LAFS SVI Level 1 - Introduction

Level 1
David Mullich
Survey of the Videogame Industry
The Los Angeles Film School

Who Are You?
1. What is your name?
2. Where are you from?
3. What is your favorite movie?
4. What is your favorite game?
5. What is your career goal?

Who Am I?
 My name: David Mullich
 dmullich@lafilm.edu
 @David_Mullich
 From: Los Angeles
 Favorite Movie: 2001 A Space Odyssey
 Favorite Game: Civilization
 Career Goal: Prepare you for a career
in the game industry

EduWare
Designer
Programmer Programmer Programmer

What Did I Learn?
You may love to play
games, but a game
developer loves
making games. And
that means you need
skillz.

Distribution
Publisher
Distributor
Retailer

What Did I Learn?
Game development is a calling, because
success does not come easily. Most
games don’t break even.

Disney Licensor
(Creates intellectual properties)
Licensee
(Uses others intellectual properties)

Publisher Publishing Company
(Markets/Sells Games)
Development Studio
(Creates Games)

What Did I Learn?
Anyone can have a good game idea. You
need to also be able to persuade, plan, and
prove you can deliver.

Cyberdreams
Voice Over
Music
Artist
Designer
Developer
Licensor
Producer

What Did I Learn?
The game industry is full of people even
more talented than you, but that's one of
the benefits.

3DO Director
Lead
Designer
Lead
Programmer
Lead
Artist
Lead
Audio
Assistant Designer
Writer
Level Designers
Engine
Gameplay
Artificial Intelligence
User Interface
Audio
Multiplayer
Tools
Concept
Textures
Characters
Environments
Special Effects
User Interface
Cinematics
Sound Effects
Music
Voice-Over

What Did I Learn?
Game development is a team sport for
geeks. You need to be able to
communicate and work well in a team.

Activision
Operations
Quality
Assurance
Marketing
Finance
Legal
Developer
Producer

What Did I Learn?
Game development is a business. A
big business. Bigger than the movie
business.

What Did I Learn?
Games can now be played anywhere, any
time.

What Did I Learn?
Gamers are no longer just teenage boys.
People of all ages and types now play
games.

What Did I Learn?
You can learn just as much working on
an advertgame for cats as working on
the latest gazillion $$$ mega title.

Game development is no longer just for
geeks. Everyone now wants to get in on
the action.
What Did I Learn?

Survey of the Videogame
Industry
1. Introduction, Professionalism, Industry
2. Psychology of Play
3. Game Design and Analysis
4. History of Computer and Mobile Games
5. History of Arcade and Console Games
6. Game Development and Testing
7. Game Publishing and Marketing
8. Games and Diversity
9. Games and Society
10. Managing Your Career

Survey of the Videogame
Industry
Grading
 20%: 10 Labs
 20%: 10 Homework Assignments
 40%: 4 Tests
 10%: Professionalism
 10%: Attendance
2% Extra Credit for attending Transmedia Showcase

Associates Program
Introduction to
Transmedia
Design
Survey of the
Videogame
Industry
Game Art 1
Level Design
Quantitative
Principles
Game Audio Game Art 2
Game
Programming
1
Creative
Writing
Interpersonal
Communication
Discrete Math
Game
Programming
2
Game Design
1
Psychology of
Play
Analog Game
Theory
Game Design
2
Game Assets
Statistical
Applications
Concepting &
Preproduction
Game
Production 1
Game
Production 2
Game
Production 3

Bachelors Program
Art Creation
for Games
Aesthetics &
Culture
Storytelling for
Games
Contemporary
Art
Game
Animation
Transmedia
Storytelling
Artificial
Intelligence for
Games
World Building
Interactive
Audio
Mobile Game
Development
1
Mobile Game
Development
2
Professional
Writing
Emerging
Game
Platforms
Marketing &
Monetizaton
Concepting &
Preproduction
2
Final Project1 Final Project 2 Final Project 3

How to Succeed in LAFS
 Be your own Career Entrepreneur
 3 Keys:
 Devotion
 Persistence
 Re-invention

This is a College Class
Studying game development at college is still
college study.
 Take Notes
 Study
 Read

Take Notes
Having one of these is
a minimum
requirement.
At all times.

