i've created life!

Today I decided to branch out a little bit and play with some electronics. I lack any and all relevant knowledge or experience so I started very small. I picked up a basic soldering toolkit and a kit to build a "Game of Life" made up of some LED's placed on a circuit board.

The game of life is a simple programming trick that let's you see how individual cells live and die depending upon their proximity to other live cells. The cells are represented by the 4x4 grid of LED's that are provided in the kit that I used. You can see them there lying on the desk.


The first step was to insert the resistors. There was 16 that came with the set. Every one had to bent like a staple and threaded through pairs of tiny holes.


I found it very efficient to insert them as a bundle, soldering the connections and trimming the extra all at one time.


The chip fixture was the hardest to do by far. I think there were at least 16 tiny pins that I needed to solder.


My weapon of choice.


Time to add the lights!


A little bit of juice...


And viola! I've created life.


The action in real-time.

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want to get hired? here's some advice from some random guy!

Okay, so the last eight months of my life were spent searching for that perfect job in the games industry, you know, any job. If you've tried seeking industry positions this past year, you might know just how frustrating a process this can be. The economy is improving at a snail's pace and it's not like we're getting any younger here.

That being said, I feel like I've honed my job searching process down to its essentials and I'm happy to share some of the more successful elements with any person who is desperately seeking employment like myself.

So, you're seeking employment and you don't know where to start? Some suggestions:

Some kind of work to show off... Okay, this is an easy one: if you want to find a job somewhere, get crackin'! The more work you get under your belt, the more impressive you'll seem to potential employers and the more confident you will feel in your own abilities. If you don't know what to do, find a game that you like with a freely available development kit and start making content. Even better, find a mod team; nothing tells a prospective employer that you know how to work on a team better than real team experience. The more of a contribution you can make to a project, the better. Your prospective employers will want to know what you did to add to your project, and you want to legitimately tell them quite a bit.

Somewhere to show off that work... Online portfolios are an absolute must for aspiring game design professionals. Not only does a portfolio site give you a chance to present your hard work, they are a great way to get your name out as well. If you are working with a limited budget, use a free site like wordpress.com or blogger.com. If you need utmost control of your portfolio (like me) and don't mind spending a few bucks every month, you can find reliable web hosting fairly easily. I use hostgator.com and I'm totally happy with it. You're going to need to know html and css to make a decent site, though you can learn the bulk of it from w3schools.com, at least enough to make a functional site.

Regarding the portfolio's content, make sure to include:

• Your relevant work in a format that is easy to parse through
• A detailed written description of all of your contributions to your work (I am complimented on this regularly, it surprised me just how much companies love these things)
• Pictures of everything. Pictures are easy to take and easy to post, and as the old saying goes, "Pics or it didn't happen."
• If you've got the time to do it, take a video of your work using a program like FRAPS and upload it to youtube. If the video's quality is high enough, it gives your portfolio an extra special edge over the competition.
• Your resume, in a format that is readable online and in a format that is downloadable.
• Your contact info, as much of it as you can think to post.

Shameless plug here, if you would like some examples you can visit my site at kylehadley.com.

Companies to work for... This is a surprisingly challenging one: you need work and you need it now, with hundreds of companies operating in the United States alone there should not be a problem finding something somewhere. It's just that, what companies are there and how do you know if they're hiring? gamedevmap.com is the most comprehensive listing of game developers I've ever seen; if there's a company that's selling games for profit, you can find it here. I used the site to make up a spreadsheet of eligible companies, and then checked each company individually to ensure that they were a company that I could conceivably work for. I think my own personal list is made up of some 200 developers or so. Check each and every one of their websites to see if they are hiring or accepting applications. Apply to each and every one that is seeking, and make sure to keep track of whom you applied to work and when (that will save you the trouble of remembering a few months down the road when you need to send out more applications). Websites like gamasutra.com will show job listings, just keep in mind that half a million other people are applying to those same positions.

A decent resume... This is something I can't help with, there are many approaches to making a resume and I don't know how to tell if one is really better than another. You can visit my website at kylehadley.com to see my own, though I recommend using some online help if you need to know exactly what to include.

