My reflections and interpretations of the various presentations at the Global Youth Marketing Conference in Feb 2010. The A-Z device is something one of the presenters used there.
5 Ways to Upgrade your Office using SCIENCE!Floown
Every team needs a great office. A beautiful place to work together, learn together, and have fun together. We spend so much time in an office... Why not put a little effort in making it a quality environment? We investigated a few easy fixes anyone can implement right away. No budget, effort or big changes necessary.
I Want to Make Games: Where's the (START) button? - CGBC 2013 Presentation b...Josh Caratelli
Presentation of the 'Advice, Tips 'n Tricks' that have been passed onto me about getting into the Video Game Development industry. Presented @ Monash University's Computer Game Boot Camp (CGBC 2013)
Building a Mobile, Social, Location-Based Game in 5 WeeksJennie Lees
A 5-week experiment to practice Lean methods in game development by testing and iterating concepts around mobile, location-based social gaming and apps. Presented at GDC 2011.
Presentations from SheSummits 2016, SheSays Denver's inaugural digital conference. Relive the day and the amazing sessions that explored Inspiration, Experimentation, Making and Courage.
About the Conference:
SheSummits is a unique digital conference designed exclusively for women working in UX, design, technology, media and marketing. Celebrate your craft, find inspiration from digital innovators and connect with women pioneering their way through the world of digital agencies and brands.
As a startup founder, you probably don’t want to hear this. But if you want to accomplish wonders, you must: 9 out of every 10 startups fail. It’s not the product and not even the distribution where things tend to go sour most of the time. It’s the inner workings of your organization. To succeed, you must hack your culture with as much dedication as you pour into your products. To help you get started, we facilitate 37 hour culture hackathons. They are fun, high-energy and high-paced culture-prototyping sessions where your team develops a blueprint of a culture you need to succeed.
Contact hello@corporatespring.com for availability and prices.
This deck is a presentation on 5 Core Qualities Every Leader Must Have. The talk was given by Omolara Shitu. She is a Group Head Client Service at Brooks and Blake.
We are excited to have the second Pau Hana in our series of "Meet the Mentors" this upcoming Tuesday, November 13th! Join us as we have a dynamic talk on innovation and failure from ex-Google and Cisco design lead - Ben Sykes! Alan Tien kicked off our first Pau Hana with a talk on Block Chain and it was a packed house! https://buff.ly/2qFamsY
From the Fuqua Forbes "Future of Marketing" Conference. How much more of consumer choice is driven by factors outside of conscious awareness than we might like to believe?
Academic point of view: Professor Gavan Fitzsimons
Practitioner perspectives: Jen Lineen MBA ’05, Shopper Marketing Manager at Coca-Cola and Liz Faria MBA ’08, Senior Brand Strategy Manager at Reebok International
This presentation was given at Hacker Lab for Sacramento User Experience Meetup. It explores innovative process improvements as well as disruptive innovation using methodologies from The Luma Institute, IDEO, and Cooper Design.
My reflections and interpretations of the various presentations at the Global Youth Marketing Conference in Feb 2010. The A-Z device is something one of the presenters used there.
5 Ways to Upgrade your Office using SCIENCE!Floown
Every team needs a great office. A beautiful place to work together, learn together, and have fun together. We spend so much time in an office... Why not put a little effort in making it a quality environment? We investigated a few easy fixes anyone can implement right away. No budget, effort or big changes necessary.
I Want to Make Games: Where's the (START) button? - CGBC 2013 Presentation b...Josh Caratelli
Presentation of the 'Advice, Tips 'n Tricks' that have been passed onto me about getting into the Video Game Development industry. Presented @ Monash University's Computer Game Boot Camp (CGBC 2013)
Building a Mobile, Social, Location-Based Game in 5 WeeksJennie Lees
A 5-week experiment to practice Lean methods in game development by testing and iterating concepts around mobile, location-based social gaming and apps. Presented at GDC 2011.
Presentations from SheSummits 2016, SheSays Denver's inaugural digital conference. Relive the day and the amazing sessions that explored Inspiration, Experimentation, Making and Courage.