Study
 Review the
Lecture Notes
 Think
 Understand
 Reflect and
Connect

Assignments
If you can’t be bothered to:
 be creative
 strive for originality even within established
norms or constraints
 look beyond your initial idea
 actually enjoy and actively want to do the
above
Then get used to the phrase
“Would you like fries with that?”

Assignments
Word counts are there for a reason.
Use them wisely and avoid:
 Padding
 Going off topic
 Repeating yourself
 Padding by stating the obvious in a way that takes quite a lot
of words but really isn’t saying anything new
 Repeating yourself but in a different way
 Padding, wadding, lining, extemporising, extraneous content
or going on any other kind of Synonym Safari TM

Assignments
“On Time” means 5 minutes early.
Unless the stakes are really high, in which case it
means 24 hours early. Or a week early.
Pssst....Sometimes developers make false internal deadlines
to avoid calamity such as missed milestone payments.
Maybe you could do the same if graduation is at stake?

Tests
 Study for your tests! Refer to the slides.
 If you see on a slide, it will probably be on
the test.
 If you don’t know the answer to a test
question, guess!
 There are no points deducted for wrong answers on
multiple-choice questions
 I will award some points for clever or knowledgeable
answers on short-answer questions, even if they
weren’t the answer I was looking for.

School Is Your Job
Yes, these are important:
 Part-time work
 Family
 Friends
 Fun
But don’t neglect your school work!

Professional Gamer
Team Newbee – China
Total earnings: $1,005,661 each
Valve’s International Dota 2 Competition
Lee Jae Dong
South Korea
$519,086: Starcraft
Danil Ishutin
Ukraine
$452,841: Dota
Johnathan Wendel
United States
$454,919: FPS games
Jang Min Chu
South Korea
$453,926: Starcraft

Gaming Professional
John Romero
Co-Creator DOOM
Id Software
T.Q. Jefferson
Vice President, Game Production
Marvel Studios
Kathy Vrabeck
President
Activision

You may love to play games, but that
doesn’t make you a game developer.
I love to eat dinner, but that doesn’t make me
a chef.

Do You Have Skillz?
 Gamers are good at digital interfaces
 Gaming professionals are good at both
digital and human interfaces

This means communication.
With grammar‐Nazis.
“...the different ways they done it like in the
game play and the scenes ad the props”
...is not communicating and will incur their
wrath.
Game development is a team sport
for Geeks.

All Business is Communication
 Publisher to Customer
 Developer to Publisher
 Boss to Team
 Team to Boss
 Team Member to Team Member

Good Communication
 Precise
 Clear
 Brief

Written Communication
Informal Communication
Its cool to werk in gamez.u get too do anything u
want & stuff
Formal Communication
It’s cool to work in games. You get to do anything
you want and stuff.

Written Communication
 Capitalize the beginning of sentences,
names, game titles, and the word “I”
 Use proper spelling and punctuation
 Put a space between punctuation mark
ending a sentence and the start of the
next sentence
 Don’t use “u” for “you”, or “&” for “and”
 Don’t confuse “its” and “it’s”

Attention to detial
It matters.

First Rule of Success: Show Up
 DON’T BE TARDY
 But if you know you will be late, EMAIL ME!
 DON’T BE ABSENT
 But if you know you will be gone, EMAIL ME!

<<<Expand your horizons>>>
Just because it doesn’t have the word GAMES in it,
doesn’t mean it’s not going to inspire, inform or be useful
to you every day for the rest of your creative life.
This is especially true of non‐electronic information such
as:
 Books
 Museums
 Art
 History

“All I want to do is just pass this
class”
Classes are not kidney
stones.
If you think about them
in these terms, maybe
you’re on the wrong
career path?

