Erika Moen’s no longer publishing a weekly strip online, but there are years of her hilarious and moving comics available in her archive, and she’s working on new projects. Erika answered my questions (I’m Dan Copulsky) in August 2010, by email.
After six years creating a weekly strip, DAR: A Super Girly Top Secret Comic Diary, you stopped the project at the end of last year. What are you working on now?
I’m working with two different authors on two different graphic novels! One is a dick-and-fart-joke murder-mystery with my studiomate Jeff Parker and the other is a young adult fantasy story with Brendan Adkins. I’m hoping to start serializing one of them in the winter of this year, but I’m probably jinxing that by acknowledging it aloud.
How do you schedule your time and organize your projects? What determines what you work on and when you work on it?
Scheduling is something I struggle with very much. The level of importance and the immediacy of the due date is what determines when I work on something. I try to block out specific days and times when I’m working on a certain project, but that rarely goes according to plan because I’m also running my own business and when things come up (which they do every day) they need to be taken care of NOW. The one thing that has helped me schedule enormously was setting aside Fridays as my day to fulfill the orders that come in through my online shop, that frees up a LOT of time during the rest of the week for me.
In Drawn to You, you described creating comics as a way to process your life. Does changing the pace at which you create and share comics have an affect on how you understand the events that are happening to you?
No, it hasn’t really changed that. I feel like my process of perceiving and interpreting life is always evolving, so the stage in which I had to document my life into comics is something I’m ready to move on from for the moment. I will come back to it, as I still have some autobiographic stories I want to turn into books (my relationship with my family, the process Matthew and I went through for immigration, etc.), but for right now it’s not what I need in my life. I’m really enjoying just experiencing life without constantly picking it apart to turn it into a comic.
Drawn to You was created collaboratively with Lucy Knisely. Is collaboration something you’d want to do again? Is there anything you’d do differently if you did?
Oh yes, I looooove collaboration! The times when I’ve collaborated are when my art and storytelling have improved the most. When I’m working on my own projects, I’m doing what I’m already comfortable creating—but when I work with someone else suddenly I have to push myself to think outside my normal box and interpret somebody else’s work and make mine work with theirs. It’s challenging in a really great way and I ALWAYS come away from those projects a better comicker. There’s so many ways in which to collaborate, too, and I’m open to trying them all. Drawing and writing with a cartoonist who is drawing and writing simultaneously (Lucy Knisley), drawing from someone else’s script (Sara Ryan, Jeff Parker), coming up with a concept and working with a writer to create the script for it and then drwing it (Brendan Adkins), writing a script and then having someone else draw it for me (haven’t done that one yet)… so many options!
As a queer women who has settled down with a man, and written a lot about your life before and through doing so, do you feel like you still have things to write about being queer?
I think I still have a few more comics left in me about that subject, but overall I feel like I’ve presented the meat-and-potatoes of my personal experience. If I never had the opportunity to do another comic on that subject, I could die feeling happy with what I did share.
Sarah Dopp is the founder of genderfork.com, a “a supportive community for the expression of identities across the gender spectrum,” and a place where I regularly gawk at photos I think are really cute. Sarah’s behind some other cool projects too. She answered my questions (I’m Dan Copulsky) in July 2010.
How did Genderfork.com get started?
Genderfork started in 2007 as an attempt to explore my own fashion sense. I found that I felt most comfortable when my appearance reflected an equal balance of masculine and feminine elements (whether that meant bright red lipstick and cleavage in a tuxedo, or jeans and a white t-shirt with no jewelry—as long as the gender weights were balanced, it felt right). Fascinated by this, I went digging for pictures of people who were pulling this off themselves on Flickr, and set up a system for blogging a photo a day. For the first year, that’s all the project was. Then, once readers started interacting more, it transitioned into a community-supported multi-media publication about gender variance, identity, and expression.
How does Genderfork balance the desire to post high quality, interesting content with the desire to create an open and inclusive community? Are you selective about what you publish, and is that a problem?
Great observation. We do have high standards for quality, and we do try to represent a broad mix of the content we find and receive. Fortunately for this issue, one of our biggest “problems” is that we get way more submissions than we can publish. This allows us to be selective about what we blog, which makes the “quality, interesting content” goal not hard to reach at all.
