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FiammaFenice posted:Hi All, The following is comprised of my personal observations in the industry and I'm not trying to talk like I know everything. That said, I'm just gonna say what I think: As you probably know, you are applying to some of the most (THE most?) competitive positions in the industry. Concept artists can be powerful assets to a team, but the more concept art portfolios I see, the more I personally believe that companies are lying to the public about concept art. You have a portfolio that is filled with pieces that look like what studios release to the public and say "Here's our concept art!" This is a lie. What they are actually releasing is illustrative marketing pieces. The portfolio you have is an illustrator's portfolio, but I personally wouldn't call it a concept artist portfolio. Concept artists are only an asset to a team insofar as they can churn through the maximum amount of the most creative ideas possible as quickly as possible. This means that what is ACTUALLY important for a concept art portfolio is breadth, variety, and appeal of ideas. Execution (skill, craft, and pretty paintings) is of secondary importance to the above. You have obvious skill that I would place squarely in the middle of the spectrum when it comes to skill and craftsmanship, but the subject matter of your pieces are fairly safe and pretty forgettable and they don't have much personality. Additionally, you haven't broken any of them down into ideas with their own variants (for example, an illustration of a spaceship flying through space is nice, but a sheet full of a bunch of different possible designs for a spaceship is better and more useful). Your portfolio shows that you are an illustrator and a painter, but not an idea factory and a visual problem solver. Edit: I'm gonna post Tyson Murphy's old school portfolio again to illustrate what I'm talking about : http://tysonmurphyart.blogspot.com/2010/03/blog-post_15.html mutata fucked around with this message at 23:34 on Jun 30, 2014 |
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Jun 30, 2014 23:29
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I said come in! posted:Anyone here with experience in communications, marketing, or public relations? I am interested in something in one of those three fields, such as community representative or public relations representative. What do I really need if I am interested in doing PR or advertising for a game studio or publisher? From my understanding as an old CM and a current dev who dabbles in it in a pinch: a really solid understanding of the markets and how to reach them. Online-wise, it ain't just about forums and your own website these days -- you have to know how to use Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, and Facebook to their fullest extent. You need to be able to estimate well what your return will be on advertising in those and other logical spaces, as well as what's the most sensible place to start outreach beyond your core audience. How to message it in ways it will be most effective while keeping costs sane is quite a juggling act. It's an interesting time.
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Jun 30, 2014 23:37
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Cyster posted:From my understanding as an old CM and a current dev who dabbles in it in a pinch: a really solid understanding of the markets and how to reach them. Online-wise, it ain't just about forums and your own website these days -- you have to know how to use Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, and Facebook to their fullest extent. You need to be able to estimate well what your return will be on advertising in those and other logical spaces, as well as what's the most sensible place to start outreach beyond your core audience. How to message it in ways it will be most effective while keeping costs sane is quite a juggling act. Too me that seems pretty easy. What sort of experience are companies looking for beyond what they might mention in their job postings?
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Jul 1, 2014 00:03
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I said come in! posted:Too me that seems pretty easy. What sort of experience are companies looking for beyond what they might mention in their job postings? Basically, they're looking for someone who goes beyond the "I like to post online" caliber. They get a ton of those. Having someone who actually understands markets and how to properly utilize and allocate a marketing budget to its most effective extent is rare. Having someone who's motivated beyond merely having an online presence and relating things the developers say to the world at large is also rare. If you have previous marketing experience, that's huge. If you're self-motivated and come in with ideas regarding how best to get the company's brand out there -- projects like streaming or youtube shows, community outreach concepts, that sort of thing -- that is a step above most applicants.
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Jul 1, 2014 01:44
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I'm a marketing manager at a top publisher, so ask away. I came from PR and community backgrounds so I think I can help here. If you have 0 experience it's going to be really hard to get in at an aaa studio/publisher doing something customer facing outside of support.
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Jul 2, 2014 07:31
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What's the realistic goal of a social media strategy? Like, what does facebook and twitter offer over a more regular mainstream advertising campaign?
