It's an odd feeling getting older

On drives back and forth from Burlington to home, I think about a lot of things... today was no different. As I approach my 22nd birthday it's really sort of weird to see the "adult" (if that's what you can call it) I've become. This Thanksgiving when asked stories of my life and how things were going, I gave up tales of friendships made in townships in South Africa and talked about how busy life is for me working on three gaming projects. It's hard to think that not too long ago I was in High School, and I wouldn't believe anyone if they told me that I'd be able to do what I've been able to do in the past four years. It's sort of funny this sort of paradox that I have with myself, I like to think I keep becoming wiser. Reflecting on the past I think, "If only I was that knowledgeable then." Many people probably feel this but fail to realize that they will think that about themselves in the present in maybe a month's time. So maybe it's good to realize that we're never as wise as we might think we are... Ugh sorry about that rant... Anyways I just can't help but think of this last phase of my life, the friend's I've made and memories created here... I can't see where I'll be a year from now, but I'll most definitely look back at this busiest part of my life (thus far) and as hard as it is right now, I'll look back and smile... and I'll miss it.

Vicarious Visions

Ok, so I don't have very long to blog but I felt the need to blog quickly about my experience meeting two incredibly interesting people from Vicarious Visions. This pretty much was the topping on an already pretty incredible week, but I can't help but be so excited about what they are doing at Vicarious Visions. The most attracting factor is just the work environment in general, it really seems as though they have gone out of their way to make it pretty exceptional. They actually encourage their employees to have a life outside of the office, crazy idea! It sounds as though it's fairly easy to move around the company internally depending on your interests, and that's the other thing... They recognize that there are really two different kinds of people, those who can focus solely on that one thing and be really good at it and those who have varied interests and good communications skills. That is so exciting because I had become increasingly nervous that I may not be able to enter the industry based solely on my art and that if I did they may not care that I have other skills and it may be difficult to move to a more communication based position, where I think I might do my best work in the future. Also they look for people with leadership potential, which my background is riddled with. Also they aren't in a huge city, which is incredibly appealing to me, they are located in Albany NY. To top it off they consider people right out of college! UGH! I probably shouldn't be getting this excited but it's really awesome to hear about a such an incredible working environment, when I've heard so many horror stories of how it might be working for a typical AAA gaming company. I was getting a little nervous that my future might just be consumed with more work and not much of an actual life. Well the future may not be as bleak =)

Check them out at www.vvisions.com

It feels like it may not be a bad fit, and so I'm very hopeful about hearing more in the future.

Ghost of Wes's Future... MIGS Post Mortem

It's pretty hard to start debriefing about the Montreal International Game Summit... I had the opportunity to talk to some great people, see some great sessions, and so have quite a bit of new thoughts you can imagine. I really wanted to go through each session here, day by day, and give my two cents but really I think I'm going to be a bit more vague then I was originally intending and just go through my two days in Montreal...

I think I have to start with talking about my epic journey to MIGS, no I'm not referring to the packed yellow school bus ride up there, I'm actually talking about the next morning. Mike Fowler and I (dressed to look good, not necessarily for warmth) were following some of our classmates to MIGS when they decided that they were going to take the Metro. Yet we didn't have any Canadian money and so we thought we couldn't buy tickets (later we found that there are ATMs down in the subway stations). So they gave us a couple of simple directions and we were off. And so we walked... and walked... and walked... and inevitably got a little lost. It was a pretty cold and windy morning in Montreal, and when we thought it couldn't get much worse... it started to snow... This wasn't exactly how I was planning on spending my first morning at MIGS, with a little luck, and a lot of backtracking, we did find our way to MIGS and in time for the first key note.

Warren Spector's key note was most definitely an inspiration! After starting on the UN project, and with working on CIMIT I can't help but be intrigued and ultimately end up working games with moral meaning and inevitably games for social change. With Spector advocating that games need meaning, it was just such a great way to start this conference for me.