The bigger source of tension is our goal of representing balance and diversity. We receive far more submissions from transmasculine people than from transfeminine people. It’s important to us that we aim for an equal balance of “masculinity” and “femininity” (in quotes because most days I’m not even sure what those words mean) in our content stream, even as those traits get mixed up, minimized, or emphasized differently on different people. We have to dig, sift, and reorganize quite a bit in order to piece that balance together. (As we still fall short of it, quite often. It’s a struggle.)
We also struggle to represent diversity in age, race, class, body size, and style of appearance when our submissions piles don’t present the level of variety we’re hoping for. We have a long way to go on these issues, and we appreciate when our readers help us out by recommending content that depicts people with less-commonly represented characteristics.
Has running Genderfork changed your own understanding of issues related to gender or your personal identity?
Yes, greatly. That first year was about me finding my own identity, which I was finally able to put words to: genderqueer, androgynous, genderplayful, and female. Those are all me.
Since then, it’s been about building an understanding of my broader community—how others describe and present themselves, who else is part of our ecosystem, and how radically and utterly NOT alone I am on this path. (What an unexpected and miraculous surprise.)
You work professionally with website development and social media marketing. How much do you think these skills have contributed to Genderfork’s success?
Probably more than I want to admit. The biggest benefit is that I’ve been able to create and maintain the site without hiring technical assistance, and the hosting cost is negligible to me. This means that money can stay out of the picture, and that gives us a lot of creative and organizational freedom.
You’ve run Deviants Online, a social media discussion workshop for queers, sex nerds, artists, and other rebels. How is social media different for those groups, or why does it make sense to have a workshop specifically for them?
Great question. Social media is a set of tools, opportunities, and philosophies that a huge number of people have all of a sudden needed to start grappling with. I’ve noticed that the education/exploration process goes a lot smoother for people when the material is interpreted for their social or professional culture. Deviants Online was just another example of social media being framed for a particular culture.
What’s interesting about this particular culture, though, is that it has to deal a lot with sex. What happens when a professional dominatrix suddenly gets a friend request from her mom on Facebook? What do you do if your educational website about sexual health is being blocked as porn? What does a working model need to consider when he wants to publish his artistic nude portraits online as part of his marketing? While most of the advice for these questions will draw from the same wisdom that’s been circulating in all the other social media discussions, it’s valuable to create a supportive space that encourages people to bring them up and discuss them
You also run a queer open mic. How does that space, particularly in being live, compare to the space you create online for people to express themselves?
There are a lot more hugs involved. Seriously! The internet is MISSING OUT on that incredible aspect of in-person community. Hugs.
Other things… it’s once a month instead of every day, which makes it more of a special occasion, but less of a constant resource. Since it’s offline and usually not recorded, it gives people permission to take a risk that the might not want archived in public memory for all eternity. And we get to go out for beer and hamburgers afterward.
Other than that, it’s pretty similar. My job is to set expectations, shine a spotlight, and make sure people have an opportunity to connect. We always get a mix of new folks and regulars, connections are formed, and the experience isn’t for everyone. But it’s important for us.
Does the future hold any exciting plans for Genderfork or other projects?
The next big thing at Genderfork will probably be the community forums. Right now we’re working with a great group of community members who offered to help us get the scope and guidelines worked out before we open it up to the public. Genderfork receives a lot of submissions from people who are searching for immediate answers and responses, and our publication process doesn’t provide them with that (it can take weeks or months for a submission to get onto our site). I’m excited about the forums because it will let people have full conversations about whatever they want, whenever it’s coming up for them.
The other big project for me is Culture Conductor, which just launched on July 22nd. Like Genderfork, this project is also a community-supporting blog. But unlike Genderfork, this one is about the philosophies and techniques used to create healthy online communities, and it includes much longer articles and interviews. I’m deeply interested in the way communities are created, managed, and expanded, and I want to build a base of information that anyone who’s interested in this kind of work can reference to get started.
Dale O’Flaherty makes comics, and he’s a recent college graduate weighing the possibility of making that a living. He answered my questions (I’m Dan Copulsky) in June and July 2010.
