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One of the girls at my last job was full-on obsessed with it. Like, ponies all over her desktop, wallpapers, t-shirts, and always browsing relevant (non-disgusting) websites to the show. There were a few others, but she was probably the biggest fan in the office. I need more TF2/Valve memorabilia for my desk. All I have right now is just a plush sticky-bomb. e: Game Jobs Megathread #3: Pimp My Workdesk!
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May 19, 2012 21:51
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I'd have a TF2/L4D statue if they werent so expensive. The only reason I've got the SMNC one is because they're cheap: https://store.uberent.com/specials/bad-luck-tank-statue/ . I just superglued his arms back on and it looks fine.Shalinor posted:The banjo music makes it. Shawn (the banjo player) is a very enigmatic and esoteric gentleman. Irish Taxi Driver fucked around with this message at 22:42 on May 19, 2012 |
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May 19, 2012 21:54
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Irish Taxi Driver posted:http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=XnEPjPGVlfM My cubes directly behind the camera.
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May 19, 2012 22:20
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floofyscorp posted:We had some players visit recently, and during their grand tour of the office they were passing by my desk and freaked out over the ponies on my desk. They were so excited to see a MLP fan, it was adorable. You're all bearded men, right? I know a guy who had a purely decorative virtual boy on his desk Incidentally, I mean for my next desk to be at Supermassive, interview is Tuesday. Also got a phone interview with EA for a software engineer role on Monday. Believe it's EA European HQ and not Criterion, but I'm not sure there's much of a distinction.
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May 19, 2012 22:36
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BizarroAzrael posted:You're all bearded men, right? The developers tend to be beardier than us artists, who are in general a fairly clean-shaven bunch. And well, I'd have a tough time growing a beard. The players in question were pretty young though(RS tends towards the younger demographic I believe); I doubt either of the them were much older than about 13/14.
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May 19, 2012 23:20
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floofyscorp posted:My response was basically 'Dude, have you ever listened to me bitch about stuff? I swear like a loving sailor.' Our office is really quiet for the most part. I quietly self-loathe when photoshop/SVN fucks up, our junior coder spins around and cheerfully hits us with a ten minute assault on what go bad and why Microsoft/Apple suck. Akuma head-desks and quietly plots the downfall of humanity and our head coder with like 20-years experience is devoid of negative emotion, I've never seen him annoyed. o_o GeeCee fucked around with this message at 01:00 on May 20, 2012 |
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May 20, 2012 00:55
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floofyscorp posted:The developers tend to be beardier than us artists, who are in general a fairly clean-shaven bunch. And well, I'd have a tough time growing a beard. Sup Character Artist buddy  I keep a beard but it is well maintained. The other character artists cant grow beards like I can, dey jealous.
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May 20, 2012 01:29
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Aliginge posted:our head coder with like 20-years experience is devoid of negative emotion, I've never seen him annoyed. o_o ... meanwhile, our side of the tech team drank heavily, I cursed like a sailor, we had a big dude who would just quietly fume, etc.
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May 20, 2012 04:03
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My desk is covered in Legos (mostly Harry Potter, my space shuttle is somewhere else in the office), and I have a small arsenal of Nerf guns behind it. It's been a while since I did an inventory, but at one point I had enough Nerf guns to go through about 100 rounds of ammo simply by using each gun until it ran empty, then throwing it away, and switching to a new gun. I also have the talking Portal turret plush on my desk, although it has to stay off at all times, because it's really annoying when the motion sensor is actually turned on.
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May 20, 2012 04:29
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I love some of our QA people. They've been there for years -- long enough that I trained them when I was still in QA. I hate it when they don't do the stuff I put in the training materials precisely because it saves the developers tons of time, but I can understand forgetting to get that info sometimes. And then there are the people who send out emails to the entire design team, code team, and QA team asking a programmer why something isn't working, when they're actually testing a completely different system on the wrong build. Don't be that person. As for my desk, I have the requisite action figures, an anatomical heart model with a sword-styled letter opener stuck through it, a bunch of Buckyball magnets, and a "Help Wanted" sign. I'm never going to get that help.
