Events O' Plenty

Today I signed up / bought tickets for upcoming industry events I identified through my strategy plan research.

I got tickets for:

• Games Education Summit (21/04 @09:30 - 22/04 @16:00)

• Everything Procedural Conference (22/04 @09:00 - 15:30)

• GamesBeat Summit (26/04 @16:00 - 29/04 @01:00)

• Tech & Tools Summit (10/05 @07:00 - 11/04 @22:30)

The first two overlap, so I will decide which one to attend closer to date / based on how day 1 of Games Edu Summit goes.

The 3rd one is in California, so it has awkward timings, so how much of it I attend depends on what's on, what my schedule looks like and whether I feel able to (I don't want to wreck my sleep for it).

I am also waiting to hear back from Games Job Fair Spring (27/04 - 29/04) which would be a great opportunity and it would 100% trump GamesBeat.

Finally, there are a few events which I'm still deciding if I can attend, the main factor is money, for both the tickets are ~£200, which is a lot, plus they're in July. The events are DIGRA (07/07 - 11/07) and Develo:Brighton (12/07-14/07). The former I'd attend online, the latter in person.

Honrable mentions: devcom Pitch it! Spring Edition and UKIE Games Demo Day, which unfortunatly, although great opportunities, I don't think are right for me - they're events aimed at pitching products for funding, and I am not currently at a stage where I have a product I want to pitch.

#GAconf Europe Day 1

Today I attended #GAconf Europe.

It was a very interesting event full of wonderful and useful information.

Some things I've learned:

1) Usability is accessibility - "if it's not accessible, it's not usable". This is the idea that well thought out usability / UX greatly, if not fully, overlap with accessibility. This makes great sense to me, great UX is easy, simple and adaptable. I think that's the key here - accessibility needs things to be adaptable to be able to fit the individual's needs. It might be tempting to have some hard presets, hoping they cover everything, but accessibility needs are too personal and too much of a multi-dimensional spectrum to be so easily quantified and neatly packaged. This is reflected in some parts of the industry, where the same department takes care of them both (I know I myself for others have given both usability and accessibility feedback mixed together into one since they're so tightly related).

2) Start accessibility research and testing early and have a plan/roadmap, it will pay off in the long run by helping to build the product with accessibility ingrained, not retrofitted. Also, it might be a good idea to have the usability & accessibility team not tell the devs what they'll test next, as devs tend to quickly cram in features to meet that and ignore others, rather than implementing them as they go - i.e. to keep them on their toes. The latter part came with a "this might not work for all, but it's what fits our studio" disclaimer.

3) Pay your research/testing participants for their knowledge - I mean this one just makes sense to me, they are there to give you feedback (personal, valuable info), so naturally they should be compensated for sharing it with you. But more than that, accommodate them and check their needs beforehand - then if it's not a fit for test X, you can try to fit them in for test Y.

4) The pandemic, or more precisely the wide and rapid adaptation and evolution of the online format, has been beneficial to accessibility testing/research. It's highlighted the importance of allowing the option of doing it online. For example, participants might have a more suitable environment and/or equipment at their desired location; or in mixed sessions, it's easier to keep their adjustments/disabilities hidden from other participants, in some cases promoting a more organic session and data.

5) This is cheeky, but sometimes a necessary one - if you're struggling to get your bosses to give accessibility research the funding you need, dress it up as usability. This is a sad one because one should not be seen as worth more than the other, especially if we go back to point 1, but unfortunately, accessibility still has a long way to go in terms of being widely adapted and correctly valued.

The general consensus was that "every little helps" - doing the best you can, even if it's only a little bit, is better than nothing.

The whole conference, broken into chunks can be found here: https://www.gaconf.com/gaconf-europe-online-2022/ - a resource I know I will come back to many times down the road.

One deadline special, please

So normally I try to take weekends off, thus I haven't been posting here on those days, but with the (shader tool) deadline just around the corner, I had to work this weekend.

So this weekend I have:

• Added a skybox to the scene

• Added skybox reflection to the (material's) specular reflection

• Started implementing Normal Mapping

• Added alpha map discarding

So far I'm very happy with it. I had a problem where the reflected skybox did not match with the scene's skybox (which moves with the camera but does not rotate with it), but the solution to that turned out to be fairly simple - the surface's reflected vector has to be rotated using the inverse of the scene's rotation (remember that the camera doesn't move or rotate, the scene moves and rotates around it).

I also began implementing normal mapping for some of the objects, as well as alpha map discarding.