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Nagna Zul posted:Big news for me - I've landed a job at Blizzard. I'll be joining the Hearthstone team starting next month. Woo! Invasive question feel free to dodge: how highly did they value/appear to value prior experience with card games like MtG/YuGiOh/Pokemon/LOT5R/I cant think of any other tcgs right now/magi nation in the interviewing process Or was it something like a general programming/art/design interview and they told you late in the process it was for the Hearthstone team
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Apr 17, 2016 06:37
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Oh, hey, I didn't know this thread existed! I lived in Australia all my life, and was always into makin' games (as a programmer). I realized a few years ago that there was pretty much no jobs in the industry left in Australia, and the killing blow was when 2K Australia shut down, so I decided to move to the UK (since I can easily move there and work there due to ancestry reasons). I moved there, and now I work at Sumo Digital (Sonic Racing Transformed, LittleBigPlanet 3, lots of commissioned/outsourced projects) as currently a programmer on the engine tech team  I've been there half a year now, it's my first job in the industry, and it's been a real interesting experience so far! I don't really know where my end goal is right now, since a lot of companies I used to love kinda fell apart (like Valve), but I'm definitely not feeling bad about where I am currently. Honestly, Blizzard seems really great these days (especially Hearthstone and Overwatch seem full of love) but I don't know if the behind the scenes is great. Hopefully it is, grats Nagna!
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Apr 17, 2016 13:39
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Another part of the Infinity machine!  Welcome!
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Apr 17, 2016 18:01
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Nagna Zul posted:Big news for me - I've landed a job at Blizzard. I'll be joining the Hearthstone team starting next month. Woo! Congrats! I've heard the company has been doing much better in the last couple of years. Blizz isn't relocating you, though?
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Apr 17, 2016 18:04
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Nagna Zul posted:Big news for me - I've landed a job at Blizzard. I'll be joining the Hearthstone team starting next month. Woo! Congratulations! Team 5's great to work on, so you should have a really good time.
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Apr 18, 2016 02:23
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Jewel posted:Oh, hey, I didn't know this thread existed! how long til you can rock the boat and ask about Sonic and All-Stars Racing Transformed
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Apr 18, 2016 06:10
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Jewel posted:I've been there half a year now, it's my first job in the industry, and it's been a real interesting experience so far! I don't really know where my end goal is right now, since a lot of companies I used to love kinda fell apart (like Valve), How did Valve fall apart?
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Apr 18, 2016 06:14
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DeadGame posted:How did Valve fall apart? They don't
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Apr 18, 2016 08:01
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The Glumslinger posted:They don't tracer core?
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Apr 18, 2016 08:42
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DeadGame posted:How did Valve fall apart? They're pretty heavily in contention within my social circles/communities because they have basically no support staff, rely on the community to moderate themselves, rely on the community for a lot of content updates, their flexible structure means seemingly nobody is ever at fault for issues, etc. These aren't all bad things, and I absolutely love Dota2 and loved TF2, but they're just not the ideal environment any more for me is all! zolthorg posted:how long til you can rock the boat and ask about Sonic and All-Stars Racing Transformed Why would it be rocking the boat? From what I've seen, everyone here loves that game (including me)
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Apr 18, 2016 11:42
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Wasn't someone in here working on Battleborn? Tried out the open beta this weekend and it's looking pretty slick.
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Apr 18, 2016 14:56
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Jewel posted:They're pretty heavily in contention within my social circles/communities because they have basically no support staff, rely on the community to moderate themselves, rely on the community for a lot of content updates, their flexible structure means seemingly nobody is ever at fault for issues, etc. These aren't all bad things, and I absolutely love Dota2 and loved TF2, but they're just not the ideal environment any more for me is all!
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Apr 18, 2016 15:13
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Shalinor posted:FWIW, Valve is still a fine place to work, I hear, it's just like... working for Google. Big comfortable environment with great benefits whose structure guarantees a ton of your job is lazily navigating political structures. The trade-off being, you can say "oh yeah I work for" and maybe even Grandma perks up, even if it isn't a place to work if you want to ship games. Oh yeah, totally. It seems comfy, I'd honestly probably enjoy it; "falling apart" isn't so much as just a way of saying they're just not very coordinated. They're definitely not going anywhere due to the income Valve gets though. Most actual negativity I hold towards them stems mostly from the lack of support with such a large userbase. Edit: Also they're pretty exclusive iirc? Jewel fucked around with this message at 15:47 on Apr 18, 2016 |
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Apr 18, 2016 15:44
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ChickenWing posted:Wasn't someone in here working on Battleborn? Tried out the open beta this weekend and it's looking pretty slick. I have a friend who went to work on it so thats good to hear
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Apr 18, 2016 15:51
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ChickenWing posted:Wasn't someone in here working on Battleborn? Tried out the open beta this weekend and it's looking pretty slick. Pretty sure there was, but I can't remember who.
