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amit
In Business, freelancing, Life skills, My Journey

My Journey from 2004 to 2008

In this blog post I will show you some of the ridiculous things I have done, tried and experienced when learning game development. This has been a trip down memory lane for me as I have kept these images over two decades soon. So without further ado, let us backtrack into my memory lane. I hope you enjoy it.

This is when I probably starting getting a bit more serious in learning tools and getting into something creative. It was also around the same time I started studying for game design. That is not to say I did not do anything before but it started taking off around this time. So, one of the first 3D I did was by copying someone else and it was something along this.

Around the same time I obviously started getting into Photoshop due to texturing. However, I was curious about manipulating images into other images. For some reason I wanted Will Smith into other movies. And iRobot. And Matrix.

During this time I was active in forums and community in one way or another. So I obviously had to create signatures. At the time I was focusing mostly on Level Design.

I started getting into Neverwinter Nights 2 community and took parts in designing big worlds for the next couple of years in community servers like Frontier and later Khalidine under other usernames. We would research the main game and then design our own town, forest, dungeons and more. It was one of the coolest time of my life. Enjoy some of my earlier modding works of NWN2 Community work below. Some part of a team effort obviously.

At this stage I started improving in my skills, storytelling and lighting a bit.

You can see that some of my later work started having better level design, story telling and lighting.

I started rotating trees in a creative way to make roof roots.

It was not long until I started entering other genre and exploring other engines. I expanded to Unreal Engine fairly early in the days, offering level design for others and becoming part of the communities. First I had to learn the engine and this is literally how the first map looked like where I just dragged everything in.

Around this time I had started year 2 in game design studies. And together with my classmates we had put together a custom level from scratch, our own game mode and I had created a custom weapon on the side for another project while also doing linear level design for another artist. I was first doing linear level design so let us look at that first.

Meanwhile I was improving with my team mates by troubleshooting issues, scripting and learning to be a project leader too.

Eventually we finished our level while I was juggling external projects and learning extra things on my own, below is the team effort of Nahnoc our level and game mode.

After this I started my last year in my studies where I started writing long particle tutorial and learning particle editor. I went back to 3DS max to experiment with some ideas and model some ships for some of my other effects. I learned to make procedural skybox and planets etc.

I realized 3D modelling is not for me so I stopped over a decade ago. 10 years later I did resume to teach 3D modelling and learning Maya. But that is another topic for another time. I never did relearn my modelling skills though after leaving it for over a decade or two. Technically this was my last 3D model a few years back when learning Maya. So, I guess you never stop to revisit on some occasions. The reason is because even if you are not trying to be the best in something, it does not mean you should not stay up to date in it.

After doing some 3D and Engine work I tried experimenting a bit with drawing briefly as I was also figuring out 2D texturing a bit.

Around this time I realized I like shading and at the time I did not think much about it. Only to realize later it is kind of related to lighting when it comes to my artistic skills and preference at this stage.

So the point here is that I have tried quite a lot, practiced different things and gained a lot of experience during my student years. You can tell that I was not particularly good or talented but I put in the hours, time, networking and hard work. So, if you feel things are doing slow. People are not supporting you. Other people are better. Whatever the reason. I hope I am a living example of making professional living out of games in one way or another for about 14 years.

amit
In Business

The Busy Gamers Market Needs Are Growing

If you didn’t already know I once had my own game company during the iPhone and appstore era, when it first started out. I researched the potential and was a bit early in creating games for a growing market I coined Busy Gamers. At the time of research the average age of gamers was 33 years old. People around age 38 bought most games and the emphasis was on casual gamers and woman at the time. What I wanted was to predict and stay ahead by slowly creating games for Busy Gamers with emphasis on cooperative games.

What are busy gamers? They are busy. They are 30+. They are in a relationship, married and have kids. They have limited time. They used to be hardcore gamers and are unsatisfied by games that take 100+ hours, with repetitive mechanic due to limited time but also experience in used game mechanics. Therefore they are increasingly interested in story but with great game mechanic, and some prefer slower paced games that are more tactical or strategic. Less twitch mechanic for some. These busy gamers would rather spend 20 dollars on 8-20 hours game than 60 dollars on 100+ hour game, because they know, by now they probably won’t finish past 20 hours.

Sounds familiar?

Today about 29% of gamers are below age of 35. Over 43% are over 35 years old. 20% are 36-49% and about 23% are in fact 50+ now. 67% of parents play with their kids once a week. 56% prefer multiplayer games.

Why is this important?

As stated earlier I recognized this trend 10+ years ago and now that I am nearing 35 years old I recognize I am a busy gamer myself now. I regularly converse with people around my age group, we talk about the type of games we want but cheaper and less hours. Although we struggle to find something that is still hardcore, complex, interesting, engaging, fun and all this within the budget and hours we have. We talk about the oversaturation of games and abundance of choice. In some cases we talk about our experience in playing games and how it affects our experience when we buy, play or put away a game. All this is important because it is still an untapped market.

Look around you

A lot of games have become multiplayer cooperative and it is increasing slowly. This is because it is also more profitable to keep players playing this way. You probably played a game that required some kind of cooperation against one other player, or against the AI. Think of dead by daylight, left 4 dead, evolved and many others that are popular today.

Start up

If I were to do another start up I would probably cater to age 35+ and create shorter deeper gaming experience for less price and shorter hours. Due to oversaturation and higher production value, it is also easier for someone new to develope those types of games, compare to an open world game, or even purely competitive multiplayer. It could even be a good strategy game. When I did it I was too early but it is the perfect time now.

So, if you are making a game for busy gamers remember their time is money, experience is value and they do want deep complex games…but in shorter time.

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