Speaking of other forms of internet communication, let’s talk about email.  Specifically, about emails you send to try and get a job.  There are a few things we’ve seen at the office recently that seem like they should be obvious, but apparently need to be repeated.

1.  When sending an email, spell your name correctly in the subject line.  I felt bad for this guy–he did everything else pretty right, but obviously was at the point where he’d typed the same thing so many times it didn’t look like a real word anymore.  He had spelled his name one way in his resume and the body of the email, but it was spelled wrong in the subject.  Typing fatigue for sure.

2.  When sending an email, try to spell things correctly. People in the industry do often have notoriously bad spelling, but when you’re applying you should make it as easy as possible for the person reading your email to understand it.  When we have to puzzle out spellings of words it doesn’t endear you to us.

3.  Don’t send out mass-emails. Yes, you’re applying to a lot of places.  We understand that.  But for the love of corndogs, don’t leave fifty emails in the “to” line on your application.  We can see those. When the “to” field of the email is longer than the email itself, it’s unprofessional.  It also makes us laugh a lot.  Do yourself a favor.  Email all those companies separately, and try to tailor your cover letter to each company.  It will make you look much more professional and appealing.

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In completely different news, I wrote my very first knitting pattern and published it online!  It’s for socks.  For all four of you people who read this and like knitting, here is the pattern.

TwinkleTwinkleLittleSocks

If you do knit it, please let me know!  I’d be excited to see it.

Also, here is some eye candy of yarn I dyed myself.

Purple hand-dyed yarn.

It was a lot of fun to do!

Games start with a GDD, or Game Design Document.  Games that do not start with a GDD are pretty much doomed to fail, because they will have no concrete guidance on what game they are making.  The GDD contains story and character information, but it also contains much more than that.  A GDD will describe what genre the game falls into.  It will describe gameplay decisions and the consequences of those decisions.  It will describe character movement, enemy types, weapons, and puzzles.  It will contain descriptions of the levels, and the actions the player will need to perform in order to progress through said levels.  A GDD is the game, albeit in a 2-d, non-interactive form.

GDDs are important for both the developer and the publisher.  They’re used to pitch games to publishers, so both parties understand exactly what kind of game is being discussed.  The GDD will of course be amended and altered over the course of the project, but it’s still a very vital starting point.

The GDD for Grim Fandango can actually be downloaded in PDF form from here.  It’s worth a read for aspiring designers.

Now that that is out of the way…

On a previous post, Robert asked:

So, I have a question pertaining to 3-D modeling.  For the purposes of my portfolio, I’m wondering how high-res my pieces should be?  I frequently find myself creating models that are shaped very well, but they have a rather large poly count. So, I guess the underlying question here is whether it is more impressive in a portfolio to see very high poly count models with good texture or to see lower poly count models with textures that just give the appearance of higher resolution?  (Keeping in mind that my painting/drawing skills are rather poor at present so the textures are a definite weakness for me right now)

This is a good question, and the answer is almost always, “It depends.”  As a general guideline, you should never put more geometry into a model than is absolutely necessary to create the shape you want.  If you’re making a cube, that cube only needs to be 6 polygons.  A cube that is 600 polygons is ridiculous, because you really only need 6 in order to make the cube look like a cube.  The more complex the object you’re creating, the more polygons you’ll probably need to make it look right.  If you have a set budget for polygons, use them where you’ll get the most bang for your buck.  People won’t care if a door is made up of six polygons, but they’ll notice if the doorknob is blocky and unrealistic.  Have a look at the wireframe on one of my meshes:

This is a fairly high-poly mesh, but I spent those polys where it would show.  If those curves were choppy and blocky, the mesh would just look bad.  Since I spent the polygons on those important parts, the blocky headboard and footboard can be very simple.

Generally, it’s more impressive to see a lower-poly model that looks good than a ridiculously high-poly model.  Anyone can throw extra polygons at a mesh to make it look smoother, but it’s much harder to serve modeling steak on a hamburger budget and it shows more skill.  Texturing is also really important–if you model really well but you can’t texture for poo, you’ll probably have a very hard time getting hired.  There really aren’t separate modeling and texturing positions in most companies–3-D artists do both, so good skills in both areas are pretty necessary for the job.

Thanks for the question!  I hope this was helpful.

But mostly I’m excited about the new fridge.

Anyway, a few days ago commenter Chandler asked a couple of questions:

how much time would you say is spent testing the games you’re working on compared to actually working on modeling and stuff for them? What kinds of things do you look for specifically as a graphic designer when testing?

I’d also maybe like to hear more about the outsourcing of modeling you mentioned… how severe is it, and how do you feel about it?

