So this past Friday I went to the Shawnee State University Game Conference. It was pretty cool overall. There were some nice talks about making games and some neat tech demos as well. I think the coolest tech demo was “Hypersonic Audio”.

I was walking around and I kept hearing this music. I thought it was one of the games on display but it was there and then gone just as quickly. On the second floor, these people were looking over the balcony and aiming some kind of weird circuit board at random people. I noticed when it pointed at me, I heard the music. I was having trouble finding the demo for Hypersonic, but when I noticed the music and board, I knew I had found it. I went upstairs and sure enough that was the demo. I got to hold the board and point it as unsuspecting students below, very fun. Apparently, it shoots out sound as a directional “beam” and its above human hearing. When the beam hits an object though, the waves slow and it become audible. Pretty cool, at least to me.

I went to see the “senior project” demo and that was a bust. They made a game with Unreal and the demo room only had a cart computer, and he couldn’t log into it to even show us pictures. Poor guy, that was a Shawnee failure, not yours.

I then went to a talk on a game I was familiar with, “Rising Rein”. About a year ago I joined the team, but had to drop out of it due to incompatible schedules. I was porting it to Mac. It was a randomly generated game… thing. Its really cool, but hard for me to put into words. I had met the front-end guy, but I had not met the engine programmer. I thought I would be unimpressed, loving engine development myself, but he blew me away with all of the changes and advanced C++ he implemented. He didn’t know I had ever been on the team, so he was confused how I knew so much about the engine. The front-end guy programs extremely complex C++, I’m good, but not twenty variables in the constructor good. That is part of the reason I left. Anyway, the engine guy has done so many cool things, he inspired me to try some. He had the usual engine constructs like State Management and Resource Handling, but he also had Object Pooling and Object Factories which I’ve never done much of. He also pulled the engine off of SFML and put it on SDL using OpenGL to render everything. I think my next project might be something similar.

The talk itself was impressive. Dave Voyles of Microsoft spoke to us about getting into the game industry. One of my college professors spoke before him, Howard Dortch, and their message was pretty universal. Get a Website! Have a website to show off your projects and skills. A resume means little to employers. You may say you know C++, but they don’t know that. And if you say you know it, they are going to assume you mean professional / expert on it. Have honesty and put “Intermediate C++, Little C#”. That tells employers that you gauge your skills well. Even if they are looking for a C# programmer, if they see you know C++ and maybe some Java, they might still hire you because those skills will carry over. The best thing you can do however, is get a website and show off your code. Do not keep your idea secret because you are afraid someone will steal it. Dave told us a story of how a team made this app, and when they showcased it, it had already been done much better by several other people. They were destroyed. Now, they should have at least googled parts of the idea to see if it had been done, but sadly they did not. After the talk, we had lunch and then went home. There were more talks after lunch, but none that really interested me.

So in conclusion, get a website and show off your projects. Talk about what you are doing, what you are having problems with, and most importantly talk about what you have learned. I got this website because of Howard and Dave. Aspiring tech professionals should do the same.