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May 20, 2012 06:21
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Tricky Ed posted:And then there are the people who send out emails to the entire design team, code team, and QA team asking a programmer why something isn't working, when they're actually testing a completely different system on the wrong build. I would love to see a bunch of game industry PSAs with a "That Guy" akin to the allstate "Mayhem" guy. "I just committed my typo fix over 63 man-hours of feature progress. I'm that guy. Don't be me." 
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May 20, 2012 07:19
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Yeaaah  I have publicly outed myself as a MLP fan at work. Trying to get the dudes in the office to watch it, but I'm not sure how much buy off I'm getting. Our artists are mostly clean shaven, with the exception of our art director and tech artist. Our designers, however, are very bearded (except for the lady designers, of course).
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May 21, 2012 13:11
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Hey Game Jobs goons! I just applied to my first non-QA job as a quest designer after two years of soulcrushing QA and two years of college. I'm only halfway done with school but I'm pretty excited nonetheless. Nervous, though. Writing for games is a really tiny field.
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May 21, 2012 14:36
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I know Kickstarter is a constant source of conversation here, the latest 8-4 Play podcast had the Republique guy guest on it, with a lot of great info. http://www.giantbomb.com/podcast/2/ They ran a Kickstarter that really went against the grain of successful video game Kickstarters and managed to pull it off. They asked for what they actually needed, instead of lowballing and hoping for it to snowball. They were a big budget iOS project. They were a new IP, instead of an old license revival. None of their staff was "video game legends", guys who have been building games since the '80s. They had a really well polished pitch video instead of something scrappier. Here's the Kickstarter page if you want to check it out again. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/486250632/republique-by-camouflaj-logan I think it would be very difficult to replicate their success, but there's still a lot of great info about running Kickstarters in that podcast.
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May 21, 2012 17:40
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The only tangible reason they met their goal, though, is because he backpedaled from his "AAA ios only game because ios is the bestest, no we're not doing a PC version, that's for losers"-flavored initial pitch and reluctantly promised to port it to PC after they didn't get many backers. I know a lot of people were turned off by his personality and the way they handled the Kickstarter.
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May 21, 2012 18:02
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Frown Town posted:Yeaaah
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May 21, 2012 19:55
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Yeah, not a fan of that show period. I have people try/convince me to watch it and I just simply tell them no. And they tell me I have a black heart. And I say: So what. 
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May 21, 2012 20:06
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mutata posted:The only tangible reason they met their goal, though, is because he backpedaled from his "AAA ios only game because ios is the bestest, no we're not doing a PC version, that's for losers"-flavored initial pitch and reluctantly promised to port it to PC after they didn't get many backers. I know a lot of people were turned off by his personality and the way they handled the Kickstarter. This comment intrigued me, so I added up all the backers of various tiers based on what edition they would be getting for their money, and besides the 4656 wildcards that would get the edition of their choice(discounting those that went for the 'all that and a fancy iPhone case too' cause I figure they're probably getting the iOS version), the numbers are pretty even between the iOS version, 3123 backers, and the desktop version's 3168 backers. I doubt you can really draw any conclusions from those numbers(except bearing in mind that the desktop edition pledges are worth $15 each to the iOS $10) but considering how very close to the line they were on actually funding it I'd say the promise of a desktop version was the only thing that pushed them over. Look at me getting the calculator again! Bad artist. Numbers bad.
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May 21, 2012 20:13
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well it's been a pretty hectic couple months, but a quick update. Had an onsite interview with Vicarious Visions up in Albany NY, and they offered me an Animator position on their console team! pretty sweet, i'm excited.