About the Conference:
SheSummits is a unique digital conference designed exclusively for women working in UX, design, technology, media and marketing. Celebrate your craft, find inspiration from digital innovators and connect with women pioneering their way through the world of digital agencies and brands.
As a startup founder, you probably don’t want to hear this. But if you want to accomplish wonders, you must: 9 out of every 10 startups fail. It’s not the product and not even the distribution where things tend to go sour most of the time. It’s the inner workings of your organization. To succeed, you must hack your culture with as much dedication as you pour into your products. To help you get started, we facilitate 37 hour culture hackathons. They are fun, high-energy and high-paced culture-prototyping sessions where your team develops a blueprint of a culture you need to succeed.
Contact hello@corporatespring.com for availability and prices.
This deck is a presentation on 5 Core Qualities Every Leader Must Have. The talk was given by Omolara Shitu. She is a Group Head Client Service at Brooks and Blake.
We are excited to have the second Pau Hana in our series of "Meet the Mentors" this upcoming Tuesday, November 13th! Join us as we have a dynamic talk on innovation and failure from ex-Google and Cisco design lead - Ben Sykes! Alan Tien kicked off our first Pau Hana with a talk on Block Chain and it was a packed house! https://buff.ly/2qFamsY
From the Fuqua Forbes "Future of Marketing" Conference. How much more of consumer choice is driven by factors outside of conscious awareness than we might like to believe?
Academic point of view: Professor Gavan Fitzsimons
Practitioner perspectives: Jen Lineen MBA ’05, Shopper Marketing Manager at Coca-Cola and Liz Faria MBA ’08, Senior Brand Strategy Manager at Reebok International
This presentation was given at Hacker Lab for Sacramento User Experience Meetup. It explores innovative process improvements as well as disruptive innovation using methodologies from The Luma Institute, IDEO, and Cooper Design.
Above The Code (TM) Story Telling & Branded Content - : TechLoft / Tel Aviv...Alan Weinkrantz
U.S. Public Relations Consultant, Alan Weinkrantz' nsights on Story Telling and Branded Content Strategies for 2013.
Weinkrantz's core premise of the discussion will be based on studying and playing music for the last 50 years, with his belief sets about music being the original code with great story telling.
What Weinkrantz sees today in most startups is great code, great UI and little and generally no story telling. He will discuss the art of story telling in the context of a building and sustaining a startup and its role in adding value to a company.
Visit: http://www.alanweinkrantz.com or email Alan - alan@weinkrantz.com
Story telling, having a voice, and the on-going narrative is a reflection of the startup's heart and soul. It also becomes the body of work which will help the startup recruit talent, gain investors, attract customers, build partnerships and be discovered by the media. It is the later that he will focus on. This discussion will not be about how to pitch media, but rather, how to prepare yourself to best work with the media by having not only a great product or service, but a body of work that will separate you from your competitors.
(Short version) Building a Mobile, Social, Location-Based Game in 5 WeeksJennie Lees
A 5-week experiment to practice Lean methods in game development by testing and iterating concepts around mobile, location-based social gaming and apps. (Short version for Where 2.0)
Most professionals take a reactive rather than proactive approach with their careers. They wait for a pay rise, promotion or recruiter to contact them before they think about doing something. But what if that call never happens? This often leads to a stagnated career where people are unhappy with what they do leading to a lack of skills progression, reduced motivation and engagement.
In this workshop, Mohammed Kasujee explains the importance of planning a career and help the participants create a defined career strategy. How to do it, what to look for and why - enabling them to feel excited and purposeful about their careers leading to greater job satisfaction and motivation.
Speaker
Mohammed is a Career Coach who helps his clients thrive in the world of work and business. His company, MK Career Solutions supports individuals in every step of the career journey from creating stand out CV’s, preparing clients for interviews and coaching them to find purpose and meaning in work.
In addition to managing his business he is also a Non-Executive Director for a Non-for-Profit organisation and provides mentorship to start-up businesses through the government’s ‘Help to Grow’ scheme.
Acorn Recovery: Restore IT infra within minutesIP ServerOne
Introducing Acorn Recovery as a Service, a simple, fast, and secure managed disaster recovery (DRaaS) by IP ServerOne. A DR solution that helps restore your IT infra within minutes.
