National Graduate Recruiting Exhibition - Friday 6th
To further seek advice and make connections within the industry, a small group of us took a trip to the national graduate recruiting exhibition as we believed that even if no game development job was present, we would be able to find stands/ stalls relating to architecture.
Once we arrived in the main hall, we found very little in relation to the artistic side of industry although it did open my mind to a few new ideas. The vast majority of people there were attempting to less carriers in business management, engineering, fast food management and strangely enough, representatives for the ministry of defence were also present.
This brought up the point of 3D simulation for military training purposes. It may be slightly morally ambiguous but would provide great pay, job security and a 9 to 5 work hours which do not seem all to available in the games industry, especially as a junior artist.
I may move towards this although there is one major catch; to do so I will have to spent a substantial amount of time learning how to programme. Looking in to this, i found that Code Academy has just released a full course on Java script so i'll be at least starting to learn this over Christmas.
As I've already taken a HTML course on Code academy in the past, I can vouch for its quality. With this, i have already completed a few lessons to get to grips with the basics and have contact with multiple programmers that are willing to give me advice and review my work whenever needed.
Employability wise, having programming knowledge will help me greatly when it comes to job searching in the game industry as I could move towards creating shaders. This and being able to complete tasks on both the programming and artistic side would essentially let me take other either job role.
This is just a long term plan for the future but it couldn't hurt starting now. Even in the worst case scenario, it'll provide me with an insight of what a programmer would need from an artist and visa-versa, making it much easier to work in a mixed team of the two.
Overall, i don't believe this was a waste of time as it brought up the interesting point of military simulation that I thought was simply a pipe-dream from the best and brightest although now it seems like a much nicer goal to work towards.
Employability Talk - Aardvark swift game industry recruiter talk - Tuesday 3rd
I'm very undecided on how useful this talk was. For a programmer it would have been magnificent, with a run-down of how to approach an employer, what they would be looking for in a new hire and greatly emphasised that we create a few levels of a game to showcase our skills. At this stage I got slightly confused over what side it was pointed towards. It seemed to be aimed towards programmers although it sounds like quite a good idea for an artist too, an entirely possible task for a one man team.
Most of the information provided had already been covered within our lectures with Robert Berry so there wasn't all too much extra that could be covered. I believe we all already understood the importance in taking part in level and asset design contests as even the runner ups can be given employment opportunities if their work is showcased on websites such as Polycount.
My only issue with these contests is that they take place during university time, making it impossible to compete without downgrading your marked work in the process.
All in all, it functioned quite a nice pep-talk and removed a lot of my doubts when it came to direction although i still dont believe it was very focused towards the artistic side of computer games.
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