You recently graduated from college. What are you doing now or planning for the future? Could you imagine trying to make a career out of comics, or do you think of creating them more as a hobby?
At the moment I’m unemployed. When I realized I would have all this free time on my hands at the start of the Summer I knew that I’d have an opportunity to try to get into comics. The problem I had before was that I was so busy with college I didn’t have time to produce comics and I would make one or two over the space of a week and then I wouldn’t put up anything new for a month or something. I’ve realized that I need to have a better internet presence if there’s to be any hope of me supporting myself through this. So at the moment the idea is to produce daily content (whether journal comics or doodles) and post thumbnails and panels from a longer work I’m currently roughing out and by the time the longer work is finished I should have enough journal comics to put out a couple of minis which will hopefully do well enough to pay for the print run of the longer one.
As far as making a career out of comics goes, I really like the idea of being self employed and doing something I love. The one problem is the comics scene in Ireland is very small from what I hear, but England isn’t that far I guess.
I also have some other non comics stuff on my radar planned like a camping trip and a lab position lined up that should keep me busy for a couple of weeks. And a lot of books to read. So many, oh my goodness.
Can you say anything about the longer comic project your working on?
Yeah, last summer I went to Electric Picnic (its a 3 day music festival in Ireland) and I got sick halfway through and had to go to the hospital with a case of appendicitis. When I was in the ambulance talking to my friend on the phone about how weird it was I knew I wanted to do a comic about it. Unfortunately my last year of college got in the way, but I still thought about it and and did bits and pieces on it here and there, but I realized that it would be silly to start it without doing a script and thumb-nailing it because it’s the longest thing I’ve tried doing. So I did out a rough list of plot points in chronological order recently to try to sort it out in my head and figure out where it was going and if there was any overarching theme or if it was just a bunch of stuff that happened. And I was worrying for a while that the comic wouldn’t work well as a whole. But funnily enough the one thing that ties it all together is that nothing turns out right. I make all these plans and everything just sort of goes wrong. I almost miss the train to Laois (I thought it was a bus and spent an hour outside waiting for a bus freaking out), I pitch my tent in the first camping ground I come to which quickly becomes packed, I miss a lot of bands, I forget sun cream, and when I do have to go to the hospital I spent two hours trying to call someone who is at the festival that can find my tent and pack up my stuff. It’s sort of funny how shitty my luck was that day, although pretty much everything did turn out okay in the end (although I had to leave my tent behind and I never got to see The Flaming Lips).
What kinds of comics (short, long, autobiographic, fictional, funny, serious) are you interested in making?
Right now I’m more interested in using journal comics to try to tell a longer story. There’s only so much you can do with short journal comics and I don’t think I’ve quite gotten the hang of those yet. The longest I’ve managed to do journal comics was for 30 days in June back in 2007. It was driving me mad at the end, it felt like an obligation instead of something I wanted to do. Although I think doing a short comic every day is a good exercise. I might try it again. I might do hourlies again sometime soon. Although I don’t know how John Campbell manages to do those for a whole month I’m sick of them by the end of the day! I have to draw really simply when I’m doing hourlies (kind of how John draws), otherwise I’m spending most of the hourlies sitting around drawing hourlies. I’m not sure how Lucy Knisley manages it. I haven’t thought of doing fictional comics yet. Maybe if I come up with a story that’s good enough. The comic I’m doing at the moment is a bit funny and a bit serious. Me and my friend are talking about where our lives are going at the moment but we’re also just drinking and goofing off so it’s a bit of both. I wouldn’t choose one over the other though, I like the story telling opportunities that both raise and each have their own advantages and disadvantages.
Though your artwork is beautiful, it seems like you’re still in some ways early in the process of learning your craft. What kind of support and advice have you received from readers and mentors?
Thank you! Yeah, I’ve always drawn since a very early age, but I’ve never had any formal art training (I think it shows as well). I started doing comics properly around June 2007 and posting them to Livejournal. Eventually I got linked by Ryan Pequin (which was a cool coincidence since his comics inspired me to start my own) and then I had all these artists I’ve loved tell me they liked my stuff, which was insanely flattering and a little bewildering. Yeah, I’ve been getting advice and constructive criticism on my stuff for a while now and its really helpful to have a community of artists and enthusiasts critique a drawing or let you know where you can buy good art material. As for specific advice, John Allison (this was on his blog I think) said to keep a proper sketchbook. I do most of my comics in my sketchbook but most of my drawings or quick doodles on printer paper. I need to get into the habit! Joseph Lambert is my sketchbook idol. His stuff is so good.
