Monthly Archives: June 2014

[Video] Career Advice to Students: Become someone who people want to work with.

Posted on by • Posted in Outreach • Tagged , , , , • Leave a comment

I gave a lot of talks at the UA GameDev Club when I was in college, but few were as good as this one. I gave this talk in the Fall of 2013, and the advice that I had to share came from the dozens of resources that I’ve read over the years, as well as my own experience in recruiting for projects and working as an intern at Microsoft.

The video player below is set to start playing at the beginning of the talk (so about 20 minutes into the recording), and the talk is about 40 minutes long.

If you want to learn more about how to get into the games industry, here are some super awesome resources that you should check out:

Good luck!

Tom Siddell’s Gunnerkrigg Court

Posted on by • Posted in Port of Exchange • Leave a comment

My friends and I have recently started a blog called Port of Exchange, and it’s basically a place for us to share cool stuff with each other. At the time of this writing, so far we’ve posted about TV shows, comic books, nonfiction, and even classical music. I figured it’d be cool to at least link to my articles on that site.

Gunnerkrigg-Court-Vol-2

Today I want to introduce you to a webcomic that has managed to become one of my many all-time favorite works of fiction: Gunnerkrigg Court by Tom Siddell.

Continue reading →

Magnet Ball Mega-Postmortem: How Learning on-the-fly Saved an Ambitious Student Project

Posted on by • Posted in **Popular Articles**, Game Design, My Game Projects, Postmortems, Project Management • Tagged , , , , , , , , • Leave a comment

basic gameplay

The following is my honors thesis, which is a research paper that I had to write in order to graduate with Honors from the University of Arizona. I had published the first two parts of this paper on my previous blog, but I have never published the full work until now. While I did try to adapt the tone of the paper to be more fitting for online reading, the paper is mostly unmodified, aside from a few major additions made to part four.

I’m going to warn you now; this paper is LONG. One of the goals when I was writing this was to show enough detail so that students who wish to try running a project like this could learn from our process and our mistakes. This project was a ton of fun, and I hope you’ll have fun reading about it.

Table of Contents

  1. Intro
    1. Abstract
    2. The Team
    3. Introduction
  2. PART ONE: Recruiting and Managing People
    1. Starting the Project
    2. Designing the Team Experience
    3. The Recruitment Process
    4. Unfortunately, Our Team was Too Big
    5. Availability and Communication Problems
  3. PART TWO: The Senses Project
    1. A Broken Pre-Production Phase
    2. The First Prototype
    3. The Second Prototype
    4. Turning the Project Around
  4. PART THREE: Pre-Production Done Right
    1. Fixing our Creative Process
    2. Rapid Prototyping and the Creative Process
    3. The Fruits of Pre-Production
    4. Prototype 1: Fighting Blind
    5. Prototype 2: Detonator
    6. Prototype 3: Particle Racer
    7. Prototype 4: Runner
    8. Prototype 5: Magnet Man
    9. Prototype 5, v2: Magnet Ball
  5. PART FOUR: Prototyping until the Bitter End
    1. Our Creative Process during Production
    2. Our Development Process during Production
    3. Thoughts on the Prototype-Centered Process
    4. Things I Would Do Differently
    5. In Conclusion

Continue reading →

Start your Engines!

Posted on by • Posted in Announcements • Tagged , , • Leave a comment

starting_line

Hello, and welcome to my new blog!

Superheroes in Racecars is now my second attempt at blogging. My first attempt was a little collection of articles called Livio’s Gaming Blog, which I started three years ago. Unfortunately, it was difficult to keep the blog updated while also attending university. Having just graduated last month, I think it’s time I got back into blogging, especially since there are so many topics that I’ve been itching to write about during the last couple of years.

Looking back, I find that my first blog was way too serious sometimes. I remember having had the explicit goal of making that blog be more about content than about myself, and while my constant strive for quality was definitely one of the strong points of that blog, it kinda gave it a weird personality that I’m just not satisfied with anymore. With this new blog, I’m looking forward to using a more casual and “bloggy” tone—one where every post doesn’t have to be a giant article that explores a topic at great depth. I’ll probably still write those kinds of articles from time to time, though, but they (hopefully) won’t be the norm.

I’m personally really looking forward to writing about a larger variety of topics. Rather than strictly focusing on game design and development, I also plan to talk about programming, education, career advice, community management, other fields of art and entertainment, and much more. As the title of the blog suggests, Superheroes in Racecars will probably still end up being mostly about games and entertainment in one form or another. And I think the title also reflects my affinity towards children’s entertainment, since this field is often more imaginative and lighthearted than other fields of entertainment.

Anyway, I hope to create some good reads on this blog, so wish me luck!