How I got into the Games Industry
A small recap of events starting from I decided I wanted to be a games developer to present day including all the mistakes and turning points along the way.
Young and lazy
During A-levels, I started to get really lazy at school and more or less went through a rebel phrase where I honestly didn’t care about anything let alone my future and just wanted to have fun with my friends. So, when it came filling in the UCAS form (UK University forms), I really didn’t know what to put in and I didn’t talk to my parents about it. The deadline loomed so I literally made a snap decision that I wanted to do something with computers since they interested me somewhat.
How to be a Games Tester
This is a commonly asked question with surprisingly little resources for information available. There are a few sites such as Only4Gamers which will provides information on testing and a list of jobs that are available for a membership fee. However, similar information is already readily available freely but is just scattered across several sites. I am writing the this article to consolidate all the freely available information into one place so aspiring testers do not have to resort to paying for information, that in my opinion should be free.
Playing games for money? Awesome, right?
Games Testing is sometimes referred to as ‘Getting paid to play games’ and from that, it sounds like an awesome job. After all, most (if not all) aspiring testers play games every day, why not get paid to play them? The reason is because the quote is wrong, testers are not being paid to play games, they are being paid to test them and that is the crucial difference. Playing games involves choosing the games you want to play and playing them the way you want to play. Games testing involve neither of these. Testers are assigned games to test and will need to play the games according to test scripts. To give a real life example, the article ‘Testing Video Games Can’t Possibly Be Hardware Than an Afternoon With Xbox’ describes a tester’s short experience on the job at Volt. The article doesn’t exactly paint a pretty picture. Games testing is effectively the minimal wage job of the games industry and the turnover of staff is the largest out of all departments in development. People get promoted, leave on their accord, get fired or are made redundant. Whatever you do, don’t expect to get rich just ‘playing’ games via games testing.
So You Want to be a Game Designer?
Just been linked to this today and I think it is a great video in what it takes to be a games designer in the industry. It be a rude awakening for many budding designers as in my experience, they think it just it is about creating ideas and games.
The reality is that only forms a tiny part of the role and the rest is about communicating that idea and vision to the rest of the team and making it a reality.
Enjoy!
(Source: escapistmagazine.com)
Just finished my online showcase refresh!
You can find it at www.stevenyau.co.uk! My old one was getting outdated as I made that in 2006 when I graduated from my MSc.
For the refresh, I used the Weightshift Personal Page and a CSS3 Generator and I think it turned out pretty well :).
Not sure about some of the images and photos though so I might change them at some point.
My new Portfolio »
Finally got round to updating my online portfolio again. My last upgrade didn’t quite hit the mark for me. A step in the right direction but it still didn’t feel presentable or something I was proud of showing.
After looking at some student’s portfolios and some inspiration from the the Update Conference site, I set myself a challenge on making a single page site and here is the result.
The layout and colour scheme is much nicer and I used Initialiser 2 as a base for some jQuery work.
Getting back into the Game
As some of you know, I recently changed jobs from WMS Gaming to Playfish UK and as I wrote about my reasons for leaving the games industry, I thought it be interesting to write about why and how I came back.
