Wednesday 22 April 2015

Oysterworld Games



As well as Framestore, this week we also had an industry talk from Oysterworld.

Oyterworld are an independent games company based in Wales. They have been growing in size and success over the last few years and plan to continue to grow the company. Oysterworld produce games mainly for the casual games market targeted towards children such as 'Garden Party'. They also are working on 'hidden object' games which are very popular with 30+ females.

It was really interesting to be able to see the process of making one of these games. We were shown both the Art and Animation side of their creation process, each with their own required skills. The over-arching advice for us was to practice practice practice! Keep striving to get better and better. As well as practicing, self teaching was also pushed by them This shows you have the drive to learn more about what you do and the initiative to do it yourself.

We were also informed and given some great advice for applying for a job at Oysterworld. Part of the process for animators is that we would be given a character to rig and then animate a few tests with it. The tests include a walk and a jump. This is to further gauge the talents of the individual and also to judge their attitude to work. I found it very interesting that these tests were also to judge the applicants personality. When an applicant is lazy, it shows through in the work they produce, its obvious if you cut corners or do not properly read the brief.

As well as the tests we were informed on interviews. The main advice was to 'be a nice person'. I was surprised to hear they have interviewed people who have come across as rude. If you are at an interview stage, the likelihood is they want to hire you, but they need to know if you are a person they would want to have on their team.

The people from Oysterworld were lovely and their talk was really useful. They came across as a great bunch of people and an awesome company to work for. They all have a lot of enthusiasm for what they do. The talk was packed full of all sorts of advice, but my favorite was that if you dont feel that you are good enough for the job or industry then go away and work as hard as you can till you are.

Also a great parting advice was "SLEEP!",  that is something that I definitely need to work on.


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