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You can add me to the developer list, too: Project Director and Lead Editor at Carpe Fulgur. I makes the games haves the good Englishes! 
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Oct 30, 2011 02:22
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Buckwheat Sings posted:
Would suck a lot more rear end if all but Activision and EA had to close their doors and games cost in the US what they already cost in Australia.
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Oct 30, 2011 02:43
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Buckwheat Sings posted:First time I've heard that one. I'd say easier access to film creation tools is what really pushed independent film. Not really sure where you got unions from that. The SAGIndie classification didn't come about until 2005. Before that, it's my understanding that getting professional actors for indie films was a bit of a mess - because SAG locked you into rates that the smaller budget films simply couldn't afford. Though I feel like I'm looking at the wrong page, here... "something" changed back in the early 00's that allowed you to sign off on a lower rate based on film budget. If you look further back, you'll find other issues with unions as they apply to small-budget films. Namely that small-budget films tend to require everyone to wear a lot of hats, which trade unions at least used to frown on / they want someone on-site certified for each specific task. Look at "The Wizard Of Speed And Time" for a based-on-fact comedic take on how that played out in practice. Shalinor fucked around with this message at 02:53 on Oct 30, 2011 |
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Oct 30, 2011 02:49
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SpaceDrake posted:You can add me to the developer list, too: Project Director and Lead Editor at Carpe Fulgur. I makes the games haves the good Englishes! When is Fortune Summoners coming out!?
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Oct 30, 2011 03:12
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Not to change the subject but I forgot the posters who actually were curious about the Media Grind job. Well I didn't get it they said they found someone better for the position (not surprised) and they said they had other positions available. Unfortunately I think it might not be legit considering the link they provided in the email redirected to a job listing site that doesn't look it was affiliated with them at all. I made sure if it wasn't a redirect by a virus or male-ware. Perhaps I'm little naive but if they said they had other positions and then redirected you to a job listings that doesn't say have any of their companies is a bit fishy. They might be a big company or something but I doubt it.
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Oct 30, 2011 07:08
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SpaceDrake posted:You can add me to the developer list, too: Project Director and Lead Editor at Carpe Fulgur. I makes the games haves the good Englishes! Would you care to comment on the Easter Egg issue? I'm sure you have many fantastic opportunities to poke obscure fun at things, and do so in such a way that it gets through into the final game.
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Oct 30, 2011 13:47
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Shalinor posted:Because unions gutted independent film in Hollywood until relatively recently, and there's little reason to assume that Games unions would magically start better than Hollywood unions did? That said, every time this comes up, I'm forced to wonder if Jason Rubin will be at least partially proven right or not. He was of the opinion that the industry is going to be forced to shift to being more talent-oriented instead of IP-oriented, and one huge test case (CoD/Respawn) is going to play out over the next few years. If true, I think that will have to happen before unions stand a chance of happening.
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Oct 30, 2011 17:15
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Chainclaw posted:The whole traditional QA process for game development never made much sense to me. Could someone with more information on QA explain in greater detail what the "traditional QA process for game development" is? We've pretty much always had the process you're describing in place for as long as I've been here, and while I'm on the art side so we don't get anywhere near as many bugs since it's harder to gently caress things up with data than code (although this mandate has been at a project/studio-wide implementation, not just for art), I can't imagine an alternate system - if you're leaving in A level bugs for multiple build cycles/milestones/sprints/whatever the nom du jour is, I can't imagine that system being sensible at any level. The notion that there was an accepted way of doing things like that is mind boggling to me.
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Oct 31, 2011 04:21
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Amrosorma posted:Unionize! Gameloft Vietnam is about to have a union. A management-created union but heh, it will be interesting to watch I guess.
