Today we visited the video game art company known as Glass Egg. A company that is very, very successful in their field as they have worked with many companies on all kinds of games. We learned about their company structure and saw their strategies as to how they are able to competitive in the video game industry. Their portfolio was way bigger than I thought at first and many of the games they have worked on are games I have played so it was really cool to see them listed. Glass Egg has several divisions that work on many different areas of game design, such as: character, environment and more, however this is not their largest division, that title is reserved for their vehicle making market. I believe Glass Egg’s stronghold on the vehicle design market is due largely in part to their partnership with Microsoft on the Forza series. Forza is one of the biggest racing game series and relies heavily on Glass Egg to get anything done as they make roughly 90% of all cars in Forza which brings them a great deal of attention. They have been the lead designers behind the cars since the 3rd installment in the franchise with no end in site. We were told that they have made about 2600 cars for the Forza franchise alone which is just an insane number to me. It is no wonder they have become the top designer of vehicles in the world as they have tons of practice making vehicles of all varieties. They also have designed farming equipment and airplanes in Farming Simulator and Flight Simulator respectively. Their experience, talent, and hard work has landed them in a spot at the top, a force to be reckoned with, and for newcomers a company that is impossible to pass.
After visiting their office we ate lunch and then headed back out to the Trigger Boxing. This gym had a boxing ring (go figure) and tons of punching bags hanging for us to smack around. We began our sports day with some stretches and a few laps around the gym. Running can be fun but I prefer to do it outside rather than in hot and humid and sweaty gyms but I managed. Then he had us do far too many squats and push ups in far too short a time. My legs are still feeling that and they might when I wake up tomorrow. Our last little exercise was to throw many rapid punches at a punching bag which was fine until near the end where my hands were giving up as I couldn’t make a fist anymore. When all was said and done I was drenched in sweat from head to toe and any water I drank was immediately turned into sweat. Our warm ups and exercises were led by a professional Vietnamese boxer whose name I did not catch but he was very cool and a great leader for today. Along with him I had a personal trainer today in the form of Hoang, who was a UEF student that did MMA style fighting and he showed me some good ways to throw a punch. Some of the Pitt students were able to spar some of the Vietnamese gym goers which was cool to watch. They only lightly tapped each other rather than throwing full force punches to avoid hurting each other. I didn’t step into the ring because I was worried even my lightest of punches was enough to get a KO. To end the sports day we played some relay races that were fun but I only played one of the two there were. One of the races had the players juggle a little doohickey like you would a soccer ball and it reminded me that soccer is so much more popular than any other sport in the US and it always surprises me for some reason. I didn’t take many pictures today so my blog pictures will be slightly lacking but that’s okay because I saw this dog.