You mentioned trying to have more of an online presence. Aside from posting comics more regularly, are you thinking about anything like setting up your own website or creating something you could sell in an online store?
Yeah, I really need to get up off my butt and do comics more often! I find it hard to balance art stuff and life which is really weird considering I’m not working at the moment and have plenty of free time. I think I need to have structure, otherwise I end up pissing away whole days doing nothing in particular. I think a website would help me keep a proper updating schedule because there is an obligation for content otherwise people would quickly forget you and your website. I think I obsess too much about having nice art (I don’t think it shows), which means I have little art freak outs every now and then so I don’t post for ages, but I think I need to stick with it. I love looking at cartoonists’ old work where you can look back and see how they’ve progressed. I feel I’m at a very early stage, but I have an idea of where I need to go so hopefully in a couple years I can look at the stuff I’m doing now and not be too embarrassed! I’ve heard ComicPress is pretty hard to use so I might just start using Blogspot (and Tumblr) for the time being. Man, I’m pretty awful with computers. I’ll probably need help with a website sometime soon. Yeah, I keep getting bugged to start making stuff that people can buy which is as good sign as any I guess. Yeah, I think I’ll start putting out minis sometime very soon.
Other than Ryan Pequin and Joseph Lambert, what work (comics or otherwise) inspires and excites you the most?
Oh jeeze, I know I’m going to end up leaving some people out accidentally. Sorry in advance if I’ve left you out! Let’s see, MS Paint Adventures is probably my favorite comic at the moment. it’s pretty amazing watching the story (Homestuck) grow organically and seeing how Andrew can take something someone mentioned ages ago and make it this prominent story element. If you didn’t know, most of it is made up as he goes along—you’d think he was a story-wizard or something. Actually, he probably is. Order of Tales just finished up recently, that was amazing. I love Evan Dahm’s art work. Renee Engstrom (of Anders loves Maria) and her partner Rasmus Gran have started to do comics together, I like those. John Alison started a new comic after Scary go Round ended. It’s called Bad Machinery, it’s so good. Adam Cadwell does a comic called the Everyday (which is ending soon!). I really like the art work, it’s clean black and white artwork (although he has experimented with color) that is balanced well between realism and cartoony exaggeration. One of his friends in the strip is another great cartoonist, Marc Ellerby. Marc does Ellerbisms, which is this really funny autobio comic that can be really sad at times. Philipa Rice does this great comic called My Cardboard Life. I had the pleasure of looking at one of her strips in person, it’s really neat to see someone doing a collage comic. Joe Decie does great autobio stuff with an ink wash. He’s recently been experimenting with watercolors. I’ve learned so much stuff about journals from him. Shug Raine did this zine called Reet! which was awesome. He’s recently been working on completing his first long form work (Find Comet, Hit Comet, Watch Comet, Sleep), which I’m looking forward to seeing how he wraps up! There’s this guy on my Livejournal called dragoninstall who does this amazing bonkers comic called Shitcomic. None of it was plotted out in advance and none of it makes sense, but it is awesome! There’s another guy on my Livejournal called deathchalupa who does these amazing journals, he has such a distinctive style. I can’t wait to see more stuff from him. Both Liz Prince and Maris Wicks are awesome and have had a huge influence on my style. Penrod Pulaski is probably my favorite person doing journals at the moment, he’s so good! Even though he’s really technically accomplished he has this great sense of humor as well. I’ve only recently got into Dustin Harbin’s comics but his journals are amazing. I wish I was that good. Box Brown and Pranas T. Naujokaitis both do awesome comics. Hey Pais is a cat who does journal comics. Robin Le Blanc is a great photographer and writer (who sells prints here). Vicki Nerino and Britt Wilson (Uterus Parade Press) are the most awesome, gross, funny people doing comics at the moment (with the possible exception of Harvey James, who sort of transcends gross and funny). That’s really all there is to say on the matter!