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Apr 18, 2016 16:34
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Shalinor posted:FWIW, Valve is still a fine place to work, I hear, it's just like... working for Google. Big comfortable environment with great benefits whose structure guarantees a ton of your job is lazily navigating political structures. The trade-off being, you can say "oh yeah I work for" and maybe even Grandma perks up, even if it isn't a place to work if you want to ship games. I've worked for Valve the past 8 years (and have been in the industry about 18 years - started at Epic). The claim the company is somehow not a game company surprised me, since I've worked on games the entire time I've been here. What you write is a strange way to characterize the company. Would be happy to answer specific questions. "Lazily navigating political structures" doesn't match my experience it all. There are a bunch of new game projects going on, we just don't talk about them unless we think they'll turn into something or unless there is some advantage to doing so.
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Apr 18, 2016 18:04
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DeadGame posted:I've worked for Valve the past 8 years (and have been in the industry about 18 years - started at Epic). The claim the company is somehow not a game company surprised me, since I've worked on games the entire time I've been here. What you write is a strange way to characterize the company. Would be happy to answer specific questions. "Lazily navigating political structures" doesn't match my experience it all. There are a bunch of new game projects going on, we just don't talk about them unless we think they'll turn into something or unless there is some advantage to doing so. If that isn't your experience though, hey, would love an updated picture of it. EDIT: xzzy posted:If no one outside the company knows about them, they effectively don't exist. Do that long enough and presto, reputation for not making games anymore exists. Shalinor fucked around with this message at 18:15 on Apr 18, 2016 |
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Apr 18, 2016 18:10
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DeadGame posted:There are a bunch of new game projects going on, we just don't talk about them unless we think they'll turn into something or unless there is some advantage to doing so. If no one outside the company knows about them, they effectively don't exist. Do that long enough and presto, reputation for not making games anymore exists.
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Apr 18, 2016 18:11
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I just imagine that while Valve's structure is obviously conducive to creativity and experimentation that it makes it more difficult to button down the not fun stuff like customer service or rallying around a project to push it out the door. People theory craft about Valve because they are an enigma in many ways. It's a perfect mixture of once releasing regular top hits, independent private and vast resources, an avant garde company structure (that we all learned about via the employee manual), and then the passage of years since a highly visible tentpole release. On top of that, the only people who have ever talked candidly publicly about what's going on at Valve have been people who have left for various reasons, which is never a good projection of all sides. The cherry on top is we all miss that golden age of top hits from Valve. Personally, I would love to take a crack at working there, and they've always been my "dream" job. I have many questions that can probably only be answered by my working there for a while.
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Apr 18, 2016 18:13
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Shalinor posted:I've heard there is a lot of who-you-know to getting on the cool projects. Anyone on any project can move their desk to where they want to be at any time. If I wanted to go work on VR, I could just move down there. If I wanted to work on CS:GO, I could just go move up there. If someone wants to join my project, they'd likely come by and ask about it (what are we doing, what are the problems we're solving, why do we think we're worth existing, etc) and then if they were interested they could just roll on up. Internal people allocation is a kind of internal labor market. No project managers or bosses tell people where to go. If my project needs a resource, I go talk to other teams and other people in that role to find out who can come lend a hand and for how long. I could go join the hardware team, but I'm not skilled in that way and I wouldn't generate as much value for Valve or my peers. My peer reviews would suffer as a result of a choice that wasn't maximizing my ability. I could go try my hand at art, but I'm not an artist and that wouldn't be a very smart choice. So cross-disciplinary moves are possible, but less common. I know an animator who has become a coder and is doing well. Shalinor posted:The hard bounce-offs I know did so because they just didn't end up somewhere cool, more feeling like an outsider without real input. I don't mean lazy as in do-nothing, but more that kinda relaxed vibe of the huge well funded companies. You kinda have to work at getting fired, lots of meetings about meetings, your standard giant company stuff. Most projects have very few meetings. Projects that are early in their life cycle or close to shipping might have more meetings. My own project has one meeting a month to set milestones and goals for that month and get everyone coordinated and that's it. We all work in the same room, so meetings aren't really necessary to coordinate on tasks. I think this varies a lot by team. Dota is on a pretty regular shipping cycle and I know they have meetings fairly often to keep that cycle coordinated - but it isn't daily. When I look over there most everyone is working (or playing Dota). The claim you have to work to get fired seems a bit nuts to me, but that's a tough thing to talk about without some insight into how the company works (easy to say the wrong thing). In short: if your productivity is chronically low, or if you are destructive you will get fired. But the company will also give a lot of benefit of the doubt to someone who had a good track record and has had a bad year. Your people are your greatest asset. You have to be really sure when you fire someone that it's the right decision and that other avenues to fixing the problem have been exhausted. Shalinor posted:Also not great if you thrive off seeing people interact with your work. Working on stuff behind closed doors for a decade, never able to talk about it, and seeing it cancelled or passed over or the like constantly, would kinda drive me insane. We've shipped VR and the Lab, a billion updates to TF, Dota, and CS:GO. It is the case we haven't shipped a classical single player game since Portal 2. I guess if you constrain your definition of "shipping a game" to "shipping a traditional story based single player game" then I can see how internal and external perception differ. And I don't think it's unreasonable for people to constrain their view that way - we've had some great single player games and people miss them and developers miss the opportunity to work on them. It probably sounds like I'm being defensive about what we choose to work on. I'm not, so don't take it that way. It just happens to be the case that people at the company are choosing to build these big multiplayer games and that those projects have been successful. Those projects dovetail well with the goal of "grow Steam" since those games are also popular in regions outside the US. I don't think that says anything about what the future might hold or that we've become a multiplayer-only company or something like that. GreenMarine fucked around with this message at 19:00 on Apr 18, 2016 |
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Apr 18, 2016 18:57
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DeadGame posted:Anyone on any project can move their desk to where they want to be at any time. If I wanted to go work on VR, I could just move down there. If I wanted to work on CS:GO, I could just go move up there. If someone wants to join my project, they'd likely come by and ask about it (what are we doing, what are the problems we're solving, why do we think we're worth existing, etc) and then if they were interested they could just roll on up. Internal people allocation is a kind of internal labor market. No project managers or bosses tell people where to go. If my project needs a resource, I go talk to other teams and other people in that role to find out who can come lend a hand and for how long. This is my lack-of-sleep-addled brain, but this seems like a great way to get hosed when no one wants to work on your project. What happens when you've got a project that no one wants to work on, but that is important to the company?
