I am giving another talk to a group of high school students on the 20th about the game industry and would like to get some feedback on what I covered before and see how to tune it up. This groups is for a math class so I will be emphasizing the real world working uses of the techniques they are learning even more so than this talk. But I haven't finished the modifications yet. Slides from the prior talk at Santa Monica Library are at: http://www.game-tech.com/GameTechTalk/D3D_SMLibrary.pdf Audio in two parts if you care to listen at: http://www.game-tech.com/GameTechTalk/SMLibrary1.mp3 http://www.game-tech.com/GameTechTalk/SMLibrary2.mp3 I appreciate any feedback.

I'm looking through them right know, so I'ld post more in a moment, but I just saw that you spelled Networking: "Networkking" on slide 8 in the D3D_SMLibrary.pdf file.

EDIT:
First I have to ask one thing, since I'm not attending an American school I dont know exactly how it works, but is this a talk people can choose whether they want to attend to or not? I'm assuming they have to attend, but I could be wrong.

I like how you show them math is involved in game development, instead of just saying "You use math, but I dont want to show it".

One thing I think is a little weird is that the last slide(29) is "No math for me! I do the audio", it is even after the conclusion.

I thought the numbers in the beginning (budgets, team size, hardware, etc.) was interresting, but I'm glad you didn't focus on numbers the whole way through since some people just cant keep focused when being presented with lots of numbers.

I really cant find anything negative, but if I find something I will post again.

[Edited by - CTar on October 6, 2005 2:32:17 PM]

Thanks. Will fix the typo. The Sound slide was there just because I decided not to use it but kept it around in case I wanted to mention it or the question came up.

For the talk that I gave these slides at, the audience chose to come, there were flyers posted. The one coming up is for a class and I am a guest speaker so they have to be there. Though they have sent notice that they are very excited to have me give the talk.

I appreciate the input.

I read over your document. There is a lot of good information in there, specifically about the types of jobs available. I would be interested in seeing more description of the jobs and what kind of skills/personality fits work for the, most importantly for the production roles since they are more ambigous compared to programmers, artists and audio engineers.

I also think that some of the timelines that you propose for games as well as team sizes may be too long or big, respectively, but that's not too important. A 1.5 year development time in production seems huge and certainly a luxury I've never enjoyed on any of the titles I have shipped.

Slide 22 reads: 'I am created a puzzle...' seems like a grammar error to me. Grammar is not listed on the skills required, but I think it should be fixed <grin>. Same error reads on slide 23.

A good overview given the target age group. Hope it goes well.

- S

Thanks for the feedback. Harsh is fine with me.

I am using open office since I really don't like powerpoint but one thing I haven't got to work at all well is the equation editor. It definitely could use a snazzier background (programmer art you know :)). I am rewriting the whole math section so I will rework those. For the SM talk I just put the math up there to get a little shock before I went into how simple it is in concept.

I tend to try not to over explain where I am going on slides because people just tend to read them and not listen and the speaker just tends to read along. Makes it less interactive. I use them more as an outline and notes. The talk outline is a jump point for various examples and explainations. But I will look at doing some better diagrams of advanced techniques. My IK demo is always good for some laughs.