Friday's Post on Blitz

So Friday I went to Blitz Games for the day and they gave all of use a mug each! Which is great because I wasn't expecting to come back with any prizes.



Obviously I had to sign an NDA and if you have been reading my blog for a while you know that I will honor it entirely, but I can still tell you anything that has already been press released or is public knowledge. And make the rest of this post sound as if it is giving you some inside information.

Blitz Games is an independent developer. This means that they are a development house for hire and that means they have to compete against other developers to get contracts for most of the games they develop. Hence why most of their games are franchised titles. The company is split into three main devisions, Blitz who are family game orientated, Volatile who deal with mature games and TruSim which produces (or will produce) serious games for training purposes. And all divisions use the same set of internally developed Middleware Tools. Which obviously cuts down on cost, but their middleware is one of the few tool-sets which is cross-platform. This obviously gives them an advantage when it comes to creating games on multiple platforms and the games benefit because there is going to be little to no difference between the different versions.

Anyway the future looks bright for Blitz in general because their work creating such classics as Barbie's Horse Adventures (which is one of the few child friendly XBox titles) is allowing them to push forwards into other projects like Reservoir Dogs which is obviously based on the film, but allows the player to play through the action that was not seen in the film and Possession which allows players to control hordes or Zombies.

I had a great time on Friday and learned a lot.
Blitz is still talking Applications for future open days so if you feel inclined towards a career in the video games industry and are a UK University student I can highly recommend applying.

Open Day Invite

I got an Open Day invite to a Blitz Games open day. Which I didn't think I would get in because the cutoff day for being confirmed was today and I hadn't hared anything. So that's good news.

It's not for a while and I am not sure what kind of NDA they might want me to agree to or wither they will simply ask for me not to talk about some stuff, but I will let you know how it goes.

Submitted Level Design

So I ended up submitting a level design to Blitz Games. Not sure if it will get me in to an open day placement, but my design is of sound conceptual design. Apparently I should hear something by the 19th. Will keep you posted.

Blitz Games Open Day

I just got an email from Blitz Games telling me that I am being considered for a chance to look around their offices (and from then on maybe the chance of a job), but first they want to see some evidence of work by the 9th. With that is an email address to send work to and details of what they want to see from the different professions they are interested in.

I certainly cannot for-fill the 2D Art, 3D Art, Audio or Animation requirements, but under the Programmer requirement they want to see a simple arcade game with a special effect. Although I could probably produce something brilliant by the end of the month after conducting some serious study, I do not believe this is doable by the 9th. No, not even with the power of .Net as 3D is completely new to me, although I will be looking at 3D now that uni is over, I just want expecting this to be on the cards so soon.
Under the Designer requirement they want level designs. I have designed many games in my little black design books and a few games that run on my final year project. My lecturers where even visibly impressed when I told them of the improvements I had made in my games as I had progressed from one to another, but I haven't ever produced such a document before. Although considering the sheer number of games that I have played over the years and my knowledge and ideas of gametheory I could probably bang something out by then.

So tomorrow I am either going to be designing a level for Barbie's Horse Adventure or going to crack-open the 3D programming stuff again and give it a fair old go. It doesn't however seem like Blitz they are interested in hiring a diversity of people and this makes me question if they are the kind of company I want to work for as their hiring strategy seems more about fitting pegs into wholes. They have probably ended up highering like this both because of the number of applications they recieve and the fact that most people are only in the industry for five years. Still this identifies two cultural issues with the company. They struggle to keep people and don't look to higher people with other skills that they could use.

Need texture, you draw? Draw now. Hmmm good texture.