose their students to the basics of interaction design in ways that the students can experience themselves. Concepts like affordance, skill building, storytelling, and emotion become real rather than just conceptual. Altering the parameters of their games helps students feel the effect these concepts have on their games.
This method has the potential to improve interaction design education across the board by ensuring that design graduates have internalized the fundamentals by the time they are ready to enter the field. What’s more, any design educator can learn to teach interaction design by teaching their students how to design games. After all, it’s fun!
Bethesda's Iterative Level Design Process for Skyrim and Fallout 3Joel Burgess
GDC 2014 Level Design Workshop Session - A breakdown of the multiple stages of level design iteration used at Bethesda Game Studios on Fallout 3 and Skyrim.
Play to Learn: Learning Games and Gamification that Get ResultsHRDQ-U
Are you a trainer or eLearning designer who wants to use games to engage your learners? While learning games and gamification have the potential to motivate and excite, your efforts can fall flat if not designed properly. To be successful, you need a solid strategy that carefully connects business goals to learning objectives and game mechanics.
Looking back at the production process of 'Another Case Solved' - a story-driven puzzle F2P game by ATGames. Slides from a speech on Digital Dragons 2014
My lecture for Games Gathering conference about production culture impact on Game Design, and the most common problems which game designer have to overcome during interaction with the team.
Lessons from the Trenches of Learning Game DesignSharon Boller
Interest in learning games and gamificaton of learning is high. But how do you do a good job of designing great learning games? This session walks you through six "lessons" learned from designing digital learning games.
A Primer On Play: How to use Games for Learning and ResultsSharon Boller
Discover the power games have to produce learning and business results. View the latest research and case studies on game-based learning and gamification. See a demo of Knowledge Guru, a game engine your team can use to quickly build your own games.
Digital Learning Game Design: Lessons from the TrenchesSharon Boller
Learning games - and gamification of learning - are hot trends. What does it REALLY take to produce a learning game, and how do you produce a good one? This presentation outlines 6 lessons learned with links to games that offer examples for the lessons learned.
Casper van Est from the University of Applied Sciences in Amsterdam is going to discuss the teaching of fundamental game design structures such as risk/reward, feedback loops and visual cues, using examples from well known games as well as his own succesful indie game SpeedRunners.
Developing your Agile skills through social GamesAgile Montréal
The end state of a highly performing Scrum team is described in the Scrum Guide by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland as follow: ""when the values of commitment, courage, focus, openness and respect are embodied and lived by the Scrum Team, the Scrum pillars of transparency, inspection, and adaptation come to life and build trust for everyone"". Then the authors add: ""the Scrum Team members learn and explore those values as they work with the Scrum events, roles and artifacts."" We simply believe we can fast-track the development of these Agile core values through daily social games.
For the past three years, we have been experimenting with half a dozen of Scrum teams, offering opportunities to play a large variety of games (board games, card games, baby-foot, etc...) during the lunch hour and after hours. The results of this experimentation have quickly exceeded our expectations.
Ludo Bruyere
Éric Boivin
Teaching Game Design to Teach Interaction DesignChristina Wodtke
All educators seek the magic trinity of attention, comprehension, and retention. For interaction design educators, the struggle to achieve these goals is even greater. Hopeful designers enter the field with lofty aspirations, yet they still need to learn the fundamental principles of design and build the core skills of an interaction designer. While keeping design students engaged is undoubtedly a challenge, there is a medium that allows students to internalize the fundamentals of design by experiencing them.
Games.
Games have become ubiquitous in our culture. They are inherently engaging. Some are good and some are… not. By teaching design students how to design games, educators expose their students to the basics of interaction design in ways that the students can experience themselves. Concepts like affordance, skill building, storytelling, and emotion become real rather than just conceptual. Altering the parameters of their games helps students feel the effect these concepts have on their games.
This method has the potential to improve interaction design education across the board by ensuring that design graduates have internalized the fundamentals by the time they are ready to enter the field. What’s more, any design educator can learn to teach interaction design by teaching their students how to design games. After all, it’s fun!
Bethesda's Iterative Level Design Process for Skyrim and Fallout 3Joel Burgess
GDC 2014 Level Design Workshop Session - A breakdown of the multiple stages of level design iteration used at Bethesda Game Studios on Fallout 3 and Skyrim.
Play to Learn: Learning Games and Gamification that Get ResultsHRDQ-U
Are you a trainer or eLearning designer who wants to use games to engage your learners? While learning games and gamification have the potential to motivate and excite, your efforts can fall flat if not designed properly. To be successful, you need a solid strategy that carefully connects business goals to learning objectives and game mechanics.