This presentation, created by Syed Faiz ul Hassan, explores the profound influence of media on public perception and behavior. It delves into the evolution of media from oral traditions to modern digital and social media platforms. Key topics include the role of media in information propagation, socialization, crisis awareness, globalization, and education. The presentation also examines media influence through agenda setting, propaganda, and manipulative techniques used by advertisers and marketers. Furthermore, it highlights the impact of surveillance enabled by media technologies on personal behavior and preferences. Through this comprehensive overview, the presentation aims to shed light on how media shapes collective consciousness and public opinion.
0x01 - Newton's Third Law: Static vs. Dynamic AbusersOWASP Beja
f you offer a service on the web, odds are that someone will abuse it. Be it an API, a SaaS, a PaaS, or even a static website, someone somewhere will try to figure out a way to use it to their own needs. In this talk we'll compare measures that are effective against static attackers and how to battle a dynamic attacker who adapts to your counter-measures.
About the Speaker
===============
Diogo Sousa, Engineering Manager @ Canonical
An opinionated individual with an interest in cryptography and its intersection with secure software development.
This presentation by Morris Kleiner (University of Minnesota), was made during the discussion “Competition and Regulation in Professions and Occupations” held at the Working Party No. 2 on Competition and Regulation on 10 June 2024. More papers and presentations on the topic can be found out at oe.cd/crps.
This presentation was uploaded with the author’s consent.
Have you ever wondered how search works while visiting an e-commerce site, internal website, or searching through other types of online resources? Look no further than this informative session on the ways that taxonomies help end-users navigate the internet! Hear from taxonomists and other information professionals who have first-hand experience creating and working with taxonomies that aid in navigation, search, and discovery across a range of disciplines.
Sharpen existing tools or get a new toolbox? Contemporary cluster initiatives...Orkestra
UIIN Conference, Madrid, 27-29 May 2024
James Wilson, Orkestra and Deusto Business School
Emily Wise, Lund University
Madeline Smith, The Glasgow School of Art
1. WORKING IN THE GAMES
INDUSTRY
LESSONS LEARNED FROM AAA, INDIE AND MOBILE
2. WHO AM I?
Kieran Nee (@kieran_nee on Twitter)
•Lead Client Engineer on
•At Mediatonic Games in London
•Been making games professionally since
2004
3. WHERE?
• Lionhead Studios/Microsoft
2004- 2012
• The Movies
• Fable 2
• Fable 3
• Fable Heroes
• Fable: The Journey
• Bit By Bit Games – Co-founder
in 2011
• It's Tanks!
• MMA Manager
• Unnamed/Failed Startups in both
2012 and 2016 – Co-founder
• Contracted at
JiggeryPokery 2013-2014
• GodFinger 2
• Full time at Mediatonic 2016 -
Present
• Fantastic Beasts: Cases From The
Wizarding World
• New Yahtzee with Buddies
•
• Unannounced Title I would love to talk
about if I wasn't so scared of lawyers
5. CONSOLE & PC AKA “AAA”
• Typically get longer to work on features
• Projects have longer timescales
• More specialized work/areas
• Great for finding your feet in the industry and getting used to
doing what so many of us enjoy as a hobby as a JOB
• Studios usually try their best to avoid Crunch
• But usually fail
• Launch windows with Marketing budgets and physical media
MUST Be hit
6. STARTUPS
• Exciting.
• Fuzzy goaled.
• Often lurching from idea to idea trying to find that massive
success.
• Smart ones are funded by VC / Investment / Publishers.
• Very smart ones get a good deal. These are incredibly rare.
• Good partners and initial hires are key.
• Good communication with your investors etc is Key.
7. INDIE
• Small teams or Solo devs
• "Games are Art" / Passion Projects
• Often self-funded
• Glamourized more than healthy
• Devs must be multi-taskers
• Publicize game
• Handle business side
• Talk about their work
• Social media
• Make a good game
• Lean and Mean businesses
• What's an Office?
• Employees, what are they?
8. INDEPENDENT STUDIOS
• Can be thought of as the next step in either Startups or Indie studios
• Generally
• Specialized OR
• Hyper-diversified
• Usually ranging between 30-200 staff.