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Oct 31, 2011 05:47
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Shindragon posted:Not to change the subject but I forgot the posters who actually were curious about the Media Grind job. Well I didn't get it they said they found someone better for the position (not surprised) and they said they had other positions available. Unfortunately I think it might not be legit considering the link they provided in the email redirected to a job listing site that doesn't look it was affiliated with them at all. A lot of 'recruiters' are contract/temp type people who actually work for several places at once. Games placement at higher levels is pretty rough, and it's not unusual for a recruiter to work for several places at once. Now, if they're really good at their jobs, you'll never be able to tell that. This of course excludes the big Corporate style EA/Activision HR 'recruiters' who basically just do interviews and stuff. I'm talking the big headhunter types who cold call you to tell you about an amazing well-funded mobile/social games start up that is just getting off the ground, and think you'd make an amazing addition to their team, but they can't give you any specifics on where the company is located or what their market is.
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Oct 31, 2011 06:34
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Sigma-X posted:Could someone with more information on QA explain in greater detail what the "traditional QA process for game development" is? It's not that people often develop entirely without QA for the majority of a project, it's more about when the majority of QA staff rolls on to a project. Traditionally QA will hit heavy later in a project. This is especially true when QA is handled at an external location, whether it's due to outsourcing, publisher-side QA, or QA owned by the developer located off-site. On-site QA is a luxury many studios can't afford, so working with external QA to come online for a few weeks each milestone can be really difficult to schedule, especially when the external QA is working with other studios. My favorite application of QA for game development is a small handful of well-trained testers that are on-site, working for the majority of the project, seated as close to the developers in the building as possible.
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Oct 31, 2011 06:57
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Chainclaw posted:It's not that people often develop entirely without QA for the majority of a project, it's more about when the majority of QA staff rolls on to a project. Traditionally QA will hit heavy later in a project. This is especially true when QA is handled at an external location, whether it's due to outsourcing, publisher-side QA, or QA owned by the developer located off-site. A severity bugs will often stay open for a while, unless the bug is blocking another area from being tested. Those get fixed very quickly, as QA lists them on their reports saying, hey we cant test anything you want until this is fixed. There are also lots of preventative things done like smoke testing of builds before the QA team gets them to make sure there are major blocking issues that will stop the entire team from testing. There is nothing worse than picking up all your builds, stopping progress, and deleting all your data to find out your new build doesn't even boot.
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Oct 31, 2011 07:32
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Andio posted:When are you guys going to get a website up and running that lists available roles? We're very close to having the full website up. I'll post again when it finally goes up.
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Oct 31, 2011 11:01
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Freelancepolice posted:We're very close to having the full website up. I'll post again when it finally goes up. Thanks for letting me know. I'm assuming Assistant/Associate Producer openings are rare?
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Oct 31, 2011 15:34
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Management created unions kind of defeats the purpose of the unions though...
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Oct 31, 2011 16:13
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SpaceDrake posted:You can add me to the developer list, too: Project Director and Lead Editor at Carpe Fulgur. I makes the games haves the good Englishes! Also me! Narrative designin' gun for hire! (For the moment, anyway.) I've got irons in the fire at 4 studios right now. Nothing quite beats a AAA writing credit to open doors. Cross y'alls fingers for me.
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Oct 31, 2011 16:23
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Odddzy posted:Management created unions kind of defeats the purpose of the unions though... Of course, but that's what management sells, telling everybody that joining a known union federation will be bad and cause problems. We the management know what you want, it will be better if we start our own in-house union, etc. Same tactics they used in the 60s and 70s, nothing changes. I'm kind-of management and am a foreigner so I don't think I'll be able to get involved, but I'm a very pro-union leftist myself and curious to see how that goes - a (corporate) union in a game company is a first to me.
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Oct 31, 2011 18:28
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I have a question for game designers. I bought Game Design: A Practical Approach by Paul Schuytema for cheap in a bargain bin and I just started reading it. It seems to be aimed at beginners and it's also a bit dated (2006), not sure if anybody would actually recommend that book. I've read about 20 pages and the illustrations (Fig. 1.3 - a man sleeping under his desk, Fig. 2.4 - a book) are just wasting space and I'm a bit annoyed by every single corporate word having the (R) or (TM), it feels like product placement. I'm interested in game design, I've been starting game projects for years (rarely finishing them), but I don't think I could get a job doing that - mostly due to pay scale, I can't see myself going back to a junior GD paycheck after working with servers and coding for years. But I'm curious for personal reasons, hoping it might help me make an indie game one day. Or maybe just help me understand more about the whole game production chain in general.
