Meeting Aaron Walker

               Aaron works at Disney and when he came to present to us he brought a very professional manner to it. His presentation had a seriousness to it as he discussed what we’d be facing in our futures exactly. I enjoyed his presentation due to the fact that I learned what to expect.

                Firstly he explained that learning never stops; a coder must always be ready to expand his knowledge. In most of his experiences he coded in C++, which is the language we are currently studying most. He went on to explain how it is best for someone to find their ‘niche’ spot in coding, whether that is physics, UI development, etc, etc. By having a niche specialty companies and coworkers know exactly what you’re good at and they can rely on you in those aspects. One of his quotes, which I’ll share, also portrayed the importance of handling whatever task is given to you: “To be successful, work hard and do anything they bring to you.” If one is to follow this quote then to be successful one has to be an important asset to whichever company you may be working for; doing so will lead to you getting more responsibilities and trust from your company and people will come to you because you can get the job done.

                Further on in his presentation he explained how his company worked in their creation process. One thing that he made sure to drive home was that every game they created has a crunch time, or a Code Red as they called it. As a developer you must be able to motivate yourself through these times and get the job done; but maybe even more important than that is having something that in the end you’re proud of. If you’re not proud of what you’re doing then you’ll be less motivated to continue. So it is quite important to find that motivation to make something amazing. A good helpful tip he also gave us was to make release versions of our product to test how it runs without all of the debug code holding it together, that way we can foresee any problems that may be experienced in the user’s end result.

                Throughout all of his presentation I learned just how intense the coming jobs would be. I can’t just freely go into a job expecting it to be fun without any hard work. To truly succeed as a Video Game Developer I’ll have to work hard and motivate myself to make a product as great as possible.

Meeting Rich Reagan

           Throughout Rich’s presentation he was very well-spoken and was funny enough to keep the audience interested, not that we weren’t already interested to begin with. He went on to discuss how games are developing and how the video game market has to adapt to that changing market. If we can’t adapt to the market then our video games will go out of style, much like the cassette player did once MP3 players were produced. Due to smart phones more and more people, who aren’t avid gamers, are getting easy access to a variety of video games. This opens up the video game market to many casual gamers such as the older generations and those who are just barely coming into video games, so these games must be marketed to this new audience as well as interesting those already familiar with video games.

An interesting trend that Steve pointed out is that games are beginning to go ‘freemium’, which means that the game is released for free and either some content of the game requires money to buy or the game just repeatedly asks for appropriate donations for their effort. With the video game genre expanding to reach broader audiences the freemium style of producing games is becoming more prevalent. But by going with the freemium route those video games must be fun, or addicting enough, to make people willing to pay for that content. For example, the player could farm for hours to get a decent quality item or they could pay a small sum of real-world money to acquire an item of superior or unique quality. Doing this perfectly means that the player is willing to make that small micro-transaction because they believe that it is beneficial for them to do so. On the other hand competition drives freemium purchases. By having players compete amongst each other they’ll be much more open to giving money in order to gain an edge or some aesthetical value that the other players may not have.

Given all this information, I learned how we, as developers, must learn to view the changing tides of consumer and make fun games that reach out to those audiences while still being profitable to our company.