 Hey there beautiful people, I'm here at EGX Rest and what I've been doing is talking to developers and educators today so I've been talking to the developers of games and people representatives from university to get them to tell me the best way to get into games. So have a look at what they've said and hopefully it'll be helpful to you. So I got into working games, I started as an intern working at introversion during my third year. After that after I graduated I sort of took a year doing my own sort of small projects and my own games after that because introversion knew me they sort of you know sent me an email they knew I was doing sort of like freelance work and I just went hey we have a small job do you want to do it? I went yes and then since then I've just gotten more and more work from them more or less. So I got into making games based on that I used to play a lot of games when I was younger so things like Nintendo 64 I used to love Zelda Ocarina of Time and alongside that I used to be really into art and just creating paintings or drawings. Originally I went to university to do fine art but I quickly realised that that just wasn't for me and I was just a little bit more techie so basically I got into making games just by looking at courses and realising that having an art background and combining that with a technical background you could make some really cool stuff for games. I got into it when I was in high school then just followed it on from college to uni to then pretty much since then. Making like a small prototype game because a friend said I want to do this, this and this I built a small prototype then he's doing that from there but then that project kind of got shelved but then I moved on to projects like Stanley's Adventures in Space to my career when I went to AR. I didn't really know what I wanted to do and then I just knew I was OK at art and I thought what can I do to make money out of this and there were a lot of courses that were doing games but we decided we both went on to the Dunnington course for games design and animation and I just really enjoyed it and now we've got a game, here we are. I have very boring college speeches so I've started painting things on my speeches in college and I've sent paintings to many developers and one of them picked me up and how I'm here. Make your own games, have your own projects, it doesn't matter what the size there are but show your particular focus so if you're an audio of like find a small team that works together make something that shows how your process works like to probably be to sort of work on your own projects like build a portfolio of work that you could continually just take to a person and say hey this is the thing that I have made and just have something that shows that you have experience working in games whether it's your own games or it's like a small Unity project or if it's like here is a mod or like something that's out there like Star Isis or whatever anything that has like there are a few games that have mod tools nowadays but they're still out there and a lot of them you'd be able to show regardless of what discipline you're actually looking to work in. Try, really hard. The best thing I could say to get into making games is not always to play them because what I found is we played a lot of games and you almost feel like it's going to be unreachable like you'll never be able to make that level of game. The best thing you can do is start from scratch start from the bottom. Your work will look like crap all the time but that pushes you to get a lot better. Yeah and what we found really useful was just looking online at tutorials, following step-by-step guides, going wrong, learning from your mistakes. Feedback, constant feedback from people on forums like this Facebook group called 10,000 hours and always posting your work because any critique is a good critique because you're getting feedback all the time. And also I take your portfolio out there at an early stage because you never know who you're going to meet so we come to events like EJX or Res all the time. We have for the last four or five years and each time we've come we've had a portfolio online giving business cards out or exchanging emails with people let them look at your portfolio and they can give you feedback or they can even offer you a job or say yeah this is good this is bad just don't be ashamed to show what you've got even if you think it's not that good yet because everyone always gets better like we never thought we'd be here with a game. No couldn't even 3D about four years ago. Yeah that's it yeah so you will get there. Think about what you want to make then do research on to see if it's been done before if it's not find out why then if it has been done but not in such a scale then try to build it just using small prototype text stuff like Unity or real depending on what your programming level is but then just build upon what you you know and what you've done before. The most important thing to get somewhere you need to you need to make things don't think and not only think about them but making things you need to still improve yourself and make new things over and over again to and trying new things to have more ideas and be better artists in my situation for example. Okay so that's what the developers I spoke to said but I also spoke to some educators none of whom were brave enough to appear on camera so I'm just gonna kind of paraphrase what they told me so I did speak to the University of Huddersfield and Teeside University as well both are quite well known for their gaming courses in the UK they asked for pretty much one thing in particular which was grafters they didn't mention portfolios they didn't mention what education they've done before they wanted people the thing they were looking for to set people apart was that they were willing to work hard not that they completed assignments that they had made things in their own time and they were proud of them so that is something you need to throw in there as well. Right so I hope all that information has been useful to you thanks for watching any comments or questions leave them below and I'll see you in the next one. Laters.