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Diplomaticus posted:Usually they don't differentiate. Kotaku, Xplay, Joystiq, Mashable, all those guys use the main press room (which has led to some great conversations with them.)  Plus, panels keep me occupied almost all day. I need to find some time to sit in the press room and talk to dudes, but there's so many reveals this time around (Carbine's new game, Skyrim, etc.) that my Google Calendar schedule is pretty freakin' packed on Friday and Saturday except in the morning.
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Aug 12, 2011 07:02
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So, first week at Raven is over: I'm having a lot of fun! The work is right in line with what I'm used to doing, and it was pretty easy to get set up and going. Its insane to be working with some of the people who inspired me to want to do design for a living. I'm working with people who worked on Heretic! I remember my dad bringing that home and playing it with him most of the night! Getting swag left and right, working with my idols, I can't believe I'm doing this!
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Aug 13, 2011 09:33
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I'm guessing you're on CoD then? I really want more Singularity.
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Aug 13, 2011 10:16
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Irish Taxi Driver posted:Getting swag left and right, working with my idols, I can't believe I'm doing this! Livin the dream.  
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Aug 13, 2011 10:58
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Anyone work at Crowdstar? Went in to pitch them a game for their development fund, ended up having the CEO call to offer me a job on Friday.
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Aug 14, 2011 01:46
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Comrade Flynn posted:Anyone work at Crowdstar? Went in to pitch them a game for their development fund, ended up having the CEO call to offer me a job on Friday. Update: Here's a press release that's more informal than it probably ought to be, but it still kinda works for the content it covers: http://retroaffect.com/paxprime2011/ M4rk fucked around with this message at 04:28 on Aug 14, 2011 |
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Aug 14, 2011 04:22
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M4rk posted:Gotta be a smallish place if the CEO's making recruitment calls. Not that that's a bad thing, mind you, just less chance of goons being present. About 150 people. The position would be working with the CEO, so I guess that's why he made the call.
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Aug 14, 2011 05:15
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And I do believe I am responsible for a titlequote.  Also, haven't been ignoring you, Shalinor, it's just been mad busy on this trip and I haven't had time. I'll get back to you ASAP.
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Aug 14, 2011 06:31
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Comrade Flynn posted:Anyone work at Crowdstar? Went in to pitch them a game for their development fund, ended up having the CEO call to offer me a job on Friday. I have a friend who just started at CrowdStar and I got the impression that the management of the company is very hands-on (in a good way)
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Aug 14, 2011 20:59
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Ramen Ocelot posted:I have a friend who just started at CrowdStar and I got the impression that the management of the company is very hands-on (in a good way) Well, he just called and asked if I could be there tomorrow (I'm going to have to fly up), so this should be interesting! Who's your friend?
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Aug 14, 2011 22:32
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Comrade Flynn posted:Well, he just called and asked if I could be there tomorrow (I'm going to have to fly up), so this should be interesting! Who's your friend? I was gonna send you a PM but you have them turned off. 
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Aug 15, 2011 15:29
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Oh I am totally stressing out now. Rockstar wants to send me a two hour timed programming test. Last time I took one of of those it was in a web form that you had to do all of your work in, and they didn't give you any debugger or data set to work with. My naive implementation ran perfectly for a simple data set but failed for odd or huge data sets, and I got a terrible score as a result. If it's another test like that I'll get another horrible score and then I'll be out of a job at a great place. I asked the nice HR lady if there's any particular style I should be shooting for but she probably won't give me a solid answer. Any suggestions?
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Aug 16, 2011 02:08
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Vino posted:Oh I am totally stressing out now. Rockstar wants to send me a two hour timed programming test. Last time I took one of of those it was in a web form that you had to do all of your work in, and they didn't give you any debugger or data set to work with. My naive implementation ran perfectly for a simple data set but failed for odd or huge data sets, and I got a terrible score as a result. If it's another test like that I'll get another horrible score and then I'll be out of a job at a great place. I mean why trust some place with your talent if they don't care enough about their own future employees to design a test correctly? :l M4rk fucked around with this message at 03:02 on Aug 16, 2011 |
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Aug 16, 2011 02:59
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M4rk posted:Try it and don't feel bad if it's one of those kind of lovely tests again. If you fail, just tell yourself you probably didn't want to work at a place that doesn't know how to set up a proper test anyhow. The theory goes that it's better to reject promising candidates than it is to pass through useless candidates. This is accurate, so long as you have a surplus of applicants, which holds true for most well-known game studios. If you've got solid experience, they don't run you through the same process. That's, generally, a culling they only apply to junior applicants.