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Jul 2, 2014 07:43
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GetWellGamers posted:What's the realistic goal of a social media strategy? Like, what does facebook and twitter offer over a more regular mainstream advertising campaign? More agile feedback to customers and development and better penetration with customers. Facebook is starting to take more of a back-seat these days since everyone noticed that it's kind of rubbish for marketing and Twitter is more where it's at. Tumblr is certainly a thing that's starting to become more of a big deal but you really want to have specific content for each platform. Twitter works great for short things to hook people into your campaign; Facebook works well for long term, low penetration stuff (for fucksake, don't clog up peoples news feed with what you're having for lunch), tumblr is great for mini-blogs and 'hey folks, quick update to say the office is on fire WITH #AWESOME' or whatever the hell you're talkin' about. Your website and your blog space are where you're gonna be pumping up the most content, especially for long term projects. Being able to concisely explain what your game is, why it's awesome, where you can get it from in 140 characters or less (hashtags are seemingly mandatory and can eat up about 10 of those characters - #menofshooting) is a pretty valuable skill. The natural reach of Twitter is much stronger than Facebook these days, but twitter should be seen as a gateway to other online aspects of your marketing. Teasing new stuff on your blog or core website on twitter is a good way of going about it because once someone actually clicks on a blogpost or website you can really start controlling what they see and when; your blog has headline features of 'Screenshots', 'Developer Diary' and 'Trailers' or whatever and the browser is (hopefully) gonna start reading about all the cool poo poo you've got going on in your game. You can't get that with an advert on the side of a bus. You can do some cool poo poo with bus adverts (the Portal 2 advert that was wraparound was baller as hell) but you don't get anywhere near the same level of engagement or reach - for the hundred and fifty grand that bus adverts and billboards cost you, you can get a significant amount of paid positioning on twitter and you can get a very, very swish website that draws the eye, keeps customers involved and makes them want to know more. You see a tweet about the cool Manopener melee weapon in the game. You don't include a picture of it because twit.pic links can get kind of bloated and no one ever loving clicks them - but you do write something like: "The new Obamacare DLC for #menofshooting includes the Manopener weapon. Check https://www.menofshooting.com/store for more details! Get tore in!" You get the name of the DLC pack, the game name, the name of the headline feature, the website and a dumb slogan for your man-opener weapon. You're hitting all the basic notes. Another thing that facebook, twitter and internet adverts have over more mainstream adverts is that you get far better information back from facebook and twitter than you do with TV adverts or something. Let's say you run six banner adverts on IGN or Eurogamer. It's perfectly expected for you to ask IGN or Eurogamer to give you information on click through so you can see which adverts work the best. You know if people that visit those sites want to see adverts with a lady with big breasts taking deep breaths while the title of your game slowly fades into background or you can see if they'd rather have an advert that juxtaposes one thing with something else that's curious and eye catching. The above is based on an actual discussion I once had with the 'marketing fusionist' at my last job - guy was a toolbag and constantly pushed for us to sex it up as much as we could. He said 'we need to stimulate the 14 year old male market as much as possible.' He also thought that implications of sexual violence when selling a car in game was fine and dandy - this caused such issues that the CEO in our office had to tell him that it was not an acceptable thing and he needed to have a word with himself in the mirror before coming back into work tomorrow. We ran an advert with a female character from the game in a corset breathing deep and the words FREE TO PLAY up next to her which got gently caress all click through and we ran an advert that had a traditionally dressed nun holding a machine gun, surrounded by a halo of stylized bullets with the words 'Appearances can be deceiving' that got fuckin' tonnes of click through. 'Sexy' can sell but clever (or at least visually interesting) should always sell better. Further to the 'better information back' thing is you can see what people are saying about your game. Now, this bit needs to be taken with a pinch of salt (or prozac, depending on how your community feels like being today), but it can be invaluable to tell you what's going on in your game, especially if it's a long term project or an online game. If you're looking through stats for the last week's worth of play and you see that the manopener is responsible for half the kills in the game, a designer might think 'gently caress it, nerf the manopener.' It is the community team's job to find out that the manopener isn't being used in combat, but it's actually being used to gank dudes that are out mining for ore so maybe make the ore nodes a little bit better defended rather than loving with weapon balance. People will ask you questions about your game on twitter, facebook and tumblr. Try to answer those questions. A direct answer can often do wonders for people and their engagement with your product. If you tweeted at a game company and were like 'when is the manopener coming out' and got a reply of 'It's out already! go go go!' are you more or less likely to think 'hey, they listened to me, cool, let's keep playing.'? At the same time, if you're getting hundreds of interactions a day and 50% of them are saying 'fix your lovely game' then it might be worth going up to a producer and saying 'yo, something's broken, can we have a look at the crash reports for the last live version please?' You get great feedback from the community, even if sometimes you need to fashion it into something that's usable. Once upon a time I worked on a virtual pet thing and we got a guy from the community that was like 'I WANT MY DOG TO HAVE A JETPACK' and we were like 'dogs can't use jetpacks what the gently caress' until my then boss (a good dude) was like 'no, he doesn't really want his dog to have a jetpack, he just wants his dog to have something that makes it awesome. He wants something with a little pizazz.' This is a truth when dealing with public beta tests and internal focus testing where you get dudes in from the street, give them pizza, five hours with your videogame and then a questionnaire at the end. A quick note about that oft-forgotten about child of social media - the official forums. Ah, official forums. Anywhere between 1 and 10% of your player base will ever visit your forums for more than a second. The bounce rate on official forums is gigantic. There are also two kinds of people that will ever visit official forums - people for whom the game is really important, and people for whom the game doesn't work. This is a pretty dangerous cocktail sometimes because you have a mix of people that are super-passionate about the game and can be your best friends ('I love this change, I love this game, I love you.') or your worst enemy ('I've been playing since Beta and you fucks can't keep your dicks out of your own asses for long enough to rebalance the manopener, here let me use my official forums celebrity status to make a big loving stink!') depending on how they feel that morning and people that are having a lovely time with your software because they're trying to run it on a potato.