• Often composed of smaller teams working on multiple projects on
multiple platforms to spread risk and maximize potential chance of
success.
• Mediatonic for example has 5 projects alone in production and has spun
off risky projects with sister studios before.
• Live and die on their reputation
11. Play Games, Play Lots of
Games.
Build up your language for describing problems and solutions that other games
have encountered.
Appreciate the medium, enjoy other devs work.
You never know what kind of games will inspire you.
12. Make sure people can find
and see your games.
A well laid out and written portfolio website or itch.io page with the link in your
CV is essential today.
13. Make Games With Other
People
Work in teams, get involved with jams, find
others that share your interests in certain genres
or styles and have fun.
14. Don't be picky, apply
everywhere
You never know what studios are working on, NDAs are an
important feature of professional game development and you will
rarely have any visibility on the projects you might be working on.
Glassdoor can be useful, but if you know someone personally
that’s worked at a place that’s often better.
Mediatonic is
15. Be prepared to move.
Game development is a very new industry and has generally developed around
hubs where companies did well years ago, there's excellent access to
investment opportunities and good support or tax breaks from local
government. Often all 3
16. Don’t be an arse
Game development is a very SMALL industry. Act like a prima donna, treat
other people badly, don't pull your weight in projects and that information will
spread very easily.
Bad attitudes, misogyny and toxic divas will RUIN projects, don't be that
person.
18. WORK HARD!
• But not too hard
• Crunch is real
• Crunch is bad
• …....Crunch is occasionally near impossible to avoid
• Companies that mandate crunch and pile pressure on their staff
can produce incredible things
• At the expense of your health and wellbeing to allow them to make
money.
19. KEEP LEARNING
• Ask Questions!
• Stubbornly attacking tasks wastes your time, the team's time and deprives you of an
opportunity to learn
• Experiment with non-job-related things outside of work
• New Languages
• New Approaches
• New tools
• Areas you feel weak in
• Use varying tech! Middleware & Tools come and go.
• Unity for example is a single platform that's for profit, you have zero influence on its future
direction
• Renderware for example ruled the middleware world until suddenly it was gone.
• Every single 3d package bar Blender will be bought by Autodesk eventually
20. REMEMBER, A JOB IS FOR RIGHT NOW, NOT
FOR LIFE
• Loyalty, gratitude, fear of change or job searching can keep people in
roles/companies that are
• Toxic
• Manipulative
• Underpaying
• Stressful
• Unrewarding professionally
• New opportunities are constantly appearing in Games. There's literally
new platforms/mediums popping up every couple of years and new
game ideas popping into people's heads every minute.
21. NETWORK! AKA TALK TO PEOPLE AND BE
NICE
• As I said, it's a small industry
• Learning new things and meeting new people is important
• Few people get game dev annoyances like other game devs. Let it out! Down
the pub, on Twitter, private Discord server, Industry Slack, whatever.
• People knowing you, people knowing your work will get you new jobs and
opportunities
• You'll almost always hear about some cool shit you'll find fascinating
• That was probably NDA-ed and you should never ever repeat. Snitches get...
• Help other people when and where you can.
• Unless you have a good reason not to, it’s rare that helping someone out with advice or
suggestions is going to swallow too much of your time.
• DON’T WORK FOR FREE THOUGH!
• Application tests are fair, work to go in someone’s game or for use in marketing etc is STILL WORK.
• At an absolute
22. LOOK AFTER YOURSELF!
• Physically
• Free food isn’t always good food
• Staying at your desk for hours is bad
• Don’t go to work sick
• Plus producers hate when you spread it about
• Mentally
• Take Breaks
• Do different things
• Speak up
• If something is wrong, tell your manager. If your manager is the problem, tell
someone you trust to be on your side and get their opinion. Don’t suffer in silence.
• Game Workers Unite! https://www.gameworkersunite.org
• Use your Vacation!
23. ENJOY IT!
Making games is FUN!
The people are in general amazing.
The emotional rewards can be fantastic.
Bit of a wanky title, but good place to start. Worth pointing out that I’m aiming for lessons and advice that are largely discipline agnostic.