How much time I end up testing really depends on how far along in the project we are.  If we’re still in full production, I don’t test really at all because I’m busy creating assets.  In the early stages, there’s not much point in playtesting because there are no completed levels.  The later it gets into production, the more levels there are to test and the more we’ll end up playtesting them.  Since the art tasks tend to be finished before the design tasks, it naturally falls to the art team to pick up more playtesting as the project progresses.

When I playtest, I’m actually not looking for things from an artist’s perspective!  I’m checking to make sure the game works.  We playtest to ensure the levels can be completed and that there are no major bugs that are either reeeaaally noticeable or stop the player from proceeding.  I’ll see a lot of art issues, of course, but that’s not the point of the playtest.  The point of playtesting is to make sure there are no places where the player gets stuck on collision, trapped in a wall or falls out of the world.

Outsourcing can be an issue, but not always.  The thing about outsourcing is that it can be really helpful in dynamically scaling your art team size.  You don’t usually save money on a per-asset basis, but you can essentially hire 30 extra artists for a month to crank out a bunch of stuff for your project, and then not have to find the money to keep those 30 extra artists around for several years.  Outsourcing is really only useful for characters and non-essential props for the most part.  If you try and outsource things like a wall system or a catwalk system you’ll end up wasting loads and loads of time getting the outsourcing team to tweak those assets to your specifications.  It’s much more efficient to keep important assets like that inside the company, where the turnaround time is 15 minutes.  The further outside the company you go, the longer the turnaround time is.  A 12-hour turnaround time for revisions really adds up if an asset needs more than one tweak!

The other thing about outsourcing is it needn’t be outside the country.  There are outsourcing firms in the US.  We sometimes work with a Seattle outsourcing company.  Outsourcing companies can be a great way for artists to get experience, too!  You might not get a job with a game studio, but working as a 3-d artist at an outsourcing company will get you into the industry.  I personally don’t feel threatened by outsourcing, because a studio is always going to need some in-house artists to ensure quality and quick turn-around.

Thanks for the questions, Chandler!

Re: Minigames.

Minigames can be great.  They can break up a lot of the same gameplay and add interest and re-playability to a title.  However, when you want to add a minigame, consider whether the minigame you are adding uses any of the skills that your player will have built up over the course of the game, or whether it uses the skills that would be built up in a completely different title.  Maybe don’t add minigames with gameplay elements completely alien to the title you’re working on.

An example:  My boyfriend is currently playing Blue Dragon, a JRPG of the old guard.  Turn-based, with fighters, healers, black mages, and monks.  Occasionally, though, the designers decided to break up the gameplay with minigames.  Some of these build off skills you already have (like the escort mission–probably the least annoying escort mission ever).  Others require something that is pretty much never required in a JRPG–reflexes.  I don’t know about other people, but I play JRPGs partially because they don’t require me to aim at anything or have hairtrigger reflexes.  At one point in Blue Dragon, you are required to pass a punishingly hard shooting gallery minigame in order to progress through the game.  My boyfriend has much better reflexes than I do, but it still took him three tries and a whole lot of swearing.  It was very nearly a ragequit moment.  I was just sitting there going, “Who thought this was a good idea?  People who play JRPGs don’t expect this kind of shit!  What the hell is this shooting game doing in my JRPG?”

So, to sum up:  Consider the kind of people who will be playing your game, and ask yourself, “Will these people like this minigame?  Or will they wish death upon my family when they encounter it?”  Please, don’t make me wish death upon your family.  It takes so much energy.

Don’t get me wrong, I love anime.  I love it dearly.  I cosplay as my favorite characters, watch it regularly and go to anime conventions.  But I don’t draw it anymore, because it completely destroyed my ability to look at a model and see the actual proportions present there.  Instead, I would draw everything with anime proportions.  I really shouldn’t have to point out why this is a problem.

If you like anime, that’s fine!  Great!  I like it too!  But I stopped drawing it, and so should you!  Especially if it’s the only thing you draw.  Stop.  Go take a figure drawing class, and really pay attention.  Draw from life.  Learn anatomy and proportion.  Learn to shade things so they actually look real, rather than cel-shaded.  Learn to draw what you see, not what you think you see.  When you can do this, then, if you want to, go back to drawing anime.  Your art will have drastically improved, trust me.  You’ll be drawing anime out of choice, rather than out of necessity.

So stop it.  Stop drawing anime.  Do it for your own good.

