This is how you get hired by Blizzard

I haven’t . I would love to be a part of their team and did apply, but I haven’t heard from them. They say that if you don’t hear from them in 4 weeks, you can consider your application rejected. Now there are a couple of reasons that might be the reason, but more or less I think it’s about having specific skills but not limited to that domain. Here’s a piece of the interview that I read today with Samwise Didlier (he’s the pro who made all Starcraft and Warcraft 3 characters we have come to love).

Karune: So, how would you recommend that other people, like artists, get involved in the video game industry? Or just getting involved to  become artists, you know, full time?

Samwise: Right. Well, for getting into the industry, I would totally recommend taking any kind of courses in Max or Maya or any other 3D programs  because that’s how games are made now. Unless you’re doing Flash-based games, you know, stuff like that, you’re going to be doing 3D. So get  involved in that. Even if you’re just a concept artist like some of the guys on our team, we really want guys that can do, a variety of things.   Like our concept artists on our team, we can all model, we can all texture. We may not be as kick-butt as some of the Blizzard cinematics modelers,  of course, but all the characters in StarCraft II are made by our concept guys and our texture guys and stuff like that. I guess another thing too would be try to be really well-rounded. You know, a lot of places just want a guy who’s a texture artist and all and that’s great but, if you can,  if you’re just a texture artist but then you can also model stuff and texture your own things, then, all of a sudden, you’re worth more. Like “Man,  we can count on this guy to do whatever.”

That’s the secret. That’s what I am going to work on this year of rediscovering talent. There are 3 designers who I know in real life that have impressed me a lot and hopefully someday I can make stuff that’s worthy of their attention. Check them out – Naina, Nikux, Dubey.

I met Naina like once in Gurgaon but was very impressed with her work on Design. She has a great blog and keeps spamming twitter and facebook all the time, so you can’t really miss her .

Nikux, is a junior who studied with me in IITK, there is only one word to express his skill :- Wow. I remember us putting together a poster for our gaming tournament and I sat 2 days with him. I had to pay up in icecream and canteen treats, but you should have seen the poster that came out of the lad. Fantastic. I wish I get a copy of it from somewhere.

Dubey’s the guru of everything photoshop. I have been bugging him to get me started on learning photoshop and design in general and I think he’s really got it into him to convert his fantastic talent of photography to something in Design. You should seriously check out his photographs, guys a pro !

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Tip to watch Youtube HD quality videos real quick

I was surfing one of the channels on Youtube that I subscribe to and I came across this great tip.

Follow these instructions to get the best quality out of my videos:

1. Click on the HD button once it is available (takes about 20 minutes after the video first shows up on Youtube).
2. If your computer can handle HD video, type the code “&fmt=22″ at the end of the web address for the video and hit enter. You’ll now get full quality, 30 frames per second…it’s AMAZING!

If your computer cannot handle HD, then type the code “&fmt=35″ for a non-HD version, also with great framerate. Enjoy! Thanks darksydephil

I has the iPhone!

That’s right. My brother decided to opt for the erstwhile G1 Android developer phone and I was left with this shiny showcasy “digitial media” equipment. Sure I heard the buzz around and everyone seems to have an iPhone so I was kind of cussing since I had my eye set on the Nokia E71.

What a f-in fool I was to think that.

The iPhone is perhaps the single best piece of Hardware I have ever possessed. There is such beauty and elegance to it that it wants to make me cry. I have the 2g 16gb version, which I think is far better than the 3g Version and since I am going to be in India for sometime, there is really no need for me to rush to get that version. The peeps in India are slow when it comes to the net.

In the next 5 days I spent with the iPhone I learnt all about Jailbreaking, why should one jailbreak the phone, getting SSH installed and running a remote telnet login into with WinSCP. Most of these things are common place to hardcore users, but to someone like me who has never gotten that techy with hardware, there was a certain elation when I got things working.

I now have the pdf  reader app called Docs installed. I have the latest version of Installer (which I don’t think is all that hot) and most important three great apps called

Cydia – for running all your customisation needs and especially useful because it’s maintained really well

Facebook – cause we have to you know? This is a fantastic app for facebook and has so many features.

Twitterific – this seriously is far better than the mozilla extensions.

I am currently looking at the Air Sharing app for reading pdfs because the ad in the Docs app is annoying after a while.

I also learnt that all ringtones are stored in the .m4r format and all video files in the .mp4 format, so I have to get most of my videos converted. But with this beautiful machine, I can’t have asked for a better thing to pass my time with. If you need any help with your iPhone 2g, drop me a comment or hit me up in the email and i’ll do my best to help and perhaps learn from you too.

Most of the apps that I get are downloaded from the iTunes software. You basically register a login/password first. Then download the app you want and while synching the iPhone you basically choose to synch and then you have it installed !

I would have to give mad props to Cydia and BossPrefs, 2 apps that has made my life SO much easier than before. I’d also have to believe in that nothing cannot be done if you are willing to spend the time and not get frustrated by what you see. It also helps that there are cool friends to help you out as well.

Kage is now iPhone powered yo.

Many happy returns of the day Bro

Everyone reading this can drop in a birthday wish to my younger brother Kaushik who celebrates his birthday today (20th March). Fine young man like his elder brother this lad is. So I got together some pals and this is what they had to say (click link for bigger pic)

Update – Soul Searching Memoirs.

I know it’s been a long time and many great people have mentioned that I shouldn’t start with an apology. So I wont.

I’m working on a couple of things, one of them is finding out the goal or the direction to do what it is i want to be recognised as/with. It pains me to see that half competent nincompoops making their way to millions of dollars with half the talent that i possess. That’s not an arrogant statement or a boastful one. It is to say that there is a missing thing in me that these people have. While we are on the same field as far as “raw skill” goes and even more bestowed in some areas, the primary reason I am not doing what I am doing or you aren’t taking that next step is because you are afraid.

What if you give up that cushion of comfort and be pushed into the unknown? Can you handle the fear of losing everything? I used to think dictums like “when you have lost everything you have nothing to lose so go on etc”. But that’s not really my problem. My problem is I am unable to zero in on that particular thing or skill I want to do and want to achieve greatness is.

So how do you determine that?

What I have done is to list my passions in order to find some sort of confluence or congruence in the patterns while extending it to find a fit in an industry that can pay. All talk is cheap when you don’t get some monetary benefit. You don’t have to work ONLY for the benefit, but you do need some healthy sustenance once in a while.

I have been doing a lot of soul searching and for some reason I’m not able to target down a list of 2-3 items that I want to be the best at. So once that is done, I should hopefully write a lot more on that topic, but for now I’ll leave you with some great career advice from Scott Adams.

I recommend a general formula for success. Allow me to explain.

If you want an average successful life, it doesn’t take much planning. Just stay out of trouble, go to school, and apply for jobs you might like. But if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths:

1. Become the best at one specific thing.
2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things.

The first strategy is difficult to the point of near impossibility. Few people will ever play in the NBA or make a platinum album. I don’t recommend anyone even try.

The second strategy is fairly easy.

Read the rest of this gold post here.