Week 10

Learning Journal: 

Activities 

Following the class discussion, our activity today was to quickly research some of the games studios in Australia. Some of the notable ones are Firemonkey, Hipster Whale, and League of Geeks. Surprisingly, the world-renown Untitled Goose Game was also developed in Aus. It's heartening to see how welcoming Australia is to indie studios - it means that I'm not at a disadvantage because I don't yet work for a major studio. While that's my end goal, starting as an indie developer would give me the freedom to work on ideas that are closer to my heart. As was mentioned today, you can afford to be a little off-beat when there's no pressure to release a bestseller. The important things to remember as an indie developer are: 

1. work hard, but not for free, 

2. soft skills such as communication and teamwork are invaluable, and  

3. networking is key.

For the rest of the class we continued working on our assignments. Having learnt from previous assignments, we set up a changelog early in the project to keep track of how we're doing. We also began honing in on the definitions for our in-game classes - these are the different jobs we've decided on. Because we had to merge elements from the survival and MOBA genres, we've come up with a game that requires players to collect resources and complete tasks to stay alive, but is also intensely multiplayer. The idea is that players must work together in order to survive as there's (very deliberately) no way for one person to do all the work. 

Reflection 

I wasn't aware of the sheer number of indie studios in Australia, but I was really surprised to learn that there are very few AAA studios here. 

'AAA' denotes a standard of game design and production that is higher than most other games. Typically, AAA games are very high-profile and have the luxury of multi-million dollar budgets (ARM, n.d.). Ubisoft is a particularly well-known AAA studio. Interestingly enough, CD Projekt Red is only an AA studio, mostly due to the relatively small number of people working for it. AA games are differentiated from AAA games primarily on the basis of budget (Karthikeyan, 2022). 

One of the thing that came up in class that struck the most resonant chord with me was the potential to work for an overseas AAA studio such as Ubisoft Stockholm. I think it would be very exciting to work there, on projects to the standard of Assassin's Creed. 

I'm not having any major issues with this class; I feel I'm keeping up and I'm definitely enjoying the content. 

Deliberate Practice 

I want to do more research on Ubisoft's Stockholm office to find out what pre-requisites they have for application, the work culture and environment, and available employee protections. I'd also like to know what has to happen for an indie or AA studio to become AAA.