Impressions
Your colleagues and faculty will most likely be
your doorway into the industry.
How do you want them to think of you?
Leave a professional and lasting impression.
They’re your first referees, either on paper or
via word of mouth.

StjohnColon.com
Global Games Market 2012-2016
Source: The NPD Group
Source: Newzoo, 2013 Global Games Market Report

StjohnColon.com
Top Ten Video Game Facts
10
Parents are present when games are
purchased or rented 91 percent of the
time.

StjohnColon.com
9
Eighty-eight percent of all games sold in
2010 were rated "E" for Everyone, "T"
for Teen, or "E10+" for Everyone 10+.
www.esrb.org.

StjohnColon.com
8
Forty-four percent of gamers play
games on their smartphone, and
33 percent play games on their
wireless device.

StjohnColon.com
7
In 2011, 29 percent of Americans over the
age of 50 play video games, an
increase from nine percent in 1999.

StjohnColon.com
6
Forty-eight percent of all game players
are women. In fact, women over the
age of 18 represent a significantly
greater portion of the game-playing
population (36 percent) than boys age
18 or younger (17 percent).

StjohnColon.com
5
The average age of the most frequent
game purchaser is 35 years old.

StjohnColon.com
4
The average game player is 31 years old
and has been playing games for 14
years.

StjohnColon.com
3
Purchases of digital content accounted for
53 percent of game sales in 2013.

StjohnColon.com
2
Consumers spent $21.53 billion on video
games, hardware and accessories in
2013.

StjohnColon.com
1
Fifty-nine percent of Americans play video
games.

10 Trends Affecting Gaming In 2017
1. Virtual Reality Headsets Will Find Consumers

2. eSports Market May Reach 1B By Year’s End

3. Perpetual Downloadable Content

4. Microtransaction Spending Caps

5. Streaming For Both Distributors and Players

6. Indie Outliers Finding Success By Promoting
ASAP

7. Mobile Games Using Messaging And Notifications

8. Wearable Devices Becoming More Viable For Games

9. India And China Are Huge Markets

10. Augmented Reality Finding Ways To Be Viable

StjohnColon.com
Jobs, Jobs, Jobs
 As of 2010, there were about 118,386 direct and
indirect U.S. workers in the game industry.
 The top 5 states employing workers in the game
industry:
1. California (accounts for 41% of US game industry workers)
2. Texas
3. Washington
4. New York
5. Massachusetts

StjohnColon.com
Money, Money, Money
 Average Salary (3 years or less experience):
 Programmers: $71,855
 Producers: $59,079
 Game Designers: $53,000
 Artists and Animators: $50,000
 Quality Assurance: $38,833
 Rising costs of development:
 In 1990 it cost about $40,000 per game.
 In 2004 it cost about $10,000,000 per game.
 Grand Theft Auto V, released in 2013, cost about $266,000,000
to develop.

So You Want to Work in the Video Game Industry (7:41)

Take-Away
“I’m really good at ideas. That’s what I want to do in
the team; be the guy who has the ideas.”
Join the line. At the back.
Behind the guy who can draw; the girl who can code; and
the ones who can write, plan, create, evaluate, debug,
submit and deliver.
They’ve got ideas, too.

10 Misconceptions About Working In The
Videogame Industry
1. We don’t just play games all day long.
2. We aren’t all programmers.
3. “My neighbor’s kid plays a lot of
videogames. Can he get a job like
yours?”
4. The Tech Support misconception.
5. It’s not just having ideas.

10 Misconceptions About Working In The
Videogame Industry
6. Videogame music is still real music.
7. We aren’t gaming savants.
8. Testing takes skill.
9. We get that you don’t play games.
10. It’s a real job for grownups.
What Culture

Remember, Video Game
Development is a Calling

What Is A Video Game?
This is a Video Game (1:36)

LAFS SVI Level 1 - Introduction

LAFS SVI Level 1 - Introduction

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