Edwin Jones, MSc multimedia engineering student and vice president of Dev Soc, tells how he got his heart set on the world of games.
I started my love affair with games back with ESWAT on the Mega Drive for those of you who can remember it. My brother had an imported version and although it might be considered dated by modern standards, back then it was the paradigm of modern console game design. We didn’t have Modern Warfare 2 or Halo: Reach to keep us busy and nobody had even imagined the idea of a first-person shooter, let alone an online one. Still, I loved the game and, despite not playing it much, my five-year-old mind was baked from soft clay into hard stone – this was to be my path in life.
As I got older, the formats changed but the love didn’t. From Mega Drive and Super Nintendo, then to the PlayStation and N64 I enthralled. I owned (in turn, I had to trade consoles to afford new ones) a PS2, a GameCube and an Xbox, the latter of which would spark my love for online games which sadly has waned somewhat in later years despite my continued struggle to be part of the industry.
Currently I own a 360 and a gaming PC, but I have owned and later traded in a DS, PSP and Wii. I’ve been gaming for 20 years and I’m thankful for all the sheer thrills games have given me for so many years. Some people remember Neil Armstrong landing on the moon. I remember the original Doom coming out via shareware and being too scared to play it at the time – only managed to complete it on the original Xbox as part of the Doom 3 limited edition 11 years later. Some people remember the fall of the Berlin wall. I remember my brother holding a copy of Sonic and Knuckles outside of his window as I came home from school, completing his promise to me that very morning to spend the hard saved money I had given him to buy it for me, as back in 1994 I was not allowed to walk into town on my own.
Truly, mine has been the gamer’s life and whilst some might pity me, I pity them instead as they must clearly not understand my feelings which are part of the heart of an entire generation.
As I grew older, I tried my best to get involved with making games. I was a tester for EA back in 2004 which was perhaps the best paying job of my adult life so far. I hosted some live TV on Game Guru on Game Network in 2005 and 2006. Between those years and now I have written reviews and articles for a variety of gaming websites, yet I have never managed to get a foothold within the industry I love.
Feeling worried about my financial future, I mistakenly undertook and passed a BA in Ancient and Medieval History and to this day regret not grabbing hold on my dream sooner. The dream I am talking about directly is of being part of a development team at a major studio, working on games I love. I finally plucked together the courage to follow my heart, rather than my head, and started mailing universities about graduate courses in late 2008. But without a solid portfolio, I didn’t have much success.
Then I got an email from Dr Graham Tranfield (who works in the school of computing at NTU) who said that I should really talk to a man who had a similar history to me, Mr James Lewis. I arranged a meeting with him in the spring of 2009, was offered a place on my current course and the rest is still being written as history. I don’t know what I said or did to get past the gate that so many others had denied me even seeing without a portfolio, but it was obviously impressive enough to get myself here.
I’ve been working very hard since. I volunteered for GameCity as steward. I attended extra lessons, some run by my own classmates in an attempt to catch up to the undergraduates as I have had no prior coding or 3D modelling experience before October 2009. I attended and, with my far more talented team, came second place at a sponsored Microsoft gamemaking competition, known as X48.
I don’t know if my story ends in success. I don’t know if I will live my dream or not, this is an incredibly competitive industry after all. What I do know however is this: I am happy. I have never had more fun working, nor felt I have learnt as much as I have at NTU. I can model for, code, document and present small scale games I make and whilst they would look simplistic to most, to me they are strides ahead of anything I dreamed I would be able to do even one year ago.
If I can produce the work of an undergraduate who takes three years instead of my one to learn here by the time I leave, I will have gotten what I came here for. My point is this: find you dream and go for it. For me it was game development and if you share that goal, I’d suggest arranging your own meetings with Mr James Lewis and joining the Development Society as soon as possible. If you have a different dream it doesn’t matter what it is, as long as you truly believe in it and you know it is right for you. Go for it. Work for it. Learn. Do whatever it takes, but don’t be put off by your own doubts. Don’t live a life wondering “what if?”
If in a few years time, you see my name during the credits of Modern Warfare 5 or Dead Space 3, you will know I am right.
Good luck to you.
Edwin Jones
Tags: bio, dev soc, developers, dream, students