I was very excited about the next session that I went to with Jason Mitchel from Valve, who gave a talk about "Connecting game play to Visuals," which is something I'm working intimately with on our Senior production game. Any lecture that starts with the Presenter opening with "Ravenous Zombies," you know your in the right place =) I most certainly got some interesting ideas out of this conversation on how to increase the tension of the level that I'm currently working on, and I hoping these are things that I can hopefully implement. Mitchel touched upon two games from Valve, "Team Fortress 2" and "Left 4 Dead." I was pretty interested in hearing more about the unique style of TF2, and after hearing their artist influence I now know why I found this style so appealing. One of their major artistic influences came from Normal Rockwell, who was really my first favorite artist, an odd choice maybe but ugh! Love his work! To think that people are using these sorts of influences in the world of video games is just so cool! Left 4 Dead seems to be a pretty awesome game as well, as much as scary games do just that to me, I think I may have to check it out!

I followed Jason Mitchel into a panel discussion afterwards about "Alternative Stylization," which was really a neat sort of thing to be involved with. In the panel we were able to really get into some conversations with industry professionals about what exactly do they think about key topics and design decisions. Really my take away from this one was an interesting part of the conversation in which it was argued that with less detail in character design, the more association the player can make with their avatar. Which is awesome, not only because I believe in this but also I've been advocating this point for our artistic direction in our UN Concept!

After a... unique oriental lunch with items that I'm still unsure about, I sat in on a lecture given by Laura Fryer, A Microsoft Executive Producer who's most title was Gears of War 2. I couldn't help but love this talk as well, beyond her wonderful "puppy" slides, some of the key points she gave about team management are things that I've implemented since I was a Peer Mentor Sophomore year. Leslie Averil would be proud! Really, without using this term, Fryer discussed the importants of Servant Leadership! Ugh! Which I totally agree with, as the leader you need to be the "catalyst" for the rest of the group. I couldn't help but envy her a little... More and more I'm seeing that I'm very much interested in Producer/Creative Director positions, which are extremely difficult to come by.

The next couple of sessions were equally as interesting, Chris Doran's "Engineering mood and Atmosphere with Light" (which definitely gave me some more ideas for our Senior Game), David Lightbown's "Under the Surface," and Randy Smith's Games are Art, and What to do about it." Smith's talk was pretty animated and fun, and I definitely like the direction of what it seems that a lot of industry professionals are headed.

After dinner, at a place with more things on the menu that I recognized, a bunch of us hit up the Microsoft-Ubisoft Party. This was pretty awesome, but a really hard environment to actually meet people in. It was a pretty small bar, packed with people, loud music, and dark lighting... not really conducive to networking to say the least. Yet I was able to have a pretty great one-on-one conversation with Laura Fryer who gave the key note earlier that day. It was so interesting to hear more of her perspective of not only her job but her work in general and how she got to where she is today. She also gave me some pointers about my talk for the next day, the key one being to NOT vision the audience naked... Unfortunately she didn't have any business cards to give me, so I kind of struck out there as I'd really enjoy talking to her further about her position. I was able to meet a few others that night, one specifically from Mystic Entertainment which may prove to be extremely interesting.

After a long walk, on what still seems to be a bum ankle from our "adventure" from that morning, we returned to our hostel... my comfy half-bed, and I crashed for the evening, knowing that tomorrow would be my turn to speak.

The next morning Mike and I woke up early to hit up a Tim Horton's for breakfast, which was considerably better than my quarter of a muffin and half a hot chocolate I bummed off of a friend the day before for breakfast. Let me just say that this first key note was AWESOME! Cheryl Olson and Lawrence Kutner (from Mass. General Hospital) have been doing research on the possible negative effects of video games, and what impact really does it have on the user. Dr. Kutner made some great correlations between Paperback novels, to Gangster Movies, to Comic Books, to Television Violence, and how much the public all thought they would corrupt the youth and how this sort of stereotyped view is no different today for video games. They gave some pretty hard evidence showing that players, even young players, make the distinction between the real world and the virtual one. Knowing that some of these simulated actions aren't necessarily ones that should be performed in real life. I found this to be great, but at the same time concerning... are we arguing that Video Games have no effect? So I approached them afterwards and asked what they thought about Serious Games and Games for Social Change? Is it possible to make a positive difference even though we argue that games aren't making negative impacts? Is this hypocritical? No, after a pretty interesting and brief conversation Dr. Kutner responded that he very much believed in the impact that Serious games have the potential of having, and that if anything they can be more effective on the user experience then violent media might be suggested. I'm not going to lie, I forget some of his supporting evidence but it was still inspiring nonetheless.

