Games Design Courses – Are they worth it?

Disclaimer: Everything here is of my own opinion and do not necessarily represent any other party’s views.

Note: When I refer to game developers, this means I am referring to everyone involved in the development of the game such as programmers, artists, producers, designers, etc.

There has been increasingly more enquires about becoming a games developer in forums related to games careers such as the ones on IGDA and GameCareerGuide. As much as I am happy that more and more people are interested in entering the games industry, the majority of these are asking on how they become a games designer and which games design course should they choose because they naturally see it as the best way to get into the industry. After all, if you want to be a plumber, you do a plumbing course. So if you want to be games designer, you do a games design course, right?

If only it was that simple.

I made this!

Finally, I actually get to say this after waiting for it to be publicly announced: Here is a video on Harry Potter – The Half Blood Prince Potions game which I was primary working on during development of the game, enjoy!

Fundfax Fairraiser

“Perhaps you remember Marissa, a 19 month old baby girl who was diagnosed with Infantile Spasms when she was a mere two months old. Her stuffed bunny Fairfax travels the world, sharing not only Marissa’s story but also spreading awareness of the serious paediatric epileptic condition that she, and other young children, suffer from. Approximately eight months ago we pulled together for a community project titled Fairfax ‘n’ the Chief in honour of her father (who is a fellow Halo fanatic). Today I’m proud to announce The Fundfax Fairraiser, a very special fundraising effort that will benefit sweet baby Marissa and those that are helping her through this very difficult fight.”

New article added – How to be a Games Tester

Read it here. Comments and feedback welcome.

Why I think Metacritic shouldn’t be used as a yard stick

The popularity of Metacritic has grown over the last couple of years as a yard stick to measure the quality of one product to another. The premise is fine, after all what better way to judge the quality of a product then average of the scores from all the reviews for it? However, the problem I have is that the sources for the reviews are not consistent from product to product and because of this, Metacritic scores can be heavily skewed depending on which review sources are included.

This is because not every reviewer works on the same relative scale so while one may perceive 5/10 as average, another may think 7/10. Therefore, comparing two products against each on Metacritic scores alone can be grossly unfair if the review sources for each product are different.

I am not completely dismissing Metacritic as it is still a great source for the consumer to get a rough idea of a product’s quality and also provides a list of review sources to read through, but when an industry starts using it as a target (e.g this must get at least 80% Metacritic), then it can easily become more of ‘Who are we going to get to review this’ rather then focusing on increasing the quality or concentrating on the target audience.