New Start...etc

Hi,

I've been pretty bad at posting anything here and by pretty bad I mean not for several months. A lot has happened in that time and most of my old views about the video game industry I no longer agree with. That is the point of a blog though. To state my opinion on something at the time and get other people's comments. The comments part has not been happening so far but hopefully by actually posting I'll get some attention at some point. Anyways.....

Over the summer I managed to get an internship through a family friend at a casual video game company. It was the best learning experience I have ever had. Learning how to be a producer is incredibly hard to do while in school. It is very much a hands on kind of job and the only real way to learn while in school is to make games. Making games is exactly what I got to do.

I was ready to get an internship where all I did all day was follow a producer around and basically do busy work. This was not the case at all. I was a full assistant producer on a game. The producer I was working under tried very hard to give me an entire section that I could work on during the seven weeks that I was there. The game I was working on was in pre-production and all of the sound had yet to be worked out. By the end of the internship I had set up all of the sound for pre-production. The game I was working on was the first at the company to use voice over and I had to work with the 3rd party sound design studio and the game designers to gather all of the information necessary. I got an initial estimate for voice over and then added it into the schedule so that the producer could move forward with it after I left. I also did a preliminary revision of the sound request form adding in all the new sound effects we would need.

All of the sound work was only half the work I did over the summer but I it was the most significant. Near the end of my internship I realized that I had really worked on a making a video game and there was tangible evidence of the work I did. It was one of the coolest experiences I've ever had.

All of the work I did over the summer was a great learning experience but also just simply working in a video game company gave me insights that would have been impossible to get otherwise. That is one of the main reasons I want to start writing here again. This will be an exercise in seeing what I now think compared to before my internship and just a general way to track my thoughts. In the future my posts will hopefully be less about me and more about opinions about other people and the video game industry. We'll see what happens.

Cyaz