A decent cover letter... So now you're emailing your resume to the companies you like, and you want to really stand out. Unless you plan on trying something wacky and zany (which I highly do not recommend), you will want to make your impression with your cover letter. Some things to remember when writing your cover letter:

• Keep it short. I cannot stress this enough, these guys get several dozen if not hundreds of applications each month, there's no way you're going to get noticed if your letter is too long. I'm speaking from experience, the improvement that I witnessed from shortening my letter from 750 words (LONG!) to 450 words was ridiculous. Just stick to the facts, tell them a few things that you couldn't cover in the resume, why you like them, what you think you can do for them, etc. Don't repeat things from the resume unless you think they really need stressing.
• Link to your portfolio. Since we're living in the digital age and we're applying to gaming companies, I'm assuming that you're sending everything via email. Make sure to link to your portfolio at least once in the letter, if not twice. I use two links in my own letter, one in the first paragraph (in case they're merely skimming and want to get to the good stuff), and one in the last. I saw four times as many hits when using this approach as I did from my old, too long letter.
• Again, list all of your relevant contact info.
• Try finding the hiring director's name and email address, and make sure to use it in the letter that you send them. If the studio has a phone number, try giving them a call; sometimes they will refuse to give you the contact info you need, sometimes they won't. And for the love of god, spell the name correctly!

Keep track of who's keeping track of you... Scouting is key when you're job searching. Knowing who is viewing your portfolio and when is the first step in refining your application process. If you send out twenty apps and you get a couple of hits, you know you need a new approach. If you switch things up and see that traffic has doubled or tripled, you know you're on the right track! statcounter.com is a marvelous tool for saving your portfolio's traffic stats. Quite a few of the companies that give your site a quick viewing will show up in your pageload history by name, and other's will show up as hits from specific cities (this is helpful is you get a hit from Topeka the day after you applied to that company in Topeka).

Prepare, prepare, prepare for your interview... Learn as much as you can regarding the company interviewing you. Know their relevant history, their games, their development practices (read their blogs to get a good idea of the way they work and think), etc. Write it down. Write down questions for them, they'll know you're serious if you make the interview a two way thing. Make a list of relevant games you've played, know why you want to work for that company, keep a concise history of your development as a designer in your head to recite to them, and make sure to give yourself some time to relax and feel ready for it. Since so many companies are located in other cities, you'll most likely go through a couple of phone interviews prior to the in-person interview. This is a long process sometimes, so prepare to spend a month or more interviewing with one company. If you sent out enough applications, you will most likely have at least two or three companies interviewing you at one time, if you're prepared and lucky.

Get the job... Okay, this is the one that I can't really help you with. When I get to that point, I will make sure to report back with my findings!

I hope this helps you guys who are finding yourselves dumbstruck and clueless, I know I was there just a year or two ago. It's easy to get in the flow of things once you've put in the effort, and by that time I think it's safe to say that the job search can feel exciting and fairly rewarding, even if you don't get every job you apply to.

So, happy hunting!

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a new website is up

It was pointed out to me earlier today that I haven't updated my blog in quite some time. I think my updated website makes up for it. I threw in all the bells and whistles, and since I'm still a novice I can only assume I threw in a few handfuls of bugs as well!

Please, give it a look if you haven't seen my portfolio yet.

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pax could not have possibly happened a year ago

It's that time of year again: PAX is happening in two days and the Spiral Game Studios ambassadors and I are gearing up to represent Orion. There's a lot of potential for growth as a developer over these three days, and as such I am doing my utmost to prepare for the event. That being said, I still feel woefully unprepared as I busy myself cramming every last gadget and piece of electronic equipment into a bag.

It's my second year, and I still feel like I haven't properly planned for the event. I'm more grounded this year than I was last year, I know what to expect. Rachael and I are planning on hitting the larger panels (the keynote, the Q&A, D&D with Wil Wheaton) as well as spending adequate amounts of time on the expo floor. I'm going to try to make my way upstairs a few times for the sake of Magic the Gathering with friends and there's no way in hell I'm missing Jonathan Coulton again this year.

Seeing as how I plan on spending so much time in line with my fellow gamer this year, I thought I'd spice things up a bit. My laptop is coming with me as are my Xbox 360 controllers and a wireless receiver. I packed that thing with every last good NES, SNES, and N64 game I could find and I even spent the night setting up controller configurations for specific games. This means that the time spent waiting in line will now be spent playing Mario Kart and Goldeneye instead... Yea, life IS sweet!

