Phone Interviews with Riot Games!!!!

I just recently went home for a funeral for my grandfather, Thomas Salvato. He and I were very close and it was a rough weekend the viewing was Sunday and the funeral service was on Monday; family from all around the country had come in for the services and were asking me about my job search and giving me a hard time about not having a job. When everything had settled on Monday evening I received 2 emails regarding jobs; the first was from WMS in Chicago stating that they liked my resume but had decided to pursue other candidates, and the other was from Riot Games wanting to know what my schedule was like to schedule a phone interview with me. The HR rep was and still is incredibly quick with her responses and by about 9 pm on Monday I had my first phone interview scheduled for Tuesday. I was anxiously awaiting the call all day Tuesday and playing League of Legends all day just trying to keep the game as fresh in my mind as I could. So the call came and it carried on for about 45 min. and was really informal and not too stressful. I asked a few questions and the guy answered them and that was the end of the phone call. Shortly after the phone call had ended I had come up with a few more questions that I had to ask and I wanted an evaluation of the phone interview. So I emailed my HR rep and she forwarded the email along for me and that was the end of the night Tuesday. Well, When Wednesday came I was confident that I had done alright in the phone interview but didn’t really expect to hear anything until next week sometime. I went out and got lunch with my older brother and had come back and checked my phone that I had left charging and I had another 2 emails regarding jobs; except both of them were from Riot Games. The first was a response to all of my questions that I had asked the day before and the other was asking my schedule for the rest of the week and early next week so that they could schedule another phone interview. I responded and the response had come back quickly and by the time I left my parents house to come back to Orlando I had my next phone interview scheduled for 9 pm. tonight. I was in the car riding with my parents to get dropped off at my apartment and I received a phone call from my HR rep at Riot and she had to change the time of the interview from 9 pm to 7 pm today and with a different person. So Today at 7 pm EST I will have a phone interview with Ryan Laughlin from Riot Games. I am both nervous and excited and can’t wait to see where these interviews lead.

 

-TJ Salvato

The happenings of the following week

This week ended incredibly while the programmers from Precision games took the stage for graduation. They are truly gifted individuals and will leave their mark on the game industry as we know it, so congratulations to them. Now for my Quality Assurance class, I am getting to experience Jira hands on and learning how to properly create a test plan. While this may not be the most exciting sounding thing in the world, I find it intriguing. But I understand it isn’t for everybody. I got a 100% on quiz one, and we are just now getting into statistics for the class. I am also working on two articles for submission to Gamasutra one on production and another on quality assurance. If they are accepted I will post a link to them on here as well as my Twitter and website. That’s it for this post, have a great day.

Quality Assurance Day 2

Todays post is in regards to Quality Assurance. I am taking a class on Quality Assurance in the last month of my masters degree and feel like venting on the thought process of Quality in video games. Day one of the class which was Monday 30, August; we went over Quality Assurance and Quality Control. Quality Assurance being the prevention of errors, defects and failures; where as Quality Control is attempting to fix the problem after it has already appeared. The common sense response is why would you want to use control over assurance; and the difference that is argued is money. A team to come in and test/control later on in the project when the bulk of the money has been dispersed (around Alpha and Beta) is easily affordable. But my argument is, why not have a quality standard much like a six sigma or lean system in place to ensure that the game is produced to a specific quality. Now in a real world setting this initial cost appears far greater because the bulk of your QA is done by software engineers, but when the game is being produced with as few errors, defects and failures as they can possibly prevent within a given milestone or sprint then at the end of the production process the Quality Control that could possibly be needed is so minimal a company could almost allocate a single resource that is already receiving pay to fix the problems. As far as implementing a quality standard the number of primary features will be a bit smaller than normal but the overall polish and functionality of the game will increase. this process makes more sense to implement into a new project due to the fact that implementing a standard in the middle of a project could simply be a kill shot for the game. Using a standard upfront on a project would make more sense and simply work much better. This will be a continuous post process, I will most likely post per class or at least once a week. Thanks for reading!!

Final Project Culmination =D

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/9021858

This video link is the presentations on August 19th, 2010 for Digital Alchemy Studios. Once again the game I was an Internal Producer on was Ludus Magnus. We are the first team to present and we were all extremely excited. The game and team were amazing. Over the last 5 months I have had both the honor and privilege of working with this team, and plan to keep in touch with them and hopefully get the chance to work with them again later in my career. The team is as follows: Myself TJ Salvato, Ismael Cintron, Mike McKenzie, Mike Gassman, Kai Ting Yen, Tommy Davidson, Chris Nguyen, Jariin Ostrander, Adam Amos, Jared Frenzel, Joe Joyal and Robert Guyett. It was a long five months but we were like a family; I won’t say that we didn’t have problems but we got through them.