There are more interviews in the works, but it seems like I’m a bit too busy to keep up with once a week. If you’re interested in joining the staff and conducting interviews for QuestionRiot.com, shoot me an email at dan@questionriot.com and tell me a bit about who you are and who you might be interested in interviewing.
Jake Kessler will soon complete his graduate studies at Full Sail University and enter the world of professional video game production. I think that’s pretty cool. Jake also happens to be my cousin. I’m Dan Copulsky, and Jake answered my questions by email in June 2010.
You’re currently finishing up a Master of Science in Game Design. What coursework does that entail, and what will having that degree mean you know?
The program is called Game Design, but it’s really more game production. My classmates and I are being trained as producers—which is sort of industry slang of middle managers. We know the ins and outs of the development process, we know how to motivate people, we know how to organize tasks and manage the asset pipeline, but we don’t typically do any coding or create any art. Any code or art background we might have is now an ancillary skill; it’s not core to what we do. The design part does come in a little bit—we are expected to be designers as well as producers—but the largest part of our training here is in production.
The GDMS program here at Full Sail University is a 12-month program, which is a pretty radical schedule. Each of my classes has been ten eight-hour sessions, and every four weeks I’m finishing one class and starting another. As for the coursework itself, that varies somewhat from class to class. One month in my Project Management Principles class, the seven of us who were students that month had to collaborate on all the assignments, taking turns being in charge of the team. Together we created a 300+ page Project Management Plan for a hypothetical game project, complete with budget estimates, policies and procedures, milestone scheduling, risk management, and a dozen other things. We did all the pieces one at a time, and then when it was done we had to take that 300 page conglomeration of everyone’s work and make it fit together as though one person wrote it. That was four weeks. That fast pace is demanding—there’s a joke about Full Sail students only sleeping on the weekends—but it’s forced me to become a better student. When all of your work for a semester is due in under four weeks, you don’t have time to procrastinate. You get a lot of those bad habits blasted out of you.
So the first seven months go like that. Then the last five months of the program are Final Project, where we masters students are put in charge of a team of ten or so undergraduate students who are being trained as Game Developers (programmers) or Game Artists. As a team, we have five months to basically go from concept to a finished game, pretty much on our own. At the same time as all of this, each of us masters students are also writing a thesis—a 30-page academic research paper on a subject of our choosing. So we have to balance our time between managing the team and making sure all our research and writing and editing gets done. It’s hard sometimes, having to multitask like that, when you really want to be focusing on one thing more than the other.
I know you’ve loved playing and creating games for years. How did your interest in games develop and become something you wanted to pursue as a career?
When I was in high school, the coolest game I’d ever played was StarCraft by Blizzard Entertainment. It was a pretty neat RTS (real-time strategy game) with a cool story and these great little scripted conversations between the characters. But the best thing about it was that it came packaged with Blizzard’s proprietary level editor at no extra charge. So as soon as I bought the game I had access to most of the tools that were used to make the game. I could jump right in and make scripted levels every bit as in-depth and polished as the ones in the game itself. Then Blizzard released WarCraft III, which was StarCraft in 3D with exponentially more features, and once again they included a World Editor. The ability to make levels that matched the complexity of Blizzard’s games was put directly into my hands.
So making maps for these games became a sort of hobby for me throughout high school and undergrad. I was studying Writing at Florida State, and in between assignments and going out and doing college-y things with my friends, I was making all kinds of levels and maps and campaigns. Some of them were more RPG-esque, where you had a hero character you would level up by fighting monsters and learning spells, and others were things like tower defense or more traditional RTS maps. The great thing about these editors is they didn’t require you to know code or being able to create your own 3D models—all of that was done for you—so you were able to go straight from concept into really rapid prototyping. It let me focus a lot on the design aspects of making a game rather than get bogged down with technical constraints.
