My Journey

Category
amit
In Life skills, My Journey

Game Dev Experience learned at 2008-2012

It is time to write another blog post. I am continuing from my previous post My journey from 2004 to 2008.
These years were probably the most time consuming and hectic times in my life as I knew nothing of what I was getting into. During this time I was being an intern, owner, advisor, jury, studying, traveling and helping out other game companies. It all started with…

Agenius Interactive AS

Agenius was owned by my first mentor who was also my teacher when I was studying Game Development. Since he was familiar about my ambition, skills and drives he gave me an opportunity when I came back from UK after completing my bachelors. So, for the next year I learned a lot about Educational Games and game development start up.

QA Manager

I helped organize, set up and create questionnaire of our play testers. We would play test in our office building after working hours due to parents and kids being available after school hours. In other cases we would be allowed to play test in schools. These files needed to be organized, studies and used to iterate for the next play test and then the next play test after that.

3D

Occasionally we did some 3D work so I would create simple things such as animated 3D statistic.

Assistant Producer

At times we would require translators, 2d artist and other contractors in which I was responsible of locating, interviewing, managing and tracking.

Translator

Due to it being a educational language game I also did the base translation between English and Norwegian to help the translators speed up their work for French and Spanish.

Localization

I was responsible for ensuring the localization was correct and completed by the translators. That means I also was in charge of the XML list and Excel list that tracked and was used by the programmer to implement the words into the database in the game itself.

Game Design

I was responsible for doing minor adjustment to the game and ensuring its layout and design was good enough based on feedback from playtesting.

Content Developer

I was responsible for putting together the strict user manual required by Nintendo to become validated for the e-shop.

Summary

In short, in just a year I had the opportunity to learn several roles and be part of something very amazing due to picking the right mentor and opportunity for myself. What is important to remember is I did this unpaid for a whole year. I got about 25 dollars a day from the government that went into my bank account. They got about 100 dollars a month or something for having me. That is why I state that if you really want to make it you need to put in the work and hours. After this I decided to do multiple things but I will pick out that I did help another company also with advice, qa testing, marketing and was offered to be general manager of the company. However, the team had already burned out by that time. Below is the video of the game that was released before they went on to other things.

Yes, this was one of my first trailers that I put together.

FatCow Games AS

I eventually decided to build my own brand and start on my own. So for the next couple of years I tried many things, failed many times and had to learn how to be extrovert, negotiate, business and so on. So, these are some of the things roles I learned to perform.

CEO

I learned a bit about the responsibility and workload that comes with running a company and including other people into it. I learned about strategy, branding, marketing, finance, funding, pitching, public talking and much more. I was able to acquire funding on first attempt, try and build up department, do freelancing, complete a game and learn from all of this.

Producer

I learned more about being producer. I learned about planning, task management, risk, recruitment, interview, interpersonal relationship, communication, public talking, pitching and so on. I was able to hold talks, be in a jury and travel the world to learn from Square Enix, Sega, Nexon and so on. I learned to research trends and was one of the first onto Unity, iPhone and doing what people do today in social media.

Public Relations

I learned to manage the customers, clients and PR such as dealing with press release, press kit, interviews and social media. Dealing with publisher opportunities and so on.

Social Media Manager

I was one of the early adaptors of Content Marketing and understood Social Media and how it works. I built a community with engagement in which today I am friends with some of my own customers at the time. I was in charge of making sure the content was out there, engagement and so on. I was early adopter of facebook, twitter and so on.

Game Designer

I learned to play a lot of games and research what was trending. I studied psychology and learned how to create an addictive game. I was one of the first who took endless runner into a different angle by introducing endless jumping, powers, boss and a stronger theme.

Outsourcing Manager

I learned to build international small teams to developer and manage freelancing, local web design, game development and other bigger clients. I learned the hard way of spreading out thin too early.

Summary

In short I learned a lot, I did a lot of mistake and I failed a lot. During this time I probably lost projects worth around 1.2 million krone and lost over 12 staff members. My game was pirated over 112 000 copies. I had many hats and many other roles during this time. Below is my own video trailer of the game that I did manage to complete eventually.

I hope you enjoyed some of my key experience and moments during this time. Be sure to like, subscribe and watch my upcoming interview at Elderblaze for even more details. Lastly, if you need mentorship I do provide it. You can look me up in one of my social media if you want some.

Linkedin – https://www.linkedin.com/in/amitginni…​
Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/amitginnipat…​
Twitter – https://twitter.com/AmitGinni​
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Artstation – https://www.artstation.com/amitginni

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.

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