Hi everybody, I'm Eric Arnold. I am the studio architect of programming and currently project technical director on an unannounced title at Volition in Champaign, Illinois. I'd like to go over real briefly how I got to where I am, then what is a typical day for me look like. And then a little bit of advice on how to break into the industry. So my journey has been largely self-taught up until college. I would draw out sketches for game ideas that I had. When I got a little bit older, I found some programs, they were kind of like the early ancestors of Unity. That allowed me to snap together logic and pre-made pictures and create my own pictures and animations to make little, simple 2D games. Into high school, I started learning how to program on my own by just reading books. Took an independent study in my senior year. Then into college, obviously got into real classes on how to do things. Was a computer science major, so taken all those classes. Actually connected up with some other students that were interested in making games to create the student group Spartasoft. That's still going to collaborate, work together, make games. We were able to get outside people from the industry to come in and speak. We got equipment donated to us from Microsoft so we had space to host our stuff. Just a good experience of trying to make something to use as a portfolio basically and to learn from each other. So that was great. And through later years of college, I took all of the 3D graphics programs, multimedia programs. I took some com art stuff for animation. I actually had studio art as a cognate, so I was trying to get in all different aspects of games and everything that goes into it, so I could at least understand it. And then in between my junior and senior year, I got an internship from Volition. And it wasn't one that was advertised, it was just there in my hometown. I wandered into their office with a CD and a resume and said hey, I would like to work for you this summer, please give me something to do. And ended up getting the internship. I was on the Red Faction PC team doing primarily work on their level editor and also the PC installer software. At the end of that internship, I was offered a full time job if I wanted to just stay on and not even bother completing my senior year. But decided the degree's probably a pretty good thing to have, I have lots of fun classes to take. I'll see you guys back here in May. So then came right back, didn't really miss a beat. Jumped right back into the next Red Faction game doing weapons this time. And since then I've worked on pretty much every aspect as a programmer anyway. Networking, physics, AI, rendering, everything you can think of, I've done a little bit of it. So today, or I guess three years ago, they asked me to be a studio architect of programming. And what that means is we're, after Saints Row IV which was our last big title, we decided to re-tool our engine. We had been using the same code base, kind of mutated from one game to the next but basically the same core since PlayStation 2 days. And so now Xbox One, PlayStation 4 coming out, really need to take a big step back and figure out how do we want to build open world games going forward? So they put three studio architects for programming in charge of it, we divided the code base, both tools and game code into roughly a third each. And we've been in charge of the teams of programmers and also content creators since then to build a brand new engine from scratch. So that has been a really awesome experience. A lot different in that I spent less of my time doing programming than I was directing programmers. And doing code reviews, and sitting in meetings, and coming up with decisions, and designs and the architecture of this engine. So that's been a really great experience. And then most recently, the game project needed some leadership to really get them moving forward and get your progress going faster. So they asked a couple of the studio level people to come in as the directors. So I've been serving as technical director and trying to get everything aligned. Make sure that the pipelines and the processes and the tools are all there. The feature set's there, everything's working together the way that it should be. So now and I'm still doing the studio architecture role, so I pretty much live in meeting rooms all day. But most of our programmers are at their desks working on code for the majority of the day, collaborating with content guys. The tools guys are working with people to determine how do you want to create your content for whatever discipline it is. The features guys are coming up with new things, working with the designers on how should this thing function and what kind of data set. How should the data get in there? What kind of hooks do you need to modify that data? So that's kind of my day-to-day, but mine is not really representative of what most of our programmers are doing. So then my advice for getting into the industry is really pretty simple. It's just demonstrate that you're passionate, there are a lot of people applying for a very few amount of jobs. So okay, you've gone through a program, that's great, that's a step above a lot of people. But if you've just done the bare minimum to get out, to meet the requirements of that program. That doesn't really show me that you're passionate, that you're going to be a hard worker. That you're going to really put in the effort and the blood and sweat and tears into the game. because it's really difficult even with a giant team of people to make a good quality game. So you gotta demonstrate that you're passionate. And that involves doing projects above and beyond what is required of you in class and putting together a solid portfolio. Then also just get out there, get on message boards, get involved in doing webcasts. Apply for internships, whether or not they're advertised. Show that you know something about the company, that you've done some research on them. And tell them how you can be a benefit to their company, you can add value. And then you will get an immense amount of value if you can manage to land an internship. And then, get together with your friends and the other students in your class and try to put something together. Enter it in independent festivals or go to game jams. Anything you can do to keep gaining skills and experience is really, really going to help you out in the long run. That's it, just wanted to be short and sweet. Thanks for your time and good luck finishing out your program.