But it was only ever a hobby. Around the end of undergrad, though, I was at a crossroads. I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with the next 30-40 years of my life. I had studied Writing but come out with the surprising realization that I didn’t love it as much as I thought. I was looking in a few other directions—law, teaching, I was even a Campus Ministry coordinator for a year—but I knew if I could find something I loved I’d be so much happier. My best friend has a diagram tacked up on his kitchen wall, and it’s got three circles labeled “Things I Love Doing,” “Things I Am Good At,” and “Things People Will Pay Me to Do.” The overlap between all three is supposed to be what will make you happiest for your career. One day I just woke up and realized, that’s games for me.
What does an admissions department seem to be looking for when picking students for a program like yours? Do other students in the program have backgrounds similar to your own?
Full Sail takes people from all over, with varying backgrounds. Mine’s in Writing, my partner Dave’s is in Literature. There are people in my program who came from Math, Business, Art, Music, Film… and there are even guys who went through one of Full Sail’s programs for undergrad, either Game Dev or Game Art. Some people came here straight out of undergrad while some people worked for a while first. We have kids too young to drink coming in, and we also have 30-somethings with spouses and kids. It’s pretty varied in terms of that kind of thing. What’s more important is what sort of skills you bring to the table, and for skills you don’t have, what are you willing and able to learn. You need to be good with people, communicating with them and mediating conflict. You need to be driven to get everything done. You need to be able to multitask. You need to be able to string words together on paper without sounding like a moron. More than anything, though, you need to be able to say “I don’t know this, please teach me.” Nothing is more fatal to this kind of career than the attitude that you already know everything.
As a final project, you and another producer are leading a team of seven programmers and five artists to produce a 3D real-time artillery game, called Cast Away. What’s the process of putting that together like?
On day 1 of Final Project you come in and the EPs (External Producers, Full Sail professors) divide up the studio (everybody starting Final Project that month) into teams. You find out who your team is, who your partner is if you have one, and you start getting to know them. You get to work right away, because after the first week you have Pitches, which is where you actually give a presentation pitching two ideas to the EPs for games you want to make. They’ll pick one of them to greenlight, and that’s what you’re making for the next five months. Before production can actually start, though, there’s about a month and a half of documentation that needs to get done. (This is where having taken that Project Management Principles class comes in handy.) There’s a team Charter that spells out policies and procedures, like what hours each day the team is going to meet, what days are going to be off for weekends, and what the protocol is for dealing with human resource problems. There’s a Design Document, which spells out all the features that are going to go into the game and what priority each one is. Then there are Technical and Art Design Documents, which take the base Design Doc and extrapolate it to spell out what’s demanded of programmers and artists respectively. All of that needs to be finished before you can start actually making the game.
So right away, your five months for production is really more like three, three and a half. Once all the documentation’s done, the first milestone is called Proof of Concept (POC). That’s the most basic working build of the game that a person can sit down and play for five minutes: it’s typically got nothing but placeholder art assets, no music, very few gameplay features, just the bare bones mechanics of the game. For us that was moving and shooting. After POC, we have a new milestone due pretty much every two weeks: Feature Frag 1 and 2 are turned in by the end of the third month of the project, and then a week later is Alpha. By Alpha, all of the game’s core gameplay features and the majority of the art assets are supposed to be in, along with the bulk of the sound assets. (Since there isn’t anybody on the project team trained in sound design, Full Sail has a sound guy who’s supposed to create all the sound assets for the games—we tell him what we need, we show him the tech is ready to support it, and he gives it to us as soon as it’s done. I guess you could say sound is the one part of the game that’s outsourced.) After Alpha, we get another three weeks before we deliver Beta, which is supposed to be the vast majority of the finished game. There’s another three weeks after Beta to tighten things up, fix bugs, playtest, balance the game, that kind of thing, but by Beta the game should be functionally complete or pretty close. If there are any sounds or art assets still not finalized by Beta, there better be a good reason.
The final version of the game (Gold) is turned in three weeks after Beta, and all the teams give a big Final Presentation in Full Sail’s auditorium. This is the part my team is building towards now. Presentations are a big deal, and they’re always open to friends and family. It’s basically us showing off the game, going through what we did and demonstrating ten minutes or so of gameplay on the big screens. After Final Presentation, the only thing left is a week of Archiving: gathering up all the documentation, updating it to accurately describe the finished game, and binding it together for both us and Full Sail to keep a permanent record.
