Category Archives: Success

Westwood College 3rd Annual 2D Game Development Competition Follow-Up

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I attended Westwood College on Saturday, June 11th, to give a short talk about "becoming a success in the games industry" and also judge the Westwood College 3rd Annual 2D Game Competition, and I now have the details about the various category winners.

And the winners are:

Overall I was pleased with the results, but personally felt that Stupid Robot deserved a much higher placing (it was also my personal favourite), as it offered a complete casual game experience, full tutorial and reasonable graphics. I will admit that the game play was not innovative, but it was reasonably well executed in the time available to the team.

Each of the categories received a very nice award designed and created by GROW it 3D, a rapid fabrication and prototyping company that uses various technologies for creating physical representations from 3D models in a semi-automated fashion.

This technology really is cutting-edge and part of our future, think of a printer that prints in three dimensions, and the actual devices themselves are coming down in price, whilst the capabilities are increasing.

The $50 multi-format CD/DVD recorder in your computer that records on DVD costing pennies was once the size of my full-tower workstation, recorded only CD’s at 1x speed and cost around $8,000, not including the $2,000 software package to layout the discs. Each disc took about an hour to record, and if you messed up, you started over with a new $50 blank CD-R. The progress from the early 1990’s to today in CD and DVD recording technology, and the commensurate reduction in price to sub-$100 levels is exactly what will happen with these 3D fabrication devices in the next 20 years.

Unfortunately I did not have the presence of mind to take pictures of the award, and looking through my SenseCam images I cannot find a good shot of the individual awards. Hopefully somebody over at Westwood College will officially announce the winners along with photos of each team and their awards.

Get Ahead!

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Many industries, many companies, are geared to one-upmanship, and the workforce is indoctrinated in to the belief that this is the only way to get ahead.

"Hard work is rewarded!" you will hear in corporate offices across the land.

"Our office is a meritocracy!" you will be told.

It’s a trap!

I have had those same lies told to me. Stop believing them!

Any industry you want to join, any job you care to mention, putting in more hours than the other guy does not make you get ahead, it just makes someone else rich at your expense.

Any person in business and being smart about it does not hire for the number of hours someone can put in at the office. If they want someone to put in 100 hours a week at the office, might as well just hire a couple of kids right out of McDonald’s, paying them hourly until they fall over from exhaustion.

DSC00060 That parochial, 18th century mindset of labour is fine for menial production line jobs that do not require any smarts. But if you are an educated person, if you are employed for your knowledge and how to apply it, you get paid for not having to put in 60, 70 or 80 hours a week. You get paid for doing in 1 hour what someone else could never achieve in 100 hours.

To get ahead and be more productive than other people, you have to focus on results, not the amount of time it took. You should not care if a particular project consumed a week or a year of time, the only question you should concern yourself with is, "Did you finish?"

Putting in hundreds of hours but failing miserably, you get an A for effort, and a D- for achievement.

Next!

I know, it’s harsh. A tough pill to swallow.

Focus on your achievements, talk about them when someone brings up the number of hours you or they work, redirect their attention to results rather than effort.

Don’t rise to the bait when people ask "what time did you leave the office last night?" Any time that someone asks that, your answer should always be "When I was done."