Looking back at the production process of 'Another Case Solved' - a story-driven puzzle F2P game by ATGames. Slides from a speech on Digital Dragons 2014
This walks through a set of tools, tips, tricks, and hacks for becoming a 10x engineer, walking through dev environments, the software development lifecycle, communication, focus, and office tips and tricks.
It's meant to accompany a real life presentation, so quite a bit of data is lost with the slides alone. :(
How to Design Effective Learning Games: Sharon Boller and Karl KappSharon Boller
Slides used during September 2017 ATD Learn workshop facilitated by Sharon Boller & Karl Kapp: "Play to Learn: Effective Learning Game Design"
Includes numerous slides identifying DIY game creation resources, templates, tools for creating learning games.
Primer on Play: Case Study for Knowledge GuruMarlo Gorelick
As shared in #GE4L, great structure of how and why to create game based learning. Prime case study to use when discussing possibilities of gamification for business
Tanner B. Engaging Tomorrow’s Learners with Impact Focused Virtual Reality Games. Serious Play Conference; 2018 July 18; Buffalo, New York, United States.
Uncharted lands, or why games are not designed but discoveredJakub Stokalski
Even though we say we 'design' games the process is often similar to exploration of unknown seas. During a storm. In a ship that just started leaking - and is on fire. The lecture was given during Digital Dragons 2016 conference. It meant to highlight some mental and processual tools a game designer and his/her producer can use to maximise the quality of their work.
User Experience 6: Qualitative Methods, Playtesting and InterviewsMarc Miquel
This presentation introduces the most fundamental qualitative methods: the playtesting and the interview. It discusses when to use it and the possible bias the researcher may incur.
These slides were prepared by Dr. Marc Miquel. All the materials used in them are referenced to their authors.
Slack (or Teams) Automation for Bonterra Impact Management (fka Social Soluti...Jeffrey Haguewood
Sidekick Solutions uses Bonterra Impact Management (fka Social Solutions Apricot) and automation solutions to integrate data for business workflows.
We believe integration and automation are essential to user experience and the promise of efficient work through technology. Automation is the critical ingredient to realizing that full vision. We develop integration products and services for Bonterra Case Management software to support the deployment of automations for a variety of use cases.
This video focuses on the notifications, alerts, and approval requests using Slack for Bonterra Impact Management. The solutions covered in this webinar can also be deployed for Microsoft Teams.
Interested in deploying notification automations for Bonterra Impact Management? Contact us at sales@sidekicksolutionsllc.com to discuss next steps.
Builder.ai Founder Sachin Dev Duggal's Strategic Approach to Create an Innova...Ramesh Iyer
In today's fast-changing business world, Companies that adapt and embrace new ideas often need help to keep up with the competition. However, fostering a culture of innovation takes much work. It takes vision, leadership and willingness to take risks in the right proportion. Sachin Dev Duggal, co-founder of Builder.ai, has perfected the art of this balance, creating a company culture where creativity and growth are nurtured at each stage.
GraphRAG is All You need? LLM & Knowledge GraphGuy Korland
Guy Korland, CEO and Co-founder of FalkorDB, will review two articles on the integration of language models with knowledge graphs.
1. Unifying Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs: A Roadmap.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.08302
2. Microsoft Research's GraphRAG paper and a review paper on various uses of knowledge graphs:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/graphrag-unlocking-llm-discovery-on-narrative-private-data/
State of ICS and IoT Cyber Threat Landscape Report 2024 previewPrayukth K V
The IoT and OT threat landscape report has been prepared by the Threat Research Team at Sectrio using data from Sectrio, cyber threat intelligence farming facilities spread across over 85 cities around the world. In addition, Sectrio also runs AI-based advanced threat and payload engagement facilities that serve as sinks to attract and engage sophisticated threat actors, and newer malware including new variants and latent threats that are at an earlier stage of development.
The latest edition of the OT/ICS and IoT security Threat Landscape Report 2024 also covers:
State of global ICS asset and network exposure
Sectoral targets and attacks as well as the cost of ransom
Global APT activity, AI usage, actor and tactic profiles, and implications
Rise in volumes of AI-powered cyberattacks
Major cyber events in 2024
Malware and malicious payload trends
Cyberattack types and targets
Vulnerability exploit attempts on CVEs
Attacks on counties – USA
Expansion of bot farms – how, where, and why
In-depth analysis of the cyber threat landscape across North America, South America, Europe, APAC, and the Middle East
Why are attacks on smart factories rising?