Our team dynamic was amazing and like I said we were a family. We could take a joke and be just as serious all at the same time. We got together on day one and it was like a freight train barreling down the tracks from then on. We all worked our hardest to deliver the best game we could within the five month process. A few weeks ago we were sitting and talking about how if we could do it again we would have done a lot of the tasks differently, and that is incredibly important because we all learned so much from the experience, the one thing that we wouldn’t have changed was the team.

Our game is available for download on our website www.minimuswillrise.com and you can get in contact with any of us through the website.

Final Project coming to a sudden stop!!!

So for those that don’t know I am in my final months of my Game Design degree and at the very end of my final project. Lead a group of programmers and artists to make a game in 5 months. Easy, right?! Anyway, as of Monday August 16th we are in the last 3 days of production. Overall I am incredibly excited for numerous reasons: 1. I am confident that my team worked to the best of their ability; 2. I took part in making a game and it is my first, Never going to forget it!! those are the most important ones right now. So our game is called “Ludus Magnus”; it is a gladiatorial hack n’ slash with a somewhat cartoony feel. You play the role of Minimus to embark on your treacherous battle for your freedom. We have and endless wave mode that you compete for the top rank on our online leaderboard which can be found on the games website: Minimus Will Rise; I did the design for the layout and my tech lead Mike Gassman, he did the bulk of the programming. We present our game as well on Thursday at Full Sail University at 1 p.m. and we are going to attempt to stream the presentation, check the twitter post on the home page of the website on Wed. or Thur. to get the url for the stream. Also, I am currently applying for jobs as a Producer of some sort; Associate Producer, Producer, Art Manager, etc. I am actively looking or jobs so if any potential employer is reading this my email and other contact information can be found on my website: My Website.

I will post more come presentation day. Wish me luck any comments or questions are greatly appreciated!!

-Tj Salvato

Beta Turn In

So today is Final Project beta turn in. I feel like we have a solid build, the team really busted their ass to get this build together. It may not be perfect but it has come a long way in a short period of time. Come final this game should be extremely clean and polished. We have a few special things we plan on implementing and our website should be up and running here shortly. So what’s new with this build: we have both levels implemented as well as the cyclops boss fight. We have tweeked the menus as well as some clean up throughout the game. Like I said the entire team has busted their asses to get the build together but I wanna give props to my tech, art and design leads for really doing everything they can to get shit done. That’s about it for this post. Any questions or comments just leave a comment.

-TJ

Summer Break

So today summer break officially began for Full Sail students. Prior to today was a rough couple of weeks for Precision Games (My final project team). We put ourselves into crunch mode so our Alpha build of “Ludus Magnus” (Our game) was on point. Luckily, the team acts like a family and our team dynamic is extraordinary. We went from 8 hour days to 12 hour days and doubled the load of work for this milestone. The entire team busted ass to get the job done and for that I am thankful. We presented our game on Wednesday June 30th and it went well. We had a skit to open up the presentation and hype up the crowd, followed by a trailer of the game made by Mike McKenzie; one of the other IPs here at Precision Games. After that we had our Design lead Kai Ting Yen give a brief overview of the game and kind of catch the audience up with the games background; he then passed the mic off to Jared Frenzel, lead animator to discuss the art side of our game. Jared was followed by Mike Gassman, tech lead, to talk a bit about the programming side of our game, then to wrap up the PowerPoint portion Mike handed the mic off to the third IP, Ismael Cintron to discuss a few risks that we are having on production right now and to talk about what’s gone right so far and what hasn’t gone so right. After the PowerPoint presentation Kai took to center stage again to give the audience what they wanted, a visual play through of the game. Kai talked about what was happening on screen while Adam Amos, programmer, played the game. This was then followed graciously by a Q and A session and then finally came to a close.

So far our game is looking amazing and the team is on fire, once our website is up you can expect a link to it and from there you can download the game. Alright, well that’s it for the post, sorry if it dragged on a bit.

-TJ

Day 1… Excited Much?

So this is the first blog post for my new blog! Just want to say that I am excited to post about my thoughts and just how I am feeling about video games, production, leadership, and probably just a few other random topics.

Soooo to get the ball rolling a bit of why I want to talk about the topics of Video Games, Production and Leadership… First and foremost I love video games… they are amazing and for the most part make people happy! Which is why I chose to engage in the Game Design Masters of Science Program at Full Sail University… if you want more info on it just go to Full Sail’s website and you can learn more there. Now i know the name “Design” makes you think that I am in fact pursuing a path to design video games, if you are one of these people then you are in fact WRONG! The program is all about being a producer and being able to lead a team of artists and programmers to produce a video game and engine to run the video game in a 5 month period. Sooo that is a bit of why I want to talk about production, leadership and video games so keep up and hopefully you will find this interesting.

-TJ