Morning Meeting

This morning, I had the pleasure of meeting Vance Wallace, a designer who has worked on the Lara Croft series and knows the Rockstar creators of GTA. With a background in acting and directing before his five year foray into game development, he seemed quite animated, even though he'd just flown in from California, and 10 in the morning was admittedly not his style when it felt like 7 AM. While my advisor Amanda was attempting to get access to the presentation room and make sure everything was set up, we had the chance to talk - it was interesting to discuss how No More Heroes actually has intelligent battle mechanics that may appear hack-n-slash oriented to the untrained eye, and how Mario Kart has finally begun to lose appeal beyond its purpose as a party game.

Vance was here to apply for the level design teaching position for the fall. He had been asked to give a mock presentation, and it was Amanda's intention to see how he handles himself in front of a crowd. Unfortunately, there was no crowd. It was just me and Amanda. Oh well.

His presentation was both humorous and informative. His first slide had nothing but his name in green on it, and he then opened up by saying that "Limes make everything taste better" as he switched to a slide of limes. At first this seemed completely irrelevant to the rest of the conversation, but he eventually looped back around to it, citing the fact that he had displayed his name in green as an obscure form of foreshadowing to the fact that he was going to say something about limes. The ensuing discussion of how to actually create foreshadowing of game mechanics was quite fascinating, though necessarily brief. If he makes his way back here, this will be a guy I'd like to learn from.

I felt enlightened by more than just the words and content of his presentation. It's becoming more and more apparent to me that I haven't been flexing my design muscles. If things keep going the way they've been going, I'll be pretty weak coming out of the gate in a year. Design is a complicated beast with so many components to take into consideration. They're components that I love, but I have not devoted enough time to them. Excuse me while I retreat into the murky hollows of my mind and attempt to reemerge with something more spectacular to my own pessimistic eye.