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Jul 2, 2014 12:28
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milquetoast child posted:I'm a marketing manager at a top publisher, so ask away. I came from PR and community backgrounds so I think I can help here. Would trying for a PR company be a good place to start? Or where would you want to begin? Looking around at job postings, the requirements even the big studio's are looking for seems to be they don't want much experience, in some cases they list no experience at all. I imagine however that the competitive nature of these positions means they end up hiring someone with many years of experience.
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Jul 2, 2014 13:55
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I'm applying for community manager positions based on my skill and experience with Tinder and Grindr.
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Jul 2, 2014 14:21
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Comte de Saint-Germain posted:I'm applying for community manager positions based on my skill and experience with Tinder and Grindr.
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Jul 2, 2014 14:33
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Comte de Saint-Germain posted:I'm applying for community manager positions based on my skill and experience with Tinder and Grindr. If I ever left games, I'd be working at an online dating company. It's shocking how transferable the skillsets of a game designer/product manager are.
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Jul 2, 2014 14:51
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Shalinor posted:"Years of experience keeping excited and engaging with a passionate social following" "Spearheaded several initiatives built around deep market penetration, outside the box thinking and back-door engagement." Seriously though, folks. Be nice to your CM.
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Jul 2, 2014 14:54
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Are you or someone you know looking for employment in Montreal? BioWare has Development QA Manager and Lead Gameplay Designer positions open; PM me if you're interested or would like further details.
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Jul 3, 2014 23:39
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I'm going into a place for my very first design job interview. It's at a mobile games company (We all gotta start somewhere). I'm super excited and I've been trying to prepare as best I can, but there's one piece of information I'm having a hell of a time trying to find. Match-3 is used to refer to any kind of game where you connect three similar tiles, but is there any jargon for the different subspecies of Match-3? In my head, I call them swappers (swap two orthogonal adjacent tiles to make matches), tracers (trace a line through orthogonal and diagonal tiles to make matches) and pushers (push the entire column or row to make orthogonal matches). If there's an official industry standard term for these and I accidentally use one of the ones in my head, I'm going to feel kind of silly. 
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Jul 4, 2014 16:02
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demota posted:I'm going into a place for my very first design job interview. It's at a mobile games company (We all gotta start somewhere). I'm super excited and I've been trying to prepare as best I can, but there's one piece of information I'm having a hell of a time trying to find. I usually refer to them by the first game [that I think of where] the specific mechanics I'm talking about showed up in. Match-3 has a lot of design space; I've read a few articles on the history of design in them, and they invariably get something wrong. Most either ignore the true classics (columns, etc) or the exceptionally Japanese (money idol exchanger, etc). Don't trust anything I say on design though; I usually stick to telling the machines what to do.
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Jul 4, 2014 16:16
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To me it seems irrelevant what you call them as long as you know what they are and how they work.
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Jul 4, 2014 17:06
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We call them "match 3's" and they pretty much get sub-classified by "Candy Crush" and "everything else". E: I kid, there's also the core "dungeon raid" crowd.