When this happens, hobbies are what will save your sanity.  I really recommend having a couple of hobbies outside of work that are as far removed from video games as possible.  If you make video games all day, and then come home and play video games all night, that’s a lot of time with a console or computer.  There’s nothing wrong with that if you enjoy it, but for me personally, sometimes the last thing I want to do after a day of playtesting is play another game, even one that isn’t broken.  There are also some serious health problems that can result from a sedentary lifestyle, as well as the repetitive stress injuries that come hand-in-hand with a lot of computer use.  (Ask me how I know.  Tennis elbow.  FROM MOUSING.)

Personally, the two hobbies outside of work that keep me sane are knitting and yoga.  Knitting because it’s a creative endeavor that at the same time requires none of the tools I use at work, and yoga because it is about as far from sitting in front of a screen as it is possible to be.

The things that I like about knitting are somewhat telling.  It’s creative and lets me use my art skills when it comes to designing a garment or settling on a color scheme.  It’s also something that I can control completely from start to finish.  Nothing randomly glitches and crashes when you’re knitting.  It’s impossible to have a corrupted save file with knitting.  It’s portable, so I can do it on the bus, at home, or at a tea shop.  I don’t have to play super-close attention to it, so I can do it while I’m watching TV or holding a conversation.  I don’t have to make a special time for knitting the way I have to for drawing.  I can pick up knitting and start right where I left off without wandering all over the map trying to figure out what the hell I was supposed to do.  (Final Fantasy III on the DS, I’m looking at you.)  And when I’m done knitting something, I have a finished product that doesn’t need to be submitted to any companies or be approved by any publishers.  It’s mine, and I made it the way I wanted.

Yoga, on the other hand, requires me to actually pay attention to my body and nothing else for an hour.  It makes me move in hundreds of ways that I don’t at work.  There are poses and exercises that stretch the Perpetual Mouse Muscle Knot that lives in my right shoulder blade.  I do yoga because I know that what I do for a living can be extremely damaging to my body in a lot of ways, and yoga is a way to counteract that.  Also, it has brought me a lot closer to being able to touch my toes when I bend over, and that’s a serious accomplishment for someone with hamstrings like mine!

Whatever you do in the industry, remember to have a life outside of it.  It’s much healthier for everyone.

Where should I go to school if I want to make video games?

In the US, there are pretty much two schools specifically for game design that are worth the money.  Digipen in Seattle, and the Guild Hall in Dallas.  If you graduate from one of these schools, you are pretty much guarateed a job.  Most of Digipen’s students are hired before they even graduate.  (The Portal team?  Poached wholesale by Valve from Digipen.)  That is, of course…  IF you graduate.  Both schools have a pretty hardcore schedule and will work you hard, harder than you will probably end up working in the industry.  Digipen has many students drop out in the first six months because they just can’t handle it.

What if you don’t live in Dallas or Seattle, though?  (Well, move.  You’re going to have to move to Dallas, Seattle or Southern California to get a job in the industry anyway, so keep that in mind.)  Maybe you have some kind of school near you that offers a game design course, of you’re looking at the Art Institute of Whatever City You Live In.  The first thing you want to look at is price. Many game design courses are expensive and you need to know if they’re worth the money beforehand.  Ask about how many graduates of the course have been hired, and where.  Post on a place like CGChat and see if anyone has heard of the program or attended it and what they thought.  These programs can be useful in teaching you new skills, or a total waste of money.

If you’re looking to be an artist, consider getting a traditional fine-arts degree and learning 3-d in your spare time or in continuing education classes.  A strong background in fine arts and 2-d work will translate to a stronger portfolio and better 3-d work.  One of the major benefits of this approach is you can go to school where ever is close, even start out at a community college, and spend a lot less money in the long run.

Want to be a programmer?  Find a college with a decent computer science program and take that.  You don’t need to learn game-specific programming, C++ will do.  Get your hands on the Unreal Editor or something similar and learn to work with it and modify it in your spare time.  If you have solid programming skills, a studio is likely to work with you to get you familiar with the engine they use and any specialized coding required.  Everyone has to start somewhere.

If you want to be a game designer?  Well, that one’s tricky.  There aren’t that many classes out there that teach you how to really design systems.  There’s a lot more to design than just having an awesome idea.  That idea needs to work properly, it needs to work with other ideas and it needs to have rules governing how it works.  There aren’t classes for that kind of thing, it’s something learned as you go.  The best advice I’ve heard on this one?  Design your own board game. Make a board, invent the rules, and then get your friends to play it and tell you what they think.  Get lots of people to play it.  Ask them if it’s fun, and specifically what makes it fun.  Ask them what problems they had with it.  After you get all their feedback, take it into consideration and change the game to make it better.  That’s what designers do.  They come up with ideas and then design systems to make the ideas work correctly.  Schools, sadly, lack good programs that teach these things, so if you want to learn them, you have to teach yourself.

