{"id":1062,"date":"2012-01-23T08:45:14","date_gmt":"2012-01-22T22:45:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brnz.org\/hbr\/?p=1062"},"modified":"2012-01-23T08:45:14","modified_gmt":"2012-01-22T22:45:14","slug":"getting-into-gamedev-aka-career-motivational-speaker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brnz.org\/hbr\/?p=1062","title":{"rendered":"Getting into gamedev [aka Career Motivational Speaker]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Before departing Tasmania, I visited several high schools where I talked about getting into a career in gamedev. That was the premise, at least — I really talked more about what you can do to get a job doing what you like. Lots of high school students like games and I was getting ready to move for a gamedev job, so it was a good hook.<\/p>\n

The opportunity came about from a conversation (with a high school student) about my upcoming move, what I was doing and how it had come about, and about what part of my experience was relevant to his own. The conversation was had while the Pathway Planning Officer for a local school was nearby, and she invited me to the school to talk to some of the students there.<\/p>\n

The problem then became how to turn a spontaneous conversation into something sufficiently well-prepared and engaging that I could talk to a room of teenagers for up to an hour. I enjoy presenting to\/speaking with groups, particularly on topics that I’m passionate about, but I have little experience talking to teenagers and was somewhat uncertain about what I’d need to do to get and keep their attention. I like to keep presentations interactive and flexible — I’d rather talk about what interests the listeners than about my own prepared material. For that reason, I don’t tend to use slides and try to be interesting, engaging and memorable all on my own. (there’s always a risk leaving out something “important” — but as there’s always far more material than I can cover in a single presentation, if the audience has been interested it’s probably a nett win :P)<\/p>\n

For all my desire to keep it free-flowing and interactive, to give a talk without a clear idea of what I want to talk about and how it fits together in a coherent and plausible manner, I’m going to struggle to impart any useful information\/knowledge to the students that have so generously taken time out from their Social Science class (or whatever). It’s hard to evoke passion without passion. I find it easier to convey my excitement and passion for something when I’m well prepared to talk about it.<\/p>\n

I did some reading in preparation of the talk to make sure that I wouldn’t be talking nonsense. While I was about to start in the industry, I had not worked in the industry. While I didn’t think I had many incorrect preconceptions or invalid assumptions about the industry (who would?), my lack of experience was one thing that cropped up repeatedly through recent job applications. I thought it appropriate to do my best to make sure what I had to say would be generally useful.<\/p>\n

I read what I could find, but a couple of sites stood out in particular: there’s a lot of the great advice on tinysubversions.com<\/a>, particularly the material on\u00a0effective networking in the games industry<\/a>. \u00a0Linked from there, I found a link to a list of\u00a0New Year’s Resolutions for Game Industry Newbies (or people who want to eventually be one)<\/a>, \u00a0which I basically ripped off to form the core of my presentation (many thanks to Chris Hecker and Jonathan Blow for the list).<\/p>\n

Here’s an outline of what I talked about:<\/p>\n