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Aug 16, 2011 03:27
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To put things in perspective, the recruiter at our studio says she had been getting on average 100 CVs a day for the position I landed. I also had a one hour screening test, and performed pretty badly on it due to getting hung up on a single open-ended question instead of spending more time on the quick debugging ones. I guess my long-winded analysis still managed to impress because they followed through with an interview afterwards. All the while, I'd drafted up a sob apology reply asking for a second test, for whenever they'd turn me down.  So don't worry too much about screening tests.
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Aug 16, 2011 04:30
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M4rk posted:Try it and don't feel bad if it's one of those kind of lovely tests again. If you fail, just tell yourself you probably didn't want to work at a place that doesn't know how to set up a proper test anyhow. Because I reaaaaaaaally want that job! It's fuckin Rockstar.  Thank you Jan I'll sleep a little lighter. I'll just do the best I can.
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Aug 16, 2011 06:15
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Shalinor posted:The theory goes that it's better to reject promising candidates than it is to pass through useless candidates. This is accurate, so long as you have a surplus of applicants, which holds true for most well-known game studios. This is 100% correct. What you have to keep in mind is that, in my experience at least, the amount of damage a bad programmer can do is truly astounding.
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Aug 16, 2011 07:08
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Aramis posted:This is 100% correct. What you have to keep in mind is that, in my experience at least, the amount of damage a bad programmer can do is truly astounding. Especially with games expecting a million+ copies sold and with 100's of millions of dollars budgets.
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Aug 16, 2011 08:59
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Aramis posted:This is 100% correct. What you have to keep in mind is that, in my experience at least, the amount of damage a bad programmer can do is truly astounding. And in my experience, those are the guys that are kept on and get raises because they are the only ones that can maintain their lovely code.
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Aug 16, 2011 10:47
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Anyone make it to Dare to be Digital ProtoPlay this weekend? If you missed it I made a video.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scHKYDUwRm8
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Aug 16, 2011 14:10
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BizarroAzrael posted:And in my experience, those are the guys that are kept on and get raises because they are the only ones that can maintain their lovely code. This is so relevant (and old) it hurts, but I imagine there might be some people haven't seen it.
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Aug 16, 2011 14:19
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So what then would you guys say a company like Rockstar (or Obsidian, Valve, Bethesda, etc) would be looking for in this kind of test in terms of style? Maybe they're looking for developers who are modular and data driven and thorough or maybe just people who can write extensible code quickly? Or is it just a mass culling of skills? Perhaps they're just going to cull every score below a certain number of place on the curve and they don't care about the style? What should I focus on during the test?
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Aug 16, 2011 16:16
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Vino posted:So what then would you guys say a company like Rockstar (or Obsidian, Valve, Bethesda, etc) would be looking for in this kind of test in terms of style? Maybe they're looking for developers who are modular and data driven and thorough or maybe just people who can write extensible code quickly? Or is it just a mass culling of skills? Perhaps they're just going to cull every score below a certain number of place on the curve and they don't care about the style? What should I focus on during the test? If you want to prepare, spend your time online looking at example questions and answers from other programming quizzes, and get your mind firmly into that puzzly answer space. These are typically run by staffing agencies that draw on relatively generic question sets, they save the domain-specific questions for the phone or whiteboard interviews.
