Creative Development Week07: Creating a Portfolio

Since joining Twitter i really have been able to get more of an insight within the games industry and this ne piece of insight came from Mark Davies' blogpost on creating a portfolio for the games indutry and with looking at Mark Davies' credentials:

GAMEOGRAPHY

Professional Work:
In Production - Designer - The Last of Us (Naughty Dog - Sony - PS3)
2010 - Lead Designer - Enslaved: Odyssey to the West (Ninja Theory - Namco - PS3/360)
2007 - Lead Level Designer - Heavenly Sword (Ninja Theory - Sony - PS3)
2004 - Senior Designer - Sudeki (Climax - Microsoft - XBox)
2004 - Lead Designer - Serious Sam: Next Encounter (Climax - Global Star - GameCube/PS2)
2002 - Lead Designer - Robot Wars: Arenas of Destruction (Climax - BBC Multimedia - PC/PS2)
2001 - Designer - SpongeBob SquarePants: SuperSponge (Climax - THQ - PSOne)

PUBLICATIONS
2009 - Examining Game Pace -- How Single-Player Levels Tick - GamaSutra.com
2007 - Designing Character Based Console Games - Charles River Media

HOME PROJECTS
In Production - Supernatural Empires - Unity Project
In Production - Golf Wars - Unity Project

having the amount of insightful information from him will be beneficial so i started to read his introduction on how to create a design portfolio and he had broken down each area into five parts such as documentation, level design, game mechanics, gamebalance and playtesting and critical analysis. One  piece of information that had stuck out to me was that he mentions that there isn't many people who bring a design portfolio in for an interview but rather designers would be judged on their perfomance in the the interview or a company design test as the interviewer wouldn't have time to sit through and view many pieces of work. Looking through the sections and just reading further into the sections i found that documenting some of the areas of gaming it would be best but there wasn't any mention of documenting concept art so documenting is not needed for me. The next section being level design wasn't too much towards my area but there were some interesting points in games such as Little Big Planet and engines that could be shownas well as the level design process which actually now looking back favours my modeling side which i would produce levels to further build my level skills, so knowing how to show this would be again beneficial to me. Another section which i do feel that isn't in my area but are some instances which i could use and that is with the game mechanics section such as user feedback and game modding. Once again another area in which isn't really applying much to me is the game balance & playtesting although some parts such as the playtesting will benefit me especially with positioning and perhaps the scale of areas of levels which i may have missed. However the final part of the how to create a design portfolio which was the critical analysis part and reading what Mark Davies had written was pretty much what i believe to have been doing since i learned the fundamentals of the games industry and the processes of producing the game and that is analysing the games i play such as Uncharted 3, figuring out how certain areas of th egame were produced as well as the technique, gameplay and just the overall aspect of game production so that i can use those techniques for my own work.

Here is the link: http://lifeofadesignmonkey.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/how-to-create-design-portfolio.html