When you’re managing people who have art or coding skills you don’t have yourself, how do you know what’s reasonable to expect from them and how much time they should have to complete things?
Before this project, I wouldn’t have known how to answer that. Now of course I’ve had some experience working with these guys, so I have a frame of reference. In the early days, though, there was always an extent to which I just had to trust people when they told me what was reasonable. Then I watched them and saw what they did. There are always other resources we can turn to for help, like our EPs or other professors, or even other team members—pull them aside and go, is this a reasonable estimate for this task? What I’ve found, on my team at least, is that there isn’t a lot of reason for people to mislead you on something like that. At the end of the day, everybody’s here because they want to be here, they want to make this game, they’re at least as passionate about it as you are. They aren’t going to undershoot their estimates because they won’t be able to finish on time, and they aren’t going to pad their estimates either because that means less ends up going into the game in the end. It’s very rare that someone will be way off in what they tell us, and if that happens the rest of the team usually speaks up and goes, “Wait, that doesn’t make sense.”
At the same time, though, managing students is a delicate operation sometimes. We’re nominally in charge, but it’s very much on us to get them to do what we want. We aren’t holding these guys’ paychecks, and they aren’t getting health insurance for being part of the project—all we have to motivate them with is the fact that we’re all here, we all paid a lot of money to come here, and we all want to make a game, so let’s get it done. It’s a lot of hours and a lot of work all around, but you can’t just bark orders and expect people to get to work. You have to get them on board with what you want to do. You have to get them to love it. If you can do that, it solves a lot of these issues for you—people will do their absolute best for the game, because they’re with you that that’s what’s important.
What does your career outlook look like to you?
What I’ve been led to understand is that a lot of the industry is structured similarly to Final Project. You have leads or producers leading teams of artists and/or developers, they report to higher producers, sometimes up and up and up. Design is a little different, because some kinds of studios need full-time designers and some don’t. Companies that make games like MMOs (massively multiplayer online games), or smaller episodic games where a new episode is coming out a couple of times a year, they need people full-time to write and design regular content additions. A lot of other kinds of studios, though, they only need designers around during the early part of the development cycle, where the game is being drawn up on paper. So they’re more likely to hire designers (especially junior designers) as consultants for six or eight months at a time, and then maybe give them a permanent position later if the designer has proven himself/herself, and if the studio has a need. That’s one reason I’m really glad I’ve come through this program at Full Sail, because design is something I might have been able to do decently at before, but now I have this other marketable skill: I’m a producer. That should help me find what I want, which is a more permanent position.
As for prospects, I’m not sure what to expect. I’ve just started putting together applications to send out to places, and until this game project is finally finished I really just have a resume and cover letter—my actual application is pretty toothless without the actual game demo to go with it. I’ll send out a bigger wave of applications in August when the game is finished, and then we’ll see if anything comes of it right away. I’ve always had a lot of confidence in my speaking skills, and I know I’d be a great designer-producer, so I kind of feel like if I can get in a room with these guys for an interview I can sell myself. I just need to get in that room.
Given the right situation to work on whatever you wanted, what sort of games would you be most interested in creating?
Games for me are about two things: They’re stories, and they’re entertainment experiences. In that way they’re a lot like movies. The kind of games I want to make have definite narratives, whether that’s more of a drama or high fantasy or science fiction story, or something lighter with less depth. Playing games like Mass Effect (from BioWare) is a lot like watching a feature film of a TV drama, and writing for a game like that would make me really happy because I’d get to really flex those creative muscles. But the most important thing is for games to be fun. People have to want to play them, they have to enjoy playing them, and they have to get sucked in or “immersed” to the point where they want to come back and keep playing. I would love to work on a game like World of WarCraft, which has this huge depth and rich narrative to it, with new chapters and areas being added all the time, and where there’s always something else fun for the player to do—he/she is never finished.
A part of me also wants to keep working on things that can be modded or edited or expanded by the player, where they’re given that framework to work in—the way I was able to work within the framework of StarCraft and WarCraft III. I think that dynamic, where the player jumps into the role of the designer and gets to just mess around and create things, is a lot of fun—I’d like to make that available to new people the way it was made available to me.
