Blog | Philo Stuff

March 30, 2015 by Philo

ETH game and SGDA work

No theory lessons today, horray
Instead we met up and worked on our ETH game.

The evening was spent mostely on SGDA organisation things aka Fantasy Basel and Swiss Online Marketing tasks

Edit: Totally forgot to mention the awesome First Strike infographics that came out today! I had the pleasure to work on them during my internship and they have been tweaked and released now. Take a look at it: First Strike, year one in numbers

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March 28, 2015 by Philo

Freedom!

The Workshop is OVER! In a dance of joy I left the school building and headed home. Take a look at the boring boring device that came up with in this torturous week. There are still a few things I learned though. More in the psychological than in the design corner but what ever.
Here goes: As a teacher never ever feel you’re something better than your students. Even if you try to act all cool and hide it, we can smell your attitude from 1000 miles away. Don’t treat us like we’re in a happy go lucky state of our lifes and have no idea of what it actually means to work for our money. Also, don’t be unprepared for your lessons. Every minute you’re blabbering nonsense because you don’t know what to do next is a wast of all our time. Avoid blabbering in general please.
The week is over now and I left my feedback so time to move on to more interesting tasks

I realized that I missed drawing/painting a lot. Will start doing it more frecently again now
Here’s another quick sketch (took about 50 minutes). The topic was “Swan princess”

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March 27, 2015 by Philo

A painty lunch break & Niche research all night

Workshop. Again. Picture. No ranting.

During lunch break some game design students met up for their weekly drawing session with the common topic. The whole thing was Steffis idea and she’s giving us great advice while doodeling. The topic this week was “Fish Rider”. This is what I came up with, my first painting in AGES:

Back home I felt that I need to refresh my knowledge of Population genetics again. We’re currently rethinking some of Niches mechanics and need to be very informed for that. Here‘s a cool video about the topic I found quite informative.

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March 26, 2015 by Philo

Zoomz

The Zoomz festival for film and media is premiering this week. It takes place in Luzern and the target audience are schools. Teachers can sign up their classes for different movies and presentations. Game Design is one of them.

Gemma, Robin, Markus and me were invited to present our games Drei, Tower Offense and Elarooh. Additionally to offering a glimpse behind the development process we also talked about possible game related careers in Switzerland. We felt like missionaries, talking about the different Swiss studios, game history, education and so on. It was a great experience telling the students about the path we chose and invite them to join us
At the end of the presentation we were interviewed by the students radio 3Fach. You can listen to the interview here.
There is only one downside to the whole story: The festival organizers told us about their attempts to invite schools to our presentation and It seems that game design is still a topic that many teachers reject. We need to improve that until next year when the festival takes place again!

To end the day perfectly we were invited for dinner. We were sitting at a table with the Vloger and Youtuber manniac. He’s a really nice guy and we had a great time talking about animation and other stuff

Thanks a lot Zoomz for having us! We wish you the best of luck with your future program!

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March 25, 2015 by Philo

The foreign vending machine and ETH prototype

I won’t even start ranting about the workshop lesson today.

The afternoon was quite alright, since we were allowed to work freely. Our group will build a Selecta vending machine which contains foreign snacks. Some impressions:

I left the ZHdK early to attend our usual course at the ETH. Look, we have a digital prototype now :D!

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March 24, 2015 by Philo

Ranting and some insight to the Niche team meeting xD

Welcome dear friends of fright and horror to another WORKSHOP WEEK! Our teachers: Some “business business” architecture guys, talking about how important it is to be on time and are late constantly. Also, starting a lesson with the words “I’m not prepared at all” is not a good idea. Especially if you than still think everything coming out of your mouth is gold and students are toootally interested in your random thoughts. After some “inputs” we were send out to find and document a so called “Urban Device”.
Andi and me went to the cinéma Abaton to look for our devices there. He chose a movie projector and I decided to document the Selecta vending machine. Mr Popovic, the cinéma boss was so kind to open the machine for me. Hoorray for mister Popovic! Andi and me had fun on our trip, so the day turned out ok.

After school it was time for a Niche team meetup. Actually, it was the first meeting where ALL local team members came together. To celebrate this, we went to the Tibits to have diner together. Was nice to see the whole pack on one table and I’m glad they all get along great so far
We mostly talked about the future of Niche, defining roles and goals. We will soon meet up and tear the whole game apart. Meaning that we will only keep the core mechanics and see what we would change/improve. That might also includes building a small new prototype. I’m really looking forward to this experiment!