Cyber risk predictions
Axis of attacks – Europe
Systemic attacks in the Middle East
Download the full report from here:
https://sectrio.com/resources/ot-threat-landscape-reports/sectrio-releases-ot-ics-and-iot-security-threat-landscape-report-2024/
UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series, part 4DianaGray10
Welcome to UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series part 4. In this session, we will cover Test Manager overview along with SAP heatmap.
The UiPath Test Manager overview with SAP heatmap webinar offers a concise yet comprehensive exploration of the role of a Test Manager within SAP environments, coupled with the utilization of heatmaps for effective testing strategies.
Participants will gain insights into the responsibilities, challenges, and best practices associated with test management in SAP projects. Additionally, the webinar delves into the significance of heatmaps as a visual aid for identifying testing priorities, areas of risk, and resource allocation within SAP landscapes. Through this session, attendees can expect to enhance their understanding of test management principles while learning practical approaches to optimize testing processes in SAP environments using heatmap visualization techniques
What will you get from this session?
1. Insights into SAP testing best practices
2. Heatmap utilization for testing
3. Optimization of testing processes
4. Demo
Topics covered:
Execution from the test manager
Orchestrator execution result
Defect reporting
SAP heatmap example with demo
Speaker:
Deepak Rai, Automation Practice Lead, Boundaryless Group and UiPath MVP
Epistemic Interaction - tuning interfaces to provide information for AI supportAlan Dix
Paper presented at SYNERGY workshop at AVI 2024, Genoa, Italy. 3rd June 2024
https://alandix.com/academic/papers/synergy2024-epistemic/
As machine learning integrates deeper into human-computer interactions, the concept of epistemic interaction emerges, aiming to refine these interactions to enhance system adaptability. This approach encourages minor, intentional adjustments in user behaviour to enrich the data available for system learning. This paper introduces epistemic interaction within the context of human-system communication, illustrating how deliberate interaction design can improve system understanding and adaptation. Through concrete examples, we demonstrate the potential of epistemic interaction to significantly advance human-computer interaction by leveraging intuitive human communication strategies to inform system design and functionality, offering a novel pathway for enriching user-system engagements.
Accelerate your Kubernetes clusters with Varnish CachingThijs Feryn
A presentation about the usage and availability of Varnish on Kubernetes. This talk explores the capabilities of Varnish caching and shows how to use the Varnish Helm chart to deploy it to Kubernetes.
This presentation was delivered at K8SUG Singapore. See https://feryn.eu/presentations/accelerate-your-kubernetes-clusters-with-varnish-caching-k8sug-singapore-28-2024 for more details.
Generating a custom Ruby SDK for your web service or Rails API using Smithyg2nightmarescribd
Have you ever wanted a Ruby client API to communicate with your web service? Smithy is a protocol-agnostic language for defining services and SDKs. Smithy Ruby is an implementation of Smithy that generates a Ruby SDK using a Smithy model. In this talk, we will explore Smithy and Smithy Ruby to learn how to generate custom feature-rich SDKs that can communicate with any web service, such as a Rails JSON API.
Encryption in Microsoft 365 - ExpertsLive Netherlands 2024Albert Hoitingh
In this session I delve into the encryption technology used in Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Purview. Including the concepts of Customer Key and Double Key Encryption.
UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series, part 3DianaGray10
Welcome to UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series part 3. In this session, we will cover desktop automation along with UI automation.
Topics covered:
UI automation Introduction,
UI automation Sample
Desktop automation flow
Pradeep Chinnala, Senior Consultant Automation Developer @WonderBotz and UiPath MVP