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Aug 16, 2011 17:20
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Vino posted:Oh I am totally stressing out now. Rockstar wants to send me a two hour timed programming test. Last time I took one of of those it was in a web form that you had to do all of your work in, and they didn't give you any debugger or data set to work with. My naive implementation ran perfectly for a simple data set but failed for odd or huge data sets, and I got a terrible score as a result. If it's another test like that I'll get another horrible score and then I'll be out of a job at a great place. Look on the bright side: if you don't get the job you'll get to keep your life. Rockstar is legendary for working people ridiculous hours. Vino posted:So what then would you guys say a company like Rockstar (or Obsidian, Valve, Bethesda, etc) would be looking for in this kind of test in terms of style? Maybe they're looking for developers who are modular and data driven and thorough or maybe just people who can write extensible code quickly? Or is it just a mass culling of skills? Perhaps they're just going to cull every score below a certain number of place on the curve and they don't care about the style? What should I focus on during the test? IME no one is going to look terribly hard at your code. If your test works (including for tricky data sets) you could have written it in brainfuck and you'd get to the next stage.
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Aug 16, 2011 18:30
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Jaytan posted:Look on the bright side: if you don't get the job you'll get to keep your life. Rockstar is legendary for working people ridiculous hours. Yeah, I don't want to take the wind out of your sails (and hopefully things have improved over there), but we interviewed a few Rockstar San Diego refugees who got laid off after 2 years of crunch on Red Dead. Didn't sound pleasant.
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Aug 16, 2011 18:41
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Jaytan posted:you could have written it in brainfuck and you'd get to the next stage. They would especially pass him if he'd done it in brainfuck in 2 hours. 
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Aug 16, 2011 18:59
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I can't remember if we've done this excersise before: please forgive me if this is a repeat. If you were starting your own dev studio, how many people would you hire before you would bring in someone who wasn't a programmer or an artist? Let's assume your ambitions are fairly large and you intend to build something that could use dozens of people. But you're not going to scale to that number overnight. I assume pretty much everybody would start out with a programmer, or at least a level-design/scripter person if working in a very high level engine. Ideally a programmer-artist but those are pretty rare. Then obviously person #2 is an artist. But where to go from there? There are needs in game design, testing, PR, and business development that will arise early on, but in my opinion they could be covered by the founding programmers and artists as side-efforts for quite a while. At 5 or 6 people I probably bring in (or transition an existing employee) a dedicated game designer. This person is responsible for level scripting and game data tweaking, as well as writing design specs for upcoming features. As the studio grows this person hires another tech designer or two to do the scripting etc. and spends more of their time on the creative vision and design specs. Around 10 people you probably need a lead artist and a lead programmer (the founders are probably the de-facto leads anyway, though), though these leads always have direct hands-on development responsibility. I think I get to 20-30 people before I bring in a dedicated BizDev/PR person, and a dedicated studio manager/producer (probably one of the founders). I would never hire dedicated QA staff. QA would come from a combination of team members wearing a QA hat at various times, publisher-provided QA (if applicable), and alpha/beta community.
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Aug 16, 2011 19:21
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I guess the only thing to that I could add is that often you'll need a bizdev person to help secure funding if that's an issue, but both bd and pr can be outsourced / contracted easily.
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Aug 16, 2011 19:25
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Let's see... the only startup I've been a part of had the following hires in order (these happened over the course of a year+): CEO/BizDev/Founder guy, engineer/designer, engineer, artist, artist, designer/engineer, artist, designer/engineer/soundguy, engineer, marketing guy (who was let go pretty shortly thereafter), animator, engineer, qa/engineer, engineer. At this point, I kind of lose track. We hovered around 10-15 for 3 years until we were acquired. devilmouse fucked around with this message at 20:01 on Aug 16, 2011 |
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Aug 16, 2011 19:58
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DancingMachine posted:I think I get to 20-30 people before I bring in a dedicated BizDev/PR person, and a dedicated studio manager/producer (probably one of the founders).
