Sunday, February 22, 2015

An update

I guess I could give a small update on what I'm doing with my life now. The last post was almost a year ago, after all.
Well, probably the most important thing is the fact, that I was hired by Keen SWH back in autumn. They were, and still are expanding in order to accommodate development of two games at the same time. The old one - Space Engineers, and a new one - Medieval Engineers, that went into early access on Steam a couple of days ago.
At the time when I joined, the whole art department of the studio consisted of two people, who had way too much work to chew through. Medieval was in a very unfinished state then, so I have been making new textures and editing existing models for it. Another guy who was hired along with me has been assigned the creation of collision and destruction models.
Other than that I had the pleasure to make weekly update videos for SE - recording footage, weeding out bugs, discussing functionality with programmers and testers. Before the announcement of ME I had to edit some of the videos for it, as well as make promotional screenshots.
So, while my work consist mainly of making art assets for the games, since the studio is fairly small, I get to do other art-related stuff. Sometimes, even weirder things, like recording the voice over for the tutorial for ME.
Company has employees from various European states. Most are local or from Slovakia. However, everyone is expected to be able to speak at least a bit of English, so language barrier is not a problem.

Concerning general living in Prague, I could say that it's a very pleasant place. Fairly low cost of living, beautiful surroundings, and good public transportation system. My main problem currently is the fact that it's very problematic to get by without speaking Czech or Slovak. While places in tourist areas usually have English or Russian-speaking staff, but that's about it. I am lucky if I stumble upon someone who understands a couple of words in these languages anywhere else.
I guess it's not particularly fair from me to expect everyone here to be multi-lingual. I really need to attend some sort of language courses, because basic phrases in Czech can only get you so far. But it's problematic to find time and energy while working full-time.

So, yea, that's about it. Now I'll just wait until spring is here. I'm tired of this cold weather.