Deepak Rai, Automation Practice Lead, Boundaryless Group and UiPath MVP
2. Who am I?
● Tom Mejias
● Creative Engineer @ Space Ape
● 10 years industry experience across console & mobile
● Specialisation in Gameplay / UX / Creative
● Blizzard fanboy / whale
3. Who are Space Ape?
● 6 years old
● Mobile Focus: 4 Games Released
○ Samurai Siege
○ Rival Kingdoms
○ Transformers
○ Fastlane
● Lots of new games & genres in the pipeline
● Recently part acquired by Supercell, creator of Clash of Clans
4. What will you learn today?
● Engineering & Industry Overview
● What is Creative Engineering
● How to do it
● What to keep in mind
● What to make
● What to learn
6. Engineering Roles
Specialist (Depth)
● Gameplay
● UI
● Audio
● Engine
● Graphics/Rendering
● Tools
● Networking
● AI
Generalist (Breadth)
● Broader, but shallower
understanding of a number of the
disciplines above
● Can work on many areas at once
7. Engineering Roles
Generalist (Breadth)
● Broader, but shallower
understanding of multiple
disciplines
● Can work on many areas at once
Specialist (Depth)
● Gameplay
● UI
● Audio
● Engine
● Graphics/Rendering
● Tools
● Networking
● AI
8. Console / AAA
● Specialists more desirable
● Large teams -> Less agile
● More crunch
● Smaller cog in a big machine
● Established companies more
secure
The Industry
Mobile / Startup / Indie
● Generalists more desirable
● Smaller teams -> More agile
● Less crunch
● More personal impact
● Startups & Indie can be less secure
9. Console / AAA
● Specialists more desirable
● Large teams -> Less agile
● More crunch
● Smaller cog in a big machine
● Established companies more
secure
The Industry
Mobile / Startup / Indie
● Generalists more desirable
● Smaller teams -> More agile
● Less crunch
● More personal impact
● Startups & Indie can be less secure
11. My Engineering Focus
Labels / Responsibilities
● Gameplay Engineering
● Creative Engineering
● Rapid Development
● Concept Validation
● Prototyping
Scary mind map on the next slide, be warned!
12.
13. High Level Overview
Internalise the mantra
“Write good, extendible code fast and for the express purpose of validating
a hypothesis”
14. High Level Overview
Internalise the mantra
“Write good, extendible code fast and for the express purpose of validating
a hypothesis”
● Being efficient with time
● Not duplicating code
● Not getting stuck in a code spaghetti loop
● Always thinking ahead
15. High Level Overview
Internalise the mantra
“Write good, extendible code fast and for the express purpose of validating
a hypothesis”
● Focusing on the user experience
● Focusing on feedback mechanisms
● Focusing on quality of play
● Focusing on answering your questions
17. Write Good Code
● Prototyping doesn't mean write bad code
● Refactor often & obsessively
● Scavenge code and refactor it, don't write it again
● Requirements will change, make your code extendible where you can
● Don’t get caught over optimizing
● Still be a means to an end programmer
18. Make Yourself a Toolkit
Most games have very similar common systems.
● Health System
● Damage System
● Buff System
● Ability System
● Stats Tracking System
● Profile / Persistence Systems
● UI / Dialog Systems
● Animation / Transition Systems
● Common architectural patterns
Make them generic and slot them in to every prototype you make.
19. Scavenge What You Can
Code
● Open source projects
● Your toolkit & past projects
Art
● Unity Asset Store
● Images.google.com
● poly.google.com
UX
● Find strong references to replicate and for inspiration
20. Plan your features
1. What - What is the feature you're about to make?
2. Why - Why are you making this feature, how does it tie in to your vision?
3. How - How could you go about building this feature?
4. Where - Where could you put this feature in order the maximise it's
extendibility
5. How - Now you know where, how could you build this feature to
maximise it's extendibility
6. When - Now you know the full picture, when should you do it?
21. Design for your players
● Have a good idea what you want your players to feel from every
mechanic
● Have a plan on how to elicit that feeling from them
● Q: Is this system here because it’s fun for me to write or because it’s fun
for the player?
● Show, don’t tell, the player wherever possible
● Keep it simple, stupid!
22. Summary
1. Get yourself into the habit of refactoring early. The longer you leave it,
the harder it will be to do
2. Make yourself a set of standalone systems that perform tasks, you will
move much faster by doing this
3. Be a scavenger
4. Always have a plan
5. Design for your players
24. Think about your scope
● Collate a wishlist of mechanics / abilities / interactions first
● Slice through them to find common systems / patterns
● Evaluate and prioritise what systems to make by how much value they
unlock
● This process will help you make more extendible code by forcing
yourself to think ahead and create flexible systems
25. Think about where you are
● Game Jam - Focus is on the interaction, forget about content, fake as
much stuff as humanly possible
● Prototyping - Focus is on the interaction and its interaction with
content, make things as multi-purpose as possible
● Production - Focus is on performance and maintainability, make things
as safe, understandable and single-purpose as possible
26. The Space Ape “Funnel”
Proof of
Concept
Spark
Prototyping
What is the game?
Can and should we
make it?
Make it and test it, and
then make it again!