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a sneak peak

...at something coming soon.

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experimental building concepts

I sat down and drew up a few concepts for possible future buildings for use in-game. They are pretty basic, but they depict a couple versions of a similar setup: two separate buildings that are connected by an elevated walkway.

The first picture shows a smaller building with an inset room for player spawning, etc., as well as stairs leading up to an elevated walkway. This is a more basic setup and it's nothing too crazy.



The second is my favorite of the two. It's a similar idea, two medium-sized cylindrical buildings that are connected via two passageways. The first is the blue passageway that runs underground. The green walkway is on the higher level, and it runs parallel to the first passage. Since there is a gap between the two passages, that means that players can run between them on the ground level. I like this layout personally since it allows for so many varied ways for teams to attack each other, and it's a bit more visually interesting.

Enough progress for me today, I need to catch up on this sleep thing I've heard so much about.

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fresh work!

It's good to be able to post some work again. I've had quite a bit of work these past few months and it breaks my heart to say that there's really nothing that I'm allowed to talk about, leaving just a few trickles of things that I do on the side for me to post on. That's enough of that, though, I'm taking the time to educate myself with new techniques on a new engine. These screens are from a scene I whipped up using the Unreal Development Kit. I'm learning development of it as a bit of a side experiment right now but I must say I'm loving every bit of it so far.

The engine itself is far more powerful than anything else I've used, and the interface is a million times more intuitive than other traditional approaches. The scripting utility Kismet allows someone like me with absolutely zero programming knowledge to set up mundane triggered events with little effort, complex sequenced events, or even entire map parameters with a sleek and simple GUI. The engine itself is updated constantly, and the most recent iteration of it has given me some cool new effects for outdoor scenes.

Keep in mind that this scene I whipped up took me a just a few hours and this was my first attempt, so it's far from perfect, it's just a little something fun I had a chance to do.

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learning to do my own concept work

I'm working with a team of artists right now to generate content for the maps I'll be working on. The people on our team our very skilled artists and I've found that my own skills are, well, lacking! I'm trying to create a setting with a bit of an industrial feel, albeit whatever industry would look like four hundred years from now. With that I've come up with a few drawings I wanted to share for fun.



I think that it's extremely important for anyone interested in level design to try their hand at working on art in some form. When you think of it, level design really is nothing more than applied art; it's a way to guide the player through a visually interesting gameplay experience. Likewise, I think every game artist should give design a shot, to get a strong feel for how their assets will work in a more practical setting. It's this cross discipline training that I think helps to bring a team together, especially if everyone feels like their partners are taking the extra step to better understand their work.

I'm posting a few of my sketches for fun, and to let people who don't know what goes into making game see what some of the more crucial initial steps look like. Enjoy!

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a look at catchment

My last seven months or so have been spent developing content for Orion, an ambitious total conversion for HL2's Orange Box Engine. The mod itself is a fast-paced multiplayer game set on the fictional world of Orion, which is a fertile world that is reminiscent of an infant-earth. The multiple maps in the soon-to-be-released 1.2 patch will feature a number of locations across the planet; all of them a scene of the great conflict between the humans looking to Orion as a chance to escape their used-up, wasted planet earth, and the alien Altair who are similarly trying to escape a ruined home world.

The map I spent my time working on is called Catchment, and it takes place inside a water purification plant for one of the larger colonies on Orion. The Altair know that if they can disrupt or destroy this facility, they can effectively make refugees of dozens of thousands of humans and offset the human military's strategy in a major way.



The team spawns and flags are located at 3 and 9 o clock, and 12 and 6 o clock respectively. Each team has two routes out of their spawn: one main exit and one shortcut to their own flag which can be shut down via a clever keypad hack. Each flag room is accessible through two side entrances, or a shorter entrance that is only available to the assault class. A few pipes are placed higher up to let the assault class get a height advantage. There are choke points for support class defenders and more defensible positions for snipers to do their thing.

I hope you guys like it!

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tooling around with the unreal development kit

For fun I thought I'd try my hand at the Unreal Development Kit, a FAR, far superior editor to the Source SDK (sorry Valve, but it's true). The UDK comes loaded with a few textures and static meshes (models essentially) and a light version of Unreal Tournament 3 to test your creations with.

This was just a couple of days of effort last week and I have to say that I was blown away by what the editor was capable of doing:

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