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Aug 16, 2011 21:11
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Tricky Ed posted:The Epic/iD/Crytek method is one way to go - make an amazing engine and a game that shows it off, then make profit off of engine licensing. Trouble is, there aren't that many companies that can make an amazing engine. First, Epic pretty much seized the "big engine" market with UE2, largely by being much more serious about marketing it than Id and mostly being a better product than everything else. Having it, and with lack of very many viable alternatives, they created a very anti-competitive licensing scheme where major publishers sunk a large fee up front and in return can add new UE3 titles very cheaply. Second, a lot of the attempts, even solid ones, have failed. Serious Engine got a few licensees, but none survived long enough to publish a title. 4D Rulers' engines got used by a couple budget titles. Crytek and Lithtech (the latter of which is a zombie) have actually had difficulty getting licensees due to Epic, mainly picking up developers do not already have an Unreal license like smaller Korean/European publishers. CE3 is a much more serious attempt to dislodge Unreal and might open up the field a bit. Third, with increasing publisher ownership of studios, more resources are being spent on proprietary engines since they can be scaled to more games. I believe Sony Santa Monica, Naughty Dog, and Insomniac are all using Kinetica spinoffs. EA is making Frostbite. Activision has been using COD's engine tech for Bond license games. Square Enix appears to be planning to use the engine from FFXIII for other titles, and they own Eidos so it may filter down there as well. Basically, the only way to dislodge UE3 right now is either sell your engine for a stupidly low price (Unity, Source) or pack it to the brim with features (CryEngine 3). Oh yeah, and with UDK, they're trying to compete in the budget tier too. OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 21:54 on Aug 16, 2011 |
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Aug 16, 2011 21:21
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Shalinor posted:Just focus on writing really damned good code. Yeah, but define "good code." If they're just sorting people by skill level and culling the bottom then I'll turn out on the top of the list. But I've done a few programming tests where they're looking for more than just that during the test. They want to see if I do "extensible/data driven" versus "quickly written and fun" or if I'm thorough with test cases and thinking about security or if I'm more of a systems architect or whatever. Or am I just overthinking this? Jaytan posted:Look on the bright side: if you don't get the job you'll get to keep your life. Rockstar is legendary for working people ridiculous hours. Sounds like what I work anyway. @DancingMachine I would put more focus on a concept artist, within the first 5 hires. I would also move the PR guy also up to inside the first 5 hires. It would be Designer/Programmer, Concept Artist, PR, Artist, Programmer, something like that.
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Aug 16, 2011 21:25
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Founder: Should be a programmer or artist 1st Hire/Co-Founder: should be whichever the founder is not (both of these people should have reasonable design chops too 3rd: Artist 4th: Programmer 5th: Programmer if tech-heavy studio, Artist if content-focused studio (One of these first five NEEDS to have a head for business) 6th: Programmer or Artist or Designer 7th: Programmer or Artist or Designer ... 10thish: Producer ... 15thish: Studio manager / HR person ... 20thish: One or more founders are now acting in more business or director-facing roles, and you really need to have installed reporting and planning structures. (but it doesn't usually work out this cleanly - often, one of the founders will be a business'y or producer'y type person without code/art skills, and every studio is different / will evolve differently to suit its needs) EDIT: VVV djkillingspree posted:One of these things does not belong
Shalinor fucked around with this message at 21:39 on Aug 16, 2011 |
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Aug 16, 2011 21:35
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Shalinor posted:On the one hand, you know, LEGO wouldn't be as cool to work for as some big studio - it's not a Sucker Punch, or an Obsidian, or a Bioware, or a Valve, but on the other... One of these things does not belong
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Aug 16, 2011 21:37
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Vino posted:Yeah, but define "good code." If they're just sorting people by skill level and culling the bottom then I'll turn out on the top of the list. But I've done a few programming tests where they're looking for more than just that during the test. They want to see if I do "extensible/data driven" versus "quickly written and fun" or if I'm thorough with test cases and thinking about security or if I'm more of a systems architect or whatever. Each studio I think has its own style (not literal style in terms of ANSI or K&R or whatever, but more OO vs. more C-like) and it's really hard to guess what the studio's style is without knowing ahead of time. But a good studio should recognize a good programmer regardless of the style you program in.
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Aug 16, 2011 21:40
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Shalinor posted:I like Obsidian I do too, I work here. But we're not that big tbqh!~
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Aug 16, 2011 21:41
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You guys thinking about starting something? I'll do PR for free until you start making millions.
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Aug 16, 2011 21:52
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I've got ideas.
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Aug 16, 2011 21:55
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Aliginge posted:I've got ideas.
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Aug 16, 2011 21:58
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M4rk posted:You guys thinking about starting something? I'll do PR for free until you start making millions. Yeah man goon company wooo A company founded solely on the conceit that the founding members paid $10 on an internet forum actively horrifies me.
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Aug 16, 2011 22:15
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