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Jul 4, 2014 19:03
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Moved to Seattle. Worked as an independent contractor (2d/3d art, basic stuff, building) in Second Life from home. Ended up working for Linden Labs directly as a contractor. Built welcome areas and whatnot. Left Second Life when I got a low level position at ArenaNet. Worked on Guild Wars 2 for a year and a half. Got laid off with all the others within 6 months of the game launching. Got a job at Sucker Punch. Was treated like some low level pariah slaving away in the basement boiler room. Noticed this was a trend with my position at most of the gaming companies in Seattle. Left Seattle, left the gaming industry, now detail cars for a living. No regrets, had fun. Got in and out of the gaming industry within 3-4 years and moved on without having to passive aggressively climb my way up the ladder to solidify my position in a company. Felt like the entire industry is unpredictable and unstable. Learned it wasn't for me and moved on. Buying a house in a much more affordable city in Washington and not bothering with the traffic anymore. Got room for my automotive projects. 
Nerolus fucked around with this message at 03:03 on Jul 6, 2014 |
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Jul 6, 2014 03:00
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Cool, man!
mutata fucked around with this message at 05:22 on Jul 6, 2014 |
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Jul 6, 2014 05:18
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Cool story bro
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Jul 6, 2014 05:19
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That seems like an unnecessarily cranky response. His post was moderately interesting and on-topic.
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Jul 6, 2014 05:23
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You assume I was being sarcastic.
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Jul 6, 2014 05:25
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Yeah I know it's a bit of a downer, but I remember right before applying to my first in-office game job at ArenaNet, I was asking questions in an older version of this thread. Just giving my start to finish update and personal experience. A lot of people do way better than I did, but that's my experience for better or worse. I'm okay with where I'm at now and had fun in the industry in my short time span. I still play a ton of games but learned that I'd rather not be a part of the development crowd. And I'm pretty sure it's obvious here, but don't bother going to a school for a degree in game development. You'll get laughed at.
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Jul 6, 2014 19:45
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Depends on the school. At Bungie we have a bunch of DigiPen grads and a couple of Full Sail guys in engineering and design positions. I still wouldn't necessarily recommend any of those programs, and I've done fine without any degree, but the quality of the education and networking you get from DigiPen at least is very high. (It just also happens to be enormously expensive.)
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Jul 6, 2014 20:30
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Paniolo posted:Depends on the school. At Bungie we have a bunch of DigiPen grads and a couple of Full Sail guys in engineering and design positions. I still wouldn't necessarily recommend any of those programs, and I've done fine without any degree, but the quality of the education and networking you get from DigiPen at least is very high. (It just also happens to be enormously expensive.) So what is the deal with Full Sail then? I had always head that studios view that school as a joke.
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Jul 6, 2014 21:32
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Don't know anything about it other than the fact that I have at least a couple of coworkers who went there, so it can't be that much of an impediment, and it's certainly not a "tighten up the graphics on level 3" scam. Then again, that doesn't rule out people succeeding despite going there. The only thing that is for sure is that there's no degree that is an automatic path into the industry. All school really does is give you a focus for the work that you have to put in to develop your own skills, and sometimes offers some good internship or networking opportunities.
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Jul 6, 2014 21:47
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Paniolo posted:All school really does is give you a focus for the work that you have to put in to develop your own skills, and sometimes offers some good internship or networking opportunities. Honestly I forget this myself and this needs to be stressed way more in college.
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Jul 6, 2014 21:51
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Paniolo posted:Depends on the school. At Bungie we have a bunch of DigiPen grads and a couple of Full Sail guys in engineering and design positions. I still wouldn't necessarily recommend any of those programs, and I've done fine without any degree, but the quality of the education and networking you get from DigiPen at least is very high. (It just also happens to be enormously expensive.) As a Digipen senior myself, I echo this sentiment. It's a good education, but also very challenging and very expensive and you can certainly learn almost everything on your own time if you have the gumption to do so. The CS program's pretty drat good but the other programs are varying degrees of poo poo ranging from the CS Design program and the BFA program (fairly not poo poo) to the Art Design program (a GE degree that costs you $125k). If you have the temperament for it (and very, very few people do, mind - something like only 25% of your freshman cohort will reach senior year), it's a great place to meet a lot of people and learn a lot of cool tech. I wouldn't recommend going there for most people, but it's a solid program that produces solid people (for CS, anyway - your mileage may vary for every other program).