Good luck, and where ever you end up going to school, remember to do your homework!

8:30AM Head to the bus stop.  Knit while waiting for and riding the bus.

9:00AM Arrive at work.  Clear out email from the week of being home sick with swine flu.

9:30AM Get started on a modeled floor system for use by the level designers.  This essentially requires the creation of a whole lot of flat planes in specific dimensions, with collision (so the player won’t fall through) and specific unwraps so the materials will tile properly.

10:30AM Team meeting about the current project.

11:00AM  Team meeting finished.  Back to work on that floor system.

12:00PM Go out for some “Hurrah!  I don’t have swine flu anymore!” ramen with a friend.

1:00PM Arrive back at the office.  Discuss the finer points of PAX with a co-worker.

1:30PM  Back to work on the floor system.  Duplicate, move points, unwrap, collapse, unwrap again, collapse again, repeat.

3:30PM A co-worker announces that a tour bus has managed to get itself stuck on the hill outside the office.  Head to the window to look.  Indeed it has, and now a tow truck is pulling it back up the hill, causing some very large gouges in the asphalt as it does so.  We hoped the bus would try to make the turn again after building up some steam this time, but no such luck.

3:45PM Back to work on the floor system.  Most people won’t tell you that this kind of modeling is probably 70% of a 3-D artist’s work.  Everyone likes to think they’ll get to model awesome steampunk shit, but that can be outsourced if it’s just decorative.  The actual, meat-and-potatoes pieces that make up the gameplay space are too important to be outsourced, though, so people like me get to do them.  And then the awesome steampunk stuff gets all the attention.

5:45PM Finish the first pass on the floor system.  Hurrah!  Shut things down and head home.

6:15PM  Arrive home.

7:00PM Make dinner.  Homemade mac and cheese, nom nom nom.

7:30PM  Blog.

8:00PM ???

8:30PM  Profit!

Damn my professionalism.

Anyway, let’s say that you’re an artist, and you’ve been applying to studios for a while but you haven’t heard anything back.  What are you doing wrong?  What can you do to improve your chances?

1.  Take a good, hard look at your portfolio.  Is it up to industry standards? If you can’t tell whether or not your portfolio is up to snuff, ask for advice and feedback from others online.  I have seen people apply and apply and apply with modeling skills that are poor and texturing skills that are nonexistent.  If your work isn’t good enough, you will just not be hired.  There is nothing wrong with admitting you’re bad at something and choosing to do something else.  I don’t mean give up, I mean know your limits.  I originally wanted to be an animator.  I wanted to work for Pixar!  I had grand dreams of bringing characters to life.  Then it turned out that I really, really suck at animating.  I didn’t like it, I didn’t find it rewarding and I was bad at it.  I decided then and there that animation wasn’t for me, and that I would focus on 3-d modeling instead.  I’ve never looked back.

2.  Start getting your name out there in places other than your application.  There are a lot of excellent forums for digital art.  Pick a distinctive username and start posting.  Give feedback on other posters’ work and seek feedback on your own.  Participate in contests.  Get your work associated with your username and use that username everywhere.  Industry professionals post on those boards, too, and there’s a possibility the next time you apply someone will say, “Hey, that’s FizzTheCarbonated’s work.  She’s always friendly and helpful on the CGChat forums.  We should bring her in.”

3.  Take another look at your website.  If it’s clunky, uses outdated technology and is hard to navigate, your work might be rejected before it’s even seen.  You might not be applying for a web design position, but your website is a reflection on your art.  It needs to be easy to navigate and attractive, or you might get rejected out of hand.

4.  Don’t be picky!  I know people who didn’t want to work for a studio where they wouldn’t get to do fantasy art, or people who only wanted to do character modeling.  When you’re just starting out, you really can’t be choosy about what jobs you want to take.  My philosophy was, “If I get a job modeling cardboard boxes, I will model the best damn cardboard boxes I can!”  (I have, to date, modeled over 15 different forms of cardboard boxes.)  Once you have some skills and experience under your belt, you’re going to be in a much better place when it comes to seeking your dream job.

5.  Type professionally on your website and resume, and in any professional emails to a studio.  Once you’re hired, you can pretty much throw grammar to the wind (but please…  Don’t.  Please.) but when you’re seeking an interview you need to be as easy to understand as possible.  You want these people to give you a job, so treat them with respect.  Once you know them you can be more informal, but leave the text abbreviations and l33tspeak out when you’re jobseeking.  This should go without saying, but some people still screw it up.

That’s it for today!  I can ignore the siren call of the 360 no longer.  I think I’ll call her Vera.