Campaignjunkie

No, you missed my point: the "imagine if it were the other way around" doesn't work, because people like me and women actually suffer for this in really real ways. Like, is someone going to recite Anita's rhetoric while attacking you on the street?

As a gay man, I've never done this, because if I look at a dude the "wrong way" (or if they even think I am) then that dude or maybe even COMPLETE STRANGERS might beat me up or kill me for being gay. In fact, whenever I'm walking around on the street, I look over my shoulder every now and then because I'm afraid someone is going to hurt me for being gay. As straight men, do you ever do this? Do you ever occasionally live in mortal fear because you're a straight dude? Did you know that the women in your life have probably felt similar fears at some point? Men staring at them nonstop. Men flashing their genitals at them. Men getting angry if women don't even acknowledge them. Men thinking they "deserve" a woman's attention. Men groping them on public transit... and women never saying anything because men will think they are "overreacting." Do you even have women in your life who you can ask about this? If you don't, it might be because you're one of those men, because you have the gall to think "me being afraid to walk outside" is a liberal gay agenda feminist tumblr conspiracy? Yeah brilliant conspiracy wow!!!! So you might have to forgive someone when they're upset that Red Dead Redemption specifically gives you a special achievement / encouragement for getting a woman NPC run-over by a train, and sometimes the woman doesn't protest at all and she's turned-on by the fact that you're murdering her? The worry is NOT that you're going to start murdering women; the worry is that you'll be 1% more likely to treat women as punchlines, the worry is that you'll bring it up at after-work happy hour and you'll all laugh about killing women and the sole woman on the level design team will start coming up with excuses not to go to another happy hour. The worry is that you'll be 0.2% more likely to be an unprofessional asshole. Also: if you are a game developer and you've dedicated your life to making games because you love them so much, yet you say games don't affect anyone at all, then you are lacking basic self-awareness. Look in the mirror. As devs, we can do anything in video games... space magic, lava dragons... how about also a fantasy world where men *don't* get a special achievement for killing virtual women? Let's try that. It'll be a fun creative exercise.

working on an homage to "The Garden of Forking Paths"

I think you need to sell that time travel transition a lot better, especially if that's your main conceit here... apply screen overlay, add a quick screen fade, etc. right now it's just a straight-up teleport that almost looks like a bug with how sudden it is... I'm not saying to make it into a 60 second Final Fantasy summon sequence, but, you know, at least make it juicier.

Oh, hmm... one thing I try to stress really hard is pushing back vs. workaholic crunch culture. I mandate breaks every hour during class, and I tell them not to spend 8 hours a day on their games. To some extent, I suppose this makes them less "employable", but I think less-crunch is the way the game industry is moving (especially re: tech industry's concern over work/life balance), at least in the US where it's a big problem.

Thanks everyone for feedback so far, seems like "learn how to talk and listen" is pretty high up there heh Technical or motivational? Either. Or both.

hey everyone what up I teach undergrads in game development, and we're trying to make university-level games education into something that's (A) arts-oriented but "not-shite" and (B) not-mainly-industry-oriented (Guildhall, Digipen, etc. already exist and serve that role, to me) ... we're trying to make generalists, modder types more than hyper-specialized types... self-learning self-directed people who can design AND produce entire games themselves? like, we're happy if our students go into AAA, but we also want the other 90% of students (let's be honest) to be able to transfer their education and skills into something else too so I'm wondering if any of you have any thoughts on what skills or concepts that are crucial for any designer or dev to develop? skills that you can't just pick-up from a tutorial? skills that are useful for things outside of games too? - WHAT HELPS YOU DESIGN THINGS / MAKE STUFF? - what should I make students practice doing? - or what, in your mind, are today's game schools neglecting to teach? here's some stuff that's on my mind: - practice sketching before working digitally - practice naming files and folders, organizing projects - practice preparing builds and showing your work to people - practice presenting your work / talking about your work - practice packaging / distributing your work