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Jul 6, 2014 22:17
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I found it odd someone talking down on schools after being in a Studio where probably 25% graduated from DigiPen. But for every graduate I know there's probably one tending bar or managing a call center.
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Jul 6, 2014 22:44
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The graduates you (the industry insider) know from these schools are the exceptional ones who could have made it with any education, most likely. These exceptions are how they sell an average education for a premium price. I always give the example from my class, which had 53 people at the beginning, 15 graduates, and 4 of those graduates are still in the field now. 3 of the 4 of us already had degrees when we started and the other had 2 years of CS at a state school. It *may* help to keep you focused, and it does help with networking, but it's very likely that much of that money will be wasted and you'll be trying to get a programming job with a game degree. Stay out of for-profit universities, kids. If you've got it you've got it and you'll make it in the industry with a state school degree. If you don't have it and you don't make it, you'll have a much broader education to get a job in another field and a lot less debt to deal with.
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Jul 7, 2014 00:08
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If hell exists for systems designers, it's a twist on the Sisyphus myth where they are doomed to forever watch an import bar slowly chugging forward processing updated records as the automatic 'Build Queued' email appears in their inbox, eternally dooming their changes to a later and later revision.
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Jul 7, 2014 02:20
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Demand live editing of all data. My scripts can be edited and tested while the game is running. Anything else is broken.
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Jul 7, 2014 02:54
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baby puzzle posted:Demand live editing of all data. My scripts can be edited and tested while the game is running. Anything else is broken. Oh, we have full live editing for singleton records, but it's a hell of a lot more efficient to do big changes in a spreadsheet and import. I'm just grumpy because I missed a cutoff.
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Jul 7, 2014 03:48
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*sigh* Another day, another test for a programming position returned with a NO and absolutely no feedback. That's the worst part of tests for employment vs. tests when you're in school - It's very, very difficult to learn from your mistakes. I don't know if I forgot a common edge case, if I didn't address an important principle in the "design" section of the test, or if they simply didn't read the "included files are only included to be used generating test cases in my main() function" and decided to instantly disqualify me (or if the reviewer was just rushed that day and misinterpreted something).
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Jul 7, 2014 17:05
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theflyingorc posted:*sigh* Another day, another test for a programming position returned with a NO and absolutely no feedback. If you've got your hat in your hand, I've found a good portion of people will respond with candid feedback. I figure me spending 15 minutes writing up feedback is the least I could do after they've spent 6 hours or whatever doing some test we gave them. If you've only talked to HR though, this might be harder.
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Jul 7, 2014 17:28
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devilmouse posted:If you've got your hat in your hand, I've found a good portion of people will respond with candid feedback. I figure me spending 15 minutes writing up feedback is the least I could do after they've spent 6 hours or whatever doing some test we gave them. If you've only talked to HR though, this might be harder. I asked, so we'll see if I get something back eventually, but yeah - my communication has been only with an HR person. The place is known for being really picky in regards to programmers, but the test questions are all "write a program that does XYZ" with no clue as to what they care about - I definitely could have written something more computationally efficient, but readability was much, much higher for the solution I delivered and I thought I justified that well.
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Jul 7, 2014 17:35
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theflyingorc posted:I asked, so we'll see if I get something back eventually, but yeah - my communication has been only with an HR person. The place is known for being really picky in regards to programmers, but the test questions are all "write a program that does XYZ" with no clue as to what they care about - I definitely could have written something more computationally efficient, but readability was much, much higher for the solution I delivered and I thought I justified that well. Programming tests are the worst for this exact reason.
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Jul 8, 2014 02:56
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Brackhar posted:Programming tests are the worst for this exact reason. theflyingorc posted:That's the worst part of tests for employment vs. tests when you're in school OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 05:06 on Jul 8, 2014 |
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Jul 8, 2014 04:58
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Hazed_blue posted:Are you or someone you know looking for employment in Montreal? BioWare has Development QA Manager and Lead Gameplay Designer positions open; PM me if you're interested or would like further details. Are there 3D artist positions about to open? If so I'd really like to ship my portfolio over to you.
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Jul 8, 2014 05:45
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OneEightHundred posted:I interviewed someone at a different (non-game) company where one of our questions was basically asking for an implementation of something that had directly-conflicting design goals and let them ask questions. I think that's productive. I don't know what good it does to pitch an open-ended problem with no specifics on a screener where the candidate can't ask questions though. What are interviewers even looking for in that case?
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Jul 8, 2014 06:04
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