This one is a good one to give out some information on Mediatonic.
- Who & where we are
- What we make and have made
- What we're doing now that's non-NDA-ed
Don't spend to long on this.
Key points to get across
- AAA Console & PC
- Startups
- Indie
- Mediatonic – flexible independent studio that's worked on pretty much every type of platform bar VR (so far). Size of some AAA studios, but works in smaller teams, around 40 at most.
Use Fable examples, multiple years working on single systems
Use experience examples of Kinaesthetic & MLF partnerships -
Caution that thought it sounds scathing, it's because I've been there and it's damn HARD. Honestly think Indie Game the Movie did a lot of damage in the short term. Very few true indie's that are genuinely good at it and almost all of them treat it just like any other talented entrepreneur treats their business. Seriously and professionally.
Bit By Bit as example. Explain the highs and lows of this approach, utter devastation of savings, obsessive work ethic.
Worth explaining why Specialized or Hyper-diversified
- Specialized, survive via being best in class & extremely focused on serving passionate audience
- Hyper-diversified, don't have all their eggs in one basket. Experience has taught them to be careful about dependence on single projects or platforms
Mention Mediatonic in this context. Explain that we're very diverse in terms of projects and risk
NOTHING beats experience. Good grades can get you in the door, but actually showing passion for what we do and being able to talk about your experiences is critical.
-Example here, Lionhead interview & 20 minute rant on what I did wrong in my previous project.
ESPECIALLY the games of anyone you apply to work with. It's basic courtesy and if you don't know what they've made before and can find at least something to like.....why do you want to work there?
Pro-tip: I work at MEDIATONIC, not Media Molecule
Prime Example – Recent graduate hire at Mediatonic was very nervous doing an interview over Skype and the overall impression wasn't great. But looking at his portfolio site should a very broad range of skills that came across better than his nervous interview, with an interest in areas that would benefit working on projects, tools and interesting new ways of approaching problems. He was hired and has been VERY successful
If you're applying to work at a company, you're going to be working with others. Interviewers can tell a lot from questions about your team experience how well that will work. Prime piece of advice here imo is that you need to be honest about your experiences. Why did projects fail? Why did they succeed? What went right/wrong? How did you/your team cope with problems/changes/drama?
My interviews at Mediatonic are a great example. I had no idea I'd be working on a tie-in game for the restart of the Harry Potter Cinematic Universe in Fantastic Beasts, or a tie-in game for a (now cancelled during Soft Launch) title that was linked to one of the greatest TV series of the last couple of decades.
I should feel free to hint about my current project and mention Mediatonic is hiring.
Guildford, Birmingham, Dundee, Toronto, Vancouver, London.
Talk about flexibility and ability to work from home. Emphasize that unless the team is fully remote, having that kind of trust as a junior is unlikely and in fact not beneficial to your professional growth as the best bit about being a junior is the ability to learn from those around you.
Six degrees of Peter M.
Example of recent candidate at Mediatonic. I had tangential experience of their attitude & behaviour more than 14 years ago, while also knowing they were exceptionally talented. 3 emails to people I know that may have worked with them confirmed that they hadn't improved much in the intervening time and that information was passed on to our recruitment specialist.
Use my LH examples and general poor health destruction from working like that.
Rapidly changing industry with different approaches and powerful new tools being invented and applied every day. Techniques like procedural generation and machine learning are things that are easy enough to dabble in for a few hours a week without having to spend all your spare time on but they will be useful one day, even if it's just when you're rubber ducking for someone or spitballing ideas.
Growth is important
Lionhead example
- Comfortable
- No professional advancement
- Stayed for all the wrong reasons
Remember, at the end of the day it's a JOB, you have bills to pay and the job you want one year may not be what you want to do the next. Own example, didn't particularly want involved in management for a long time, felt I was better at the implementation side of dev. Experience taught me that I had things to contribute and that by holding back on that I was doing both myself and my colleagues a disservice
Again, use self as example. 2 interviews, lots of projects I've been approached for based on personal connections.
At the end of the day your making things aimed at creating emotional reactions in other humans and there's few things as interesting as that.