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Oct 31, 2011 18:51
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Just out of curiosity here, has anyone (as a gamer) ever used MetaCritic to actually make a decision to buy a game or not? edit: When I worked at Eckerd's (now CVS), the material you were given when you started working had a bunch of anti-union stuff including a line I still remember now 11 years later: "We value our relationship with our employees so much that we will use any and all available legal resources to ensure we can do so without interference by third parties such as Unions." Andio posted:Thanks for letting me know. I'm assuming Assistant/Associate Producer openings are rare? I have only seen them at big first-party owned devs. An EA/Activision/Etc owned studio needs another body in there to manage their too-large dev team on a giant franchise game. Usually that studio closes after the game ships. milquetoast child fucked around with this message at 20:26 on Oct 31, 2011 |
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Oct 31, 2011 20:07
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dunkman posted:Just out of curiosity here, has anyone (as a gamer) ever used MetaCritic to actually make a decision to buy a game or not? I use it as a general guide on whether I should research a game more, but I've never decided either way based solely on it.
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Oct 31, 2011 20:09
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dunkman posted:Just out of curiosity here, has anyone (as a gamer) ever used MetaCritic to actually make a decision to buy a game or not? I did last week when I saw there was a Game of Thrones game and was curious why I saw no discussion anywhere about it: http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/a-game-of-thrones-genesis I also made a post asking about it in the Steam thread, which farther cemented my decision to skip that game.
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Oct 31, 2011 20:15
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dunkman posted:Just out of curiosity here, has anyone (as a gamer) ever used MetaCritic to actually make a decision to buy a game or not?
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Oct 31, 2011 21:14
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It's like the better business bureau. A bad rating is a good reason to pass on the game, but a good rating isn't the deciding factor in buying it.
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Oct 31, 2011 21:41
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I got new from that phone interview last week: I didn't get the job. It was for a temporary QA position and they cited I lacked the "skills and experience" which is really disheartening. I've reached the limit of self-improvement without any feedback or guidance from industry professionals. Can anyone offer me any help? What are QA leads looking for when they interview you? What is a good way to prepare for a phone interview as someone who rarely uses the phone? I could use some help with this.
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Oct 31, 2011 22:03
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I would take the reasons they cite for rejection with a pound of salt. "Skills and experience" basically sound like they just liked some other candidate better. There's probably a lot of people applying and you can't take it too personally, you just have to try try again. But then, it always helps to get more experience.
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Oct 31, 2011 23:47
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Yeah, I asked for feedback to help with self improvement. It's hard to get industry experience when they industry doesn't let you in, unfortunately. That's why I was applying for an entry-level job. Just hope they offer some, they did say they would so it was surprising to see the email just containing the reason why I didn't get it and not contain any feedback.
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Nov 1, 2011 00:01
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If you got through to a phone interview, experience isn't the problem - on paper at least you must have seemed like you had what they wanted. It's more likely your interview technique, perhaps you need to practice giving good answers and go in to the interview with some standard ones prepared.
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Nov 1, 2011 00:41
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FreakyZoid posted:If you got through to a phone interview, experience isn't the problem - on paper at least you must have seemed like you had what they wanted. It's more likely your interview technique, perhaps you need to practice giving good answers and go in to the interview with some standard ones prepared. What are some good standard questions to ask for an entry-level QA position? I thought I asked some pretty decent ones about the design process, how it effects QA and how that company organized their testers and distributed the workload - you know, things pertaining to the position I was gunning for. I thought my answers to the questions themselves were sound. I guess I'll just have to work on how I answer them. The worst I did was repeat a few things and slur a word or two. If those types of things count against you then I seriously think something is wrong with the recruitment process for QA. If I was Casanova on the phone, I'd be living off of the commissions I'd make selling timeshare. If not, then the person who got the job was better with words.
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Nov 1, 2011 01:47
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Chainclaw posted:I did last week when I saw there was a Game of Thrones game and was curious why I saw no discussion anywhere about it:
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Nov 1, 2011 03:19
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Vino posted:It's like the better business bureau. A bad rating is a good reason to pass on the game, but a good rating isn't the deciding factor in buying it. 90% of the time this should be tattooed on people. For your average FPS, RTS, or RPG, this is totally the case. The 10% where it's not the case tends to come from games in more esoteric genres such as sims.