hey, if anyone is interested in this, let me know, I can try to put in a word for you... this is probably good more for people on the Producer / Consultant / PR sides of things... keep in mind it's part-time so you probably can't buy a house with this, but it might be a good step to help you shift careers or move to NYC or whatever POST IS HERE: http://gamecenter.nyu.edu/2014/03/seeking-an-industry-liaison The NYU Game Center seeks a dynamic and enterprising individual to consult with our team as an Industry Liaison. The Industry Liaison will spearhead our efforts to create partnerships with the game industry along a number of fronts. The primary areas of focus for the Industry Liaison include: - Establishing partnerships with local, national, and international game companies. - Leveraging these partnerships for support of the Game Center’s events and initiatives. - Identifying high net worth individuals to become potential donors and partners with the Game Center. The Industry Liaison will work directly with our staff and faculty, including the Director, to identify, negotiate, and grow possible partnerships. These partnerships might include sponsorships for our event series, donations of hardware, software, or capital, industry-sponsored student scholarships, industry-focused research activities, etc. The Industry Liaison is an ongoing, part-time consulting position. The ideal candidate: - Has experience working in relevant sectors of the game industry. - Has worked in some combination of fundraising, public relations, or strategic planning. - Is a dynamic person with great communication skills and the ability to close a deal. - Possesses a passion for games and their future as a creative art form. The NYU Game Center advances the study of games as a form of culture at Tisch School of the Arts in New York City. The Game Center is housed at the Department of Game Design, and includes an MFA in Game Design degree program, a range of game courses for graduates and undergraduates at NYU, and a busy schedule of events focused on the design and scholarship of games. Please send a resume and cover letter to: kevin.spain@nyu.edu. The NYU Game Center is an equal opportunity employer.

US STORE PLEASE? US STORE PLEASE? US STORE PLEASE?

I would consider making the dish (or bowl?) have less sides / more angular / more faceted, maybe 8 sides at most? so it catches light in a more interesting way, and so you can read the depth of it better? I think it works in tc_hydro because the bowl is so huge, but here it's like a small depression and its function isn't immediately apparent... actually, yeah, just make the dish like 10 times bigger

What do you mean by this? The teal walls in C1A0 were 160 units tall, and I think the hallways were 192 units wide, and those proportions vs. player eye height, to me, felt really "right", but I don't know if it's intentional or just the result of the wall textures being 160 units tall? It's unclear why they had all these weird texture sizes for everything. Presumably to save texture memory, which they were really worried about? (That's why all the HL1 NPC models use like 15 different BMPs) I remember in mid HL1 mapping days there was a weird trick where you use 240x240 textures and then scale up by 1.067 to reduce geometry splits and wpoly, but then people started noticing how blurry the results were, and turns out the textures were getting downscaled to 128x128 to upload to the GPU... Though really, anything that isn't power of 2 or is > 256 just gets rescaled to the nearest power of 2 anyway, at least in non-software renderers... and now I'm rambling sorry

Glad LWM is useful to people. I usually just build off the grid sometimes... it's really not that big of a deal. I think it's the proportions that ruin everything, real-life human spaces rarely come in cubic volumes. I ran into this in BMS with doing Anomalous Materials. At first I did everything in 128 / 64 unit increments, but it felt really wrong. Valve had the right idea with 160 unit tall walls, it really adds something.

Working on a small Porco Rosso flight sim game designed for VR... it's about looking around, so it had to be an open cockpit game, so... Porco Rosso. It's called "Nostrum." Currently a finalist in the Oculus VR jam, cross your knuckles for me!

Yeah, don't over-think it, especially so early.

hey, just want to shill for someone else's HL2 mod called "From Earth" -- it's a first person Mirror's Edge parkour-ish mod, with a crafting-puzzle system and a sci-fi narrative. it's not far from AAA tendencies, but it's also pretty fresh, which I think is where a lot of Mapcorians want to be. now: they need env artists / level designers, and I think especially TF2 / CS:GO designers who want to dip their toes into single player design should really jump onto this -- this team knows what they're doing. they're a really great team that is strong in coding, character modeling, and animation... those are traditionally the hardest roles to recruit for, and they already have that stuff locked down. this is also a team that knows what they're doing -- they've finished 2 pretty big single player mods with new code / mechanics (Human Error / Water) they are also doing everything right -- they have a bunch of core gameplay implemented and prototyped, and they're iterating in the right places. the thing already feels pretty solid. this is a mod project that will almost definitely get finished, and they won't waste your time, and you'll end up making some great work. (I would totally help out if I had time, but I don't... but at the same time, I don't want this opportunity to get wasted, so I'm vouching for them in this awkward way.)