Afterwards I attended Ben Mattes' "Evolution of a Unique Artistic Direction," where he proposed the question "Does a game need to look real in order for it to be beautiful?" Mattes proposes that it doesn't and walked us through some of the design decisions for the Prince of Persia game... one with an artistic direction I wasn't completely sold on... until I saw a bit more. I truly think this may be the new wave of innovative video game creation, we've proved that we can almost match photo-realism, we can pump an engine with shaders, and yet ironically it's not eye catching to our audience. Our audiences is looking to escape to a surreal world (at times), and if we can give them just that... well we have something truly special. Ironically enough after this and a session with Reid Schneider on the "Army of Two Post Mortem," (both of which given by producers) couldn't help but reinforce my feeling of how right a position like being a producer might be for me in the future.

I didn't get much of a lunch this time, for I was meeting with Brian, Heather Conover, and Ann to discuss our presentation to be given later that day. Ironically enough some of my nerves had begun to shake off me, at least mentally anyways... my bowels were telling me a different story haha. I was pretty excited though, and confident because in this arena (while yes we are still very much students in a sense and learning) we were professionals, and I couldn't wait to engage with other professionals about our pretty large... "Problem." After this meeting there was a great key note given by David Braben, talking about how can we plan for the future of video game development. While that was all well and good, I couldn't help but be keenly interested in their rapid prototyping model that his company has been using to develop ideas for working titles. Sounds a lot like things that Lauren and I have thought of since Learning 2007, and to see it implemented seems like a very viable solution maybe for wherever I may work in the future.

I wasn't able to attend any more sessions, as I was tied up in a press interview and then it was time for our presentation. While I was hoping for a larger turnout, yet there was a plethora of interesting designers from many AAA Game Companies. It actually was a pretty awesome session, only because ours was so interactive and the fact that our audience were actually engaged in the discussions we were hoping for. It was also fun to see designers from studios like Ubisoft working with a designer from A2M, or maybe it was EA to be honest I'm not exactly sure but still was awesome nonetheless.

From here was one last key note speaker with Jonathan Blow, who gave a talk on the "Fundamental Conflict in Contemporary Game Design." He had some really interesting points about gaming and the inherent meaning behind certain game mechanics, and most definitely some interesting positions on narration in video games. While I could see where he was coming from, there were a few things that I disagreed with when it comes to narration and video games... yet he's the professional =P

After probably the best pizza I've had in.... well a long time, I went to the Gama 3D party which was organized by our very good friend Heather Kelly (who's been working with us on the UN project if I hadn't mentioned that before). This was a blast! I really sort of laid back atmosphere and some pretty revolutionary games using some interesting tool sets. There was this one awesome block game (which I can't remember at the moment but will be sure to find it and link something more about it here), in which took a pretty simple game of trying to fit a shape to a hole, and utilized head tracking so you could actually look and peer around the block you were rotating to fit. I'm sure this description doesn't do it justice, but it was pretty spectacular. At the party I was able to meet someone who was actually at our session earlier that day named Thomas Anderson, who's an animator at A2M. He was so awesome to talk to, because he runs into the same problem that I've had for a while now... I'm not just interested in art, I have a broad range of interests from design, to producing, and other major aspects of a project. It was really cool to talk to another artist who thought sort of the same way I do. I hoping to talk to him some more, if not to possibly get some help getting a foothold somewhere in the industry, to at least get to know more about what his job is really like and maybe what I should be expecting for the future... if I have future that is. UGH! It's so very scary to be a Senior right now! I don't have much time to worry about this though.

Anyways I have many, many more thoughts on my experiences in Montreal and some thoughts and concerns for me and my future, but for now I think I must end this. This was my experience in Montreal at a glance, and even though I know this was pretty dense... it's been condensed haha.