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Nov 1, 2011 15:24
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Diplomaticus posted:90% of the time this should be tattooed on people. For your average FPS, RTS, or RPG, this is totally the case. The 10% where it's not the case tends to come from games in more esoteric genres such as sims. Problem is Metacritic remaps letter grades to 0-100 when that may not be what the authors are attempting to convey, meanwhile the gaming press is full of conflicts of interest that tilt the rating scales, ranging from publications getting nudged to give good scores by advertising dollars and exclusives (see: Gamespot Kane & Lynch debacle), to Game Informer which is literally a retailer shill that deliberately puts mediocre ratings high on their scale.
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Nov 1, 2011 16:38
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So it's Movember time! Anyone have a studio team signed up?
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Nov 1, 2011 17:13
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dunkman posted:Just out of curiosity here, has anyone (as a gamer) ever used MetaCritic to actually make a decision to buy a game or not? All of the time when I see things on Steam that I've not heard of but look interesting. There must be half a dozen or so purchases I've reconsidered after seeing a low MetaCritic score. As mentioned by others, I wouldn't go to the site with the intention of seeing what games score highly and buying them, but I'd certainly check out the score if something catches my eye in an advert or preview.
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Nov 1, 2011 17:21
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Mega Shark posted:That is a great background. Care to describe a "typical" day if there is such a thing? Yeah.. typical isn't a word I would use to describe any of my days. I took yesterday off, so here is today so far: Spend an hour going through email (and not get through it all) - Send out various meeting invites - go through local and external bug databases (assign out bugs, answer questions) - localization (updates, checkins, user management) - Update wiki to reflect new dates/dates hit already - install latest build of the game to check some things (then get interrupted and forget about it for 3 hours) - branch setup - forum setup/verification - browse game's facebook page and rage internally - post here That's 2 hours of my day so far. Friday was: Hour of email - Task review for the upcoming milestone - task assignments - playtest - video capture - filling out TRC documentation - another hour of email - feature balance/discussion - fighting with EULA servers, fixed! weekend!
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Nov 1, 2011 17:42
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Monster w21 Faces posted:So it's Movember time! Anyone have a studio team signed up? We do here though I'm not participating this year, I think I will next year however.
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Nov 1, 2011 17:48
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Dinurth posted:Yeah.. typical isn't a word I would use to describe any of my days. I appreciate that. I totally understand typical being a bit inappropriate, but it's the best way to ask. What do you use for assigning tasks? What do you use for your local bug database?
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Nov 1, 2011 18:20
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Does anybody know ballpark figures for experience required with international job applicants? I realise it's a fairly discretionary question as different companies have different policies, but I'm just curious as to lower limits. I've got four years experience as a programmer, but only one of those on HD platforms. It always seems as if I should wait just a little longer before considering a move.
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Nov 1, 2011 18:45
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Mega Shark posted:I appreciate that. I totally understand typical being a bit inappropriate, but it's the best way to ask. What do you use for assigning tasks? What do you use for your local bug database? Jira for tasks and DevTrack for bugs. I despise Devtrack, but Jira is pretty great so it balances out I guess. What do you use? I'm sure pretty much everyone else will find this kind of discussion boring, but I'm always interested in what people use and what they think of it.
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Nov 1, 2011 18:52
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Dinurth posted:Jira for tasks and DevTrack for bugs. I despise Devtrack, but Jira is pretty great so it balances out I guess. I miss JIRA  Apparently, we moved to TestTrack Pro because it could output particularly nice gant charts or something 
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Nov 1, 2011 19:13
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Shalinor posted:Seconding JIRA. I loved it for bug tracking. Now we use TestTrack Pro. It is a thick client slow-rear end piece of horse poo poo - with a web client that is also lovely to use. Gant charts are the only aspect of any production tool that the people with the capability to approve and purchase new programs will use. I am pretty sure the first company to license Unreal for Gant chart display will make all the dollars
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Nov 1, 2011 19:17
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