Friday, April 30, 2010

Game² is reborn, first project on the way!

I’m currently studying Game Development at a public university here in Brazil. I already knew that the education system here in Brazil wasn’t all that great, but I had no idea it would actually have an effect on my graduation process. I’ll explain:

Since education in Brazil is a far cry from what you’d expect from an emergent country, most teenagers make their way through high school with little knowledge from what a computer can actually do besides browsing the internet and listening to music and how it came to be. And of course, they don’t learn it at home in their senior year’s vacation time. So they reach college with the same flaws. Of course the government figured that out eventually, they’re not exactly dumb, just lazy. They care about results, which means throwing people out university doors with graduation papers in their hands, ready to work, so instead of fixing the system’s problem the right way, also known as the slow way, they said “Ah, screw it!” and did it the quick way. The quick way involves taking one of the three years of a technologist course and turning it into a prep course. I won’t go into too much detail about what they should’ve done, because that’s not the focus here. So…

My first year of college is almost everything I learned during my computer technical course I did in high school. Of course, you do eventually learn a couple things, but most classes are about stuff I generally already know. Which makes it boring and nearly useless to attend to, but in order to advance I must show up so I do. So, to crack the boringness of time and to do something I want to I decided to create a voluntary cooperative group of game development. We’re really just a bunch of kids with a lot of will and nearly no knowledge, so I decided to use that will to something useful. We’re going to learn the skills by ourselves and apply it by ourselves, it’s bound to fail, but that’s the beauty of it. The people who can’t handle failure, will simply drop out and the people who I can trust will stay and learn with me and we’re gonna make great games.

It’s a bit ambitious, but I like it better that way, we’re bound not to accomplish everything we thrive for, but aiming high is enough to do a good amount of things.

I created the project and there’s about 20 people in it, including me. We decided to work on a 3D project for our first one, it’s kind of crazy, but I strangely believe each and everyone in the team, it’s entirely up to them to destroy that trust and belief, though I rather they didn’t, some are obviously going to.

We decided it would be a Survival Horror game, I already set the setting and we have a prototype of the story, it’s currently in the works for a better version. I managed to come up with a good portion of the combat system and atmosphere.

I’m Game Designer and Project Coordinator. It’s nice to be working on something I love. Some people are already leaving, some are joining, it’s a good cycle. I finally have something to exercise what I know about videogames.

I’m pretty pumped for it. It’s also much easier than actually managing to land a job at Ubisoft or EA, specially in Brazil. Some update are bound to come now. Stay tuned!

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Let's try to stay positive, huh? After all I don't get out there yelling trash about you at the top of my lungs, do I? Don't be a troll and post a constructive complaint, if you must!