It's late now though so G'Night All!

MIGS!

So this will be pretty short, really I just wanted to post up some renders of the "Exile's Hut" for Lauren and my senior team project game.

I'm pretty excited to go to Montreal later today for MIGS, anyone who's going up there be sure to check out my session on Wednesday 4-5 pm called Turning Tides: A Game to Combat Gender Violence, with Ann, Heather C, Heather K, Brian, and me! It's pretty crazy to see my bio is put up on a site with a list of speakers who have done some pretty crazy things in the industry. Getting a little nervous but still really excited to hopefully make some great contacts for my near future. Anyways wish me luck and if your in Montreal see you soon!

I'm in a hurry to get things done

Life still has me running all over the place. I've fallen into a routine, and depending on the day it changes a little but it mostly goes with waking up, going to work, going to school, going back to work, a little more work once I get home, trying to relax a little before bed, and repeat. At times it feels monotonous, I lose track of days, and without weekends anymore things just seem to blend together. People ask how I'm doing and sometimes the best I can come up with is a status update on all of the stuff that I'm working on. It's all I think about, it's pretty much all I do, but I'm pretty happy. Working on new projects, texturing new objects, or seeing projects move forward excite me. It's all I got right now, that might sound a little pathetic but mostly everything I work on right now feels pretty worth while.

Sometimes it's really hard... It's hard to keep up with everything, switch from one project to the next, and to keep my head straight (Please note, this doesnt not by any means imply that I would rather be on one project right now or that I'd like to be taken off of one. Just stating it's complexities). It's hard to hear that I should be learning new things, exploring new areas, and investing my time in researching new methods that no one else in my classes are trying. I'm not saying that any of these things are bad, but when your investing all of your time and your told that you should be giving more... I'm nervous that I'm reaching my breaking point. Lauren and I have been pretty ambitious with our game concept, but I wouldn't want it to be anything less with us. I'm just not sure how feasible it will be if I try to split more of my time away from generating art and focus more on trying to find new methods. I'm hoping if I can get through this next environment pretty quickly, I'll be able to have the time to do the polish work. It's hard having your artwork be compared with Riven or Exile, when I just don't have the time or the resources to make it to that quality... but I'm trying. I think this all is very good experience nonetheless, it may feel hard but it'll make me stronger for it in the long run. Perhaps it will make it easier for me to handle so many things at once with a potential job in the future, this sort of crazed multi-tasking that I've got going for me right now. I don't think I've ever looked forward to Christmas break more than I do this year... the thought of having a couple weeks, even weekends for a little while will be great. Anyways, CIMIT is looking to go through some more mechanics revisions in the near future. I've taken a more designer role on the projects which is sort of interesting but I'm excited. UNFPA I've taken more of a managerial role right now, trying to get my group nailed down, my designers to possibly work a little more effectively, trying to find a good character direction with my co-artist, and all the while doing possible interface concepts. In Lauren and my game I've started working on another environment, which I'm pretty excited about. The renders already are looking pretty decent so I'm hopeful for it.

Next week will be extremely exciting/hectic for me as well, as I'll be headed up to the Montreal International Game Summit!! I'm so excited after reading some of the key note session descriptions, it's such a weird feeling heading to a conference that's actually on games this time around haha. Actually I'm really excited about this one talk about mood with lighting, hopefully it will help me with our production game. Another exciting piece is that I'll actually be speaking at MIGS!!!! I couldn't be more excited, but also I couldn't be more nervous haha! I've spoke in front of thousands of others in the past, but none of them I really considered potential employers! I hope I do well, but luckily I'll be joined by Ann, Heather, and Brian! This is such a huge opportunity, that I'm still just in awe of it a little. I actually ran around trying to get business cards printed up, and even bought myself a URL wesknee.com I haven't had the time to actually build the website, so I have a pretty bad placeholder up there for now and people can access my resume. Which is a pretty good thing I think. On the flip side I can't help but think of what work I may miss due to MIGS, but I'll figure it all out and get it all done.

I think that's all that's going on with me right now, I'd like to post a new render of what I'm working on right now but I think I want to finish some of the textures first =)