Agile
Production
27. Think about your audience
● Internal prototype to a team? - Focus on the mechanic, loosen up on the
usability
● Internal prototype to a company? - Focus on the mechanic and the
usability equally
● External prototype to a user group? - Focus on the usability above all
28. Think of when/what/who to show
● First impressions will last through a prototype
● People are always most engaged the first time they try something new
● Show to a rotating subset of people
● Only show if you have a question you need answering, or to test
usability
● If you run surveys/playtests, have a consistent set of questions so you
can see change over time
29. Summary
1. Think ahead to be flexible
2. Form good habits while planning
3. Think holistically about your place in the project lifecycle
4. Think about your target audience, have empathy
5. Consider when, what, why and who to show work to
31. Have a strong vision
● The most important thing while making a game is having a clear,
consistent, and objective understanding of what you are making
● This is often called ‘the vision’
● There is often a ‘vision holder’ on a team who is in control of the vision
● The vision needs to be communicated clearly to everyone on the team
● There are many ways of finding and maintaining the vision
32. The Promise
1. Describe your vision for the game in a single statement
2. When adding a feature; does it “fit” with the statement?
3. Yes? Great! Continue on with implementation
4. No? Either the feature doesn't “fit” or the vision has changed, work that
out before continuing
5. If you updated the vision, reflect on previous features and their place
with the new vision
6. Repeat
33. The Promise
“A strategic mobile game where I play a commander of
an elite squad, outsmarting a real opponent to win in
quick, FPS-themed scenarios.”
“A racing themed game which gives me the fun,
competition, control and longevity I get from playing
Mario Kart.”
34. The Promise
“A strategic mobile game where I play a commander of
an elite squad, outsmarting a real opponent to win in
quick, FPS-themed scenarios.”
“A racing themed game which gives me the fun,
competition, control and longevity I get from playing
Mario Kart.”
35. Pillars / Ideation Gates
1. Describe your vision as a set of pillars to keep you honest
2. Ensure that for any new features, these pillars still remain strong
● This is especially useful when trying to filter out what NOT to make.
● If you develop a set of pillars; when you are brainstorming for new ideas
you can self validate by rating them out of 5 in each of your pillars and
culling ideas with low scores across the board
36. Pillars / Ideation Gates
Mobile
First
Evergreen
Gameplay
Scalable
Opportunity
for Mastery
Player Driven
Content
37. Know Your Complexity
1. Know where the complexity will exist in your game
○ Visual Complexity (visual noise, effects, reduced clarity, chaos, movement, camera shakes)
○ Cognitive Complexity (strategy of abilities, game state awareness, game rule combinations)
○ Interaction Complexity (input timing, frequency, accuracy, intuitiveness)
2. Make sure neither of the 3 complexities are too high and offset high
complexity in one with low in the others
3. Keep your complexities balanced! If you rate each complexity category
out of 5, aim for a grand total of 7 combined
39. Summary
1. Employ methods to find and maintain a strong vision
2. Think about how to best describe your vision
3. Think about ways to validate the levels of complexity
4. Think about “the opportunity”
41. Learn User Experience
● Easy to understand - If you can't explain it in a sentence, either it
shouldn't be user facing or it doesn't belong in the game
● Does what is expected - Spend the lion's share of your time and effort
on making sure your UI/UX makes sense, feels good and guides the
player
● Good feedback on actions - If the user does a thing, always do a thing,
then tell them how great it is they just did a thing
42. Learn 3D Maths
Seriously guys, just learn the following by heart, they are on every interview
● Vectors - Used for everything, from positions to rotations to velocities.
● Dot Product - Used in almost everything, think of it as “how similar are
these two vectors”
● Cross Product - Used a lot, think of it as “find the perpendicular vector”
● Quaternions - Just understanding their benefits/drawbacks is a start,
look up gimbal lock and slerping
● Matrices - Mostly useful in rendering and mesh generation, really good
to be comfortable with them
43. Learn Common Design Patterns
Communication Strategies
● Event Bus
● Signals
General Game Architectures
● Entity Component System (Data Oriented Design) (See: Entitas)
● Model/View Separation
Inversion of Control
● Dependency Injection Frameworks (See: Zenject)
● Constructor/Interface Injection
44. Learn Data Structures
● Understand the pros and cons between all the major data structures
● Try and always think of your data structures first before making
anything else
● Write your own versions of the popular containers to understand how
they work, this will always be asked in interviews
● For better or worse, interviewers ALWAYS ask you to write a linked list
implementation on a whiteboard. Just learn it.
● Maybe even take a look at unit testing, for bonus points
45. Be Experienced
● It’s so easy to make games nowadays, go make one (now that you have
the time to do it!)
● Learn Unity & C# if you want to get into mobile
● Learn Unreal & C++ if you want to get into console
● If you don’t want to make a whole game, try implementing individual
mechanics you like from existing games - you can use them for a
portfolio!
● Let yourself be inspired and don’t let yourself get jaded
46. Summary
1. Value your end user; focus on their experience
2. Learn to manipulate 3D maths concepts effortlessly
3. Learn common design patterns
4. Be comfortable with all the popular data structures
5. Get experience everywhere you can
6. Be inspired and be inspiring