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March 22, 2015 by Philo

Finding a job in game marketing and Pitching

In the morning I spent some time looking up upcoming festivals and events and shared them around. I also tried to gather ideas for the upcoming Koboldgames marketing, but my head played tricks on me. Really need to start working harder on that soon!

After lunch I metup with Cynthia at the ZHdK. Cynthia has worked in the advertising industry for several years and got bored with it recently. She now wants to find a job in game marketing and asked me for advise (as if I knew xD).
Alice joined us as Ubisoft came into discussion. We talked over different options together and found that staying in Switzerland was not one of them. Working at Blizzard would make Cynthias dream come true, but she’s also fine with starting smaller, with an internship at a medium-sized studio for example. Alice had the GREAT idea to just look all the contacts up in the latest Keyplayers magazine. Now Cynthia has a LOT of emails to write

*Random page of Keyplayers magazine*

Later in the afternoon I headed over to the Inkubator for a lesson in marketing & communication. Daniel Frei joined the event as an external mentor. We had to pitch our concepts again, this times focusing on the lesson topic. It went quite well and motivated me to work on the game even harder >=)

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March 20, 2015 by Philo

Fantasy Basel & Pro Helvetia pitch preparation

Spring is coming. It’s so warm and sunny lately. A great way to start a day full of things to do!
After finishing all kinds of organizational stuff in the morning I headed over to the Fantasy Basel office for a meeting. René Bauer, my teacher at the ZHdK, joined us aswell. Swiss Games at the Fantasy Basel, it’s going to be awesome! Stay tuned

After the meeting, I headed over to the Tower Offense office. We worked on our pitch for the Pro Helvetia “Call for projects” presentation. Did lots of research and discovered this Steam tracking site. Have to do the same thing for Niche too…
Let’s hope this will work out!

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March 19, 2015 by Philo

Gamedev Meetup at EPFL

My morning was spent preparing presentations. SO MANY presentations. The first one for the talk session at EPFL, which you will hear about in a sec. The second one for a marketing & communication workshop at the Inkubator on Friday. And then a third for the Zoomz festival we’ll be attending next week.
I also signed up Niche and Tower Offense for the Quo Vadis pitching session and the PolyLan exhibition (to sign up, send a mail to Niels) happening in April. Such business.

In the afternoon, Markus and me headed to Lausanne to attend the EPFL Gamedev meetup. Over 150 students came to listen to the various talks. This was the schedule:
– How to build your own Game Engine, Florian Brönniman
– Introduction to Unity 3D, Mikhail Chatillon
– Introduction to Unreal, Frederic Dubouchet
– Discover Game Jams, a fun Hackathon, David Roulin
– Swiss games, what’s happening in Switzerland?, Dominik Marosi
– Swiss game developer showcased:
Witchlake, Asylamba, Digital Kingdom, Playful Oasis, Tchagata Games, Sunnyside Games

I thought that by now I should have some routine when it comes to presentations. But damn, I was sooo nervous at the start. I rushed through my slides and skipped half of the content. Well, guess I need some more practice

After the presentations, the EPFL offered us a tasty apéro. Had a great time and will join the meetup again for sure! My only criticism would be to hold all the presentations in English, but I want to improve my French anyways so it was ok. I really hope more people from Zurich will join us next time
Thanks everyone for having me and keep up the great work!

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March 18, 2015 by Philo

Playing mentor & evolving the party

In the morning we were supposed to have another theory lession, but it was cancelled. So my fellow master students and me headed over to the game design bachelor classroom to check out what they’re up to. For the 6th semester students the bachelor exhibition is crawling closer and closer. It feels so strange that I was in the exact same situation only a year ago.
Well, I had a chat with Dodo and Fabian about the recent chances in their concept. And then played the prototype Martina and Alice are working on. It’s a roguelike about curing the inhabitants of a planet from a mysterious illness.

In the afternoon we headed over to the ETH again, like every Tuesday. We had to present the learnings from the paper prototyping session we did last week. After the presentations were finished we got to play the prototypes of all the other groups. Isa had to leave early. She’s flying to Hong Kong for the Workshop (not another wooorkshop, nooo!!) next week. Our team gathered in an empty room after the lesson and we started working on our digital prototype.

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