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May 22, 2012 00:04
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treeboy posted:well it's been a pretty hectic couple months, but a quick update. Had an onsite interview with Vicarious Visions up in Albany NY, and they offered me an Animator position on their console team! pretty sweet, i'm excited. How are you with snow? You're going to have a fun winter.
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May 22, 2012 00:09
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Irish Taxi Driver posted:How are you with snow? You're going to have a fun winter. spent 26 years growing up in DC (still working on growing up...) so i'm good with ice, frozen rain and occasional snow. That being said found a pretty awesome apartment complex with indoor parking...
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May 22, 2012 00:56
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The new QA job seems really nice so far, much better than the last one. There seems to be less tension between the devs and QA, at least from my first impression. I'm hoping my short contract there gets extended, I probably wouldn't want to go back to the last one after this. 
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May 22, 2012 02:39
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treeboy posted:well it's been a pretty hectic couple months, but a quick update. Had an onsite interview with Vicarious Visions up in Albany NY, and they offered me an Animator position on their console team! pretty sweet, i'm excited. I recently accepted a position at a studio in Albany as well. Nice to see so much good news from the artists in this thread lately 
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May 22, 2012 04:49
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treeboy posted:spent 26 years growing up in DC (still working on growing up...) so i'm good with ice, frozen rain and occasional snow. That being said found a pretty awesome apartment complex with indoor parking... The one joy I have in life is texting my upstate New York friends "Winter is coming" on the first day of summer. There are a lot of beautiful outdoor areas not far from Albany (I used to live in Troy) like the Adirondacks but the winters can be brutal compared to D.C.
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May 22, 2012 07:26
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jBusy posted:The one joy I have in life is texting my upstate New York friends "Winter is coming" on the first day of summer. All of my NY winter experience is from Rochester, and since we had Lake Ontario right there we got nasty lake effect. It'd snow for days at a time, and it wasn't uncommon to see people playing bumper cars. The upside though is that they're really good at clearing snow, but they won't close anything for amounts of snow less than 'ice apocalypse'.
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May 22, 2012 17:30
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It's been a rough year so far. BioWare Austin... http://venturebeat.com/2012/05/22/bioware-austin-lays-off-staff-on-star-wars-the-old-republic/ quote:Hey folks, since you’re reading this you may likely have heard that we’ve done some restructuring here on the SWTOR team. Sadly, we are bidding farewell to some talented, passionate and exceptionally hard-working people who helped make SWTOR a reality. Impacting people’s lives this way is always very hard, but we’re ensuring the affected people are treated with dignity, fairness and respect. milquetoast child fucked around with this message at 17:56 on May 22, 2012 |
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May 22, 2012 17:54
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Months? Sure. Years? I'm really doubting that one.
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May 22, 2012 18:02
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I'm not totally surprised. From what I read and heard, they massively inflated their team to make their dates, and now that it's more on-going development they don't need the massive team. Still sucks 
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May 22, 2012 18:20
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Chasiubao posted:I'm not totally surprised. From what I read and heard, they massively inflated their team to make their dates, and now that it's more on-going development they don't need the massive team. ... regardless, they always tell the team that no, this isn't the case, don't worry, we BELIEVE in this game and we need tons of people around to make it great, etc, and especially the juniors buy into it
Shalinor fucked around with this message at 18:41 on May 22, 2012 |
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May 22, 2012 18:39
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Shalinor posted:This is more or less every AAA game ever, especially MMOs. They only keep the full team on if the game is a buggy mess at release or otherwise needs work - beyond that, you've got to either transition the team to another project (if you have one / if you happen to have another project in full production), or lay everyone off down to a core support team (if it's an MMO). At least with EA I could sort of believe that, because what is there to do after making FIFA 12 than FIFA 13?
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May 22, 2012 19:02
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Juc66 posted:What I enjoyed in QA was making a difference, what I hated was the insults strictly based on the position, and backhanded compliments were annoying too. Wonder what you mean by backhanded compliments. Sometimes I like to throw a "nice catch" into a bug report, which I guess could definitely be interpreted sarcastically but is actually totally sincere. When I was on the QA side of things I totally overinterpreted everything developers said in the bug database, now that I'm a dev I'm probably equally guilty of underthinking what I say in terms of whether or not it can be easily misinterpreted.
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May 22, 2012 19:27
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Shalinor posted:This is more or less every AAA game ever, especially MMOs. They only keep the full team on if the game is a buggy mess at release or otherwise needs work - beyond that, you've got to either transition the team to another project (if you have one / if you happen to have another project in full production), or lay everyone off down to a core support team (if it's an MMO). I think this is pretty studio dependent. Bioware pre-EA didn't do those huge layoffs after projects from what I've heard, and at the places I've worked layoffs haven't been directly tied to projects finishing. On the other hand, there are some places that are notorious for massive layoffs after projects. I wonder how recruiting goes there? Seems like it'd be pretty hard to attract talent and have them invested when your people know that there's a substantial chance they'll get canned after the current project.
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May 22, 2012 19:36
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djkillingspree posted:I wonder how recruiting goes there?
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May 22, 2012 20:37
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djkillingspree posted:I think this is pretty studio dependent. Bioware pre-EA didn't do those huge layoffs after projects from what I've heard, and at the places I've worked layoffs haven't been directly tied to projects finishing. You'd think it'd be hard to attract folks if your studio historically has layoffs at the worst possible times in the worst possible manner, but for whatever reason it doesn't actually seem to pan out that way. Just look at Radical, I can't for the life of me see how people would still apply to that place, and Rockstar is more exploitive of their staff than EA ever was and they're doing dandy too. BioWare Austin was something of an obvious situation to me anyway. The team was massive, and that meant massive costs, if the team was going to survive completely unscathed they'd have had to make EA ungodly amounts of money rather than just adequate amounts of cash. Now for the guy asking about backhanded compliments, it's stuff like "you know a lot about X, for a QA guy" "QA folks are morons ... except you and the other guys in earshot" and like like, it usually ends up implying that you're a moron, just less of a moron than they expect, and it's still pretty irritating to hear them insult other folks I work with when, in general, they're pretty talented and passionate folks.
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May 22, 2012 20:47
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Juc66 posted:You'd think it'd be hard to attract folks if your studio historically has layoffs at the worst possible times in the worst possible manner, but for whatever reason it doesn't actually seem to pan out that way. A lot of people vastly overestimate their own worth, and high turnover rates don't concern them -- once they're in, management will see how totally awesome and indisposable they are!
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May 22, 2012 21:17
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Juc66 posted:Rockstar is more exploitive of their staff than EA ever was and they're doing dandy too.
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May 22, 2012 21:22
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Akuma posted:Are they? Are they not? Everybody I know who was at Rockstar has gone on about their work practices, and how they essentially practiced employee Darwinism, but they secure silence with hush money and legal threats when someone leaves. I've yet to hear something good about working there but, hey if you know something I don't I'm open to hearing it. It'd be a nice change to see a positive experience coming from there. Or are you saying they're not doing well?
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May 22, 2012 21:41
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No, I just honestly don't know. Doesn't FreakyZoid work at one of the Rockstars? Pretty sure he used to work at Rockstar Leeds at any rate.
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May 22, 2012 21:42
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Akuma posted:No, I just honestly don't know. Doesn't FreakyZoid work at one of the Rockstars? Pretty sure he used to work at Rockstar Leeds at any rate. Rockstar, at least in Canada, has been accused of some pretty lovely handling of overtime. Not like "oh, you may have to work a few extra hours" but "you may have to sleep under your desk for a few days."
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May 22, 2012 21:48
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Akuma posted:No, I just honestly don't know. Doesn't FreakyZoid work at one of the Rockstars? Pretty sure he used to work at Rockstar Leeds at any rate.
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May 22, 2012 22:10
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