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Apr 18, 2016 19:05
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Chasiubao posted:This is my lack-of-sleep-addled brain, but this seems like a great way to get hosed when no one wants to work on your project. What happens when you've got a project that no one wants to work on, but that is important to the company? obligatory "Half-Life 3"
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Apr 18, 2016 19:24
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Chasiubao posted:This is my lack-of-sleep-addled brain, but this seems like a great way to get hosed when no one wants to work on your project. What happens when you've got a project that no one wants to work on, but that is important to the company? The flippant answer is "That project dies. If people don't want to work on it, than it must not be as important to the company than the other things people choose to work on." Of course, it's more complicated than that. We're intentionally giving up that kind of centralized control over choosing which projects exist and which do not in favor of maximizing individual employee liberty and maximizing an employee's ability to generate value. I can choose to start a new project, but I know I've got to be able to convince people it's the right thing to work on. This means it's on me to do a bunch of due diligence around "what is the right product to create" and the answer involves demonstrating an ability to create value for customers and my peers. If someone starts a new project, it can't just be because they have a big idea, they have to do the work to demonstrate the opportunity to others who have a whole bunch of promising projects to choose among. People will move when that value is demonstrated. It is high risk to join a new project. Maybe it won't get there. That's a part of the evaluation people already make. I haven't seen people join a new project who didn't know it might not work out and weren't okay with that. In the internal labor market, different employees have different levels of risk aversion. Starting new projects is it's own skill. New projects aren't assured of their own success by the company deciding "we're going to build X." So if you start a new project without knowing those things, or without a skill-set to do that kind of exploratory work, then you're screwing yourself because you had no chance of success. It's somewhat similar to the engineer who wants to be an artist. Similarly, there are people who are really good at finishing and shipping projects. Often they aren't the same as people who are really good at starting projects. I trust in and require good judgement on the part of my peers to make mutually beneficial choices about which projects to work on and why. If I want to know why someone is working on Dota instead of "new project I think is important" I just go ask them. The strongest argument for "you should work on X" is when I myself go work on X. People do this all the time. It's a hard skill for new hires to learn: you often have to see it in action. But people are constantly coming by and saying things like "I'm about wrapped up with my current set of tasks, so I'm looking for something new to do and want to know what I can offer here." They are in the information gathering phase of deciding where they want to invest their time. Valve is only as good as the aggregate good decision making of its employees, as opposed to depending on the good judgement of a single owner or manager or a team of managers. That means there are a lot of trade-offs for us which are different for everyone else. GreenMarine fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Apr 18, 2016 |
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Apr 18, 2016 19:27
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Do you ever call each other comrade, and how often do you thank the ghost of Lenin?
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Apr 18, 2016 19:31
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I know you don't think of it that way, but what you just described is holy geeze political. I get the idea, but it would never be as clean as "gosh I want to work on X" and then roll my desk over. What you've got would leverage a ton of the same skills involved in just forming a team on the outside. That you even call it the internal job market is... impressive, but also - yup, logical.
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Apr 18, 2016 20:30
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So I have a question. I have two .exe files I was given months ago which can crash TF2 servers. I found a relatively serious Steam exploit where you can impersonate another user. I know a lot about Steam's backends (I was a black hat for them), and say what you will about Steam Guard, it just isn't well-crafted or secure at all. I contacted Steam customer service and got an automated reply in response. Whose responsibility is it to secure your systems, and do the fun things you don't want to do? Who do I call when Chris K pushes a merge conflict to production? My contacts who worked on SteamOS have told me that project is for all intents and purposes, dead.
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Apr 18, 2016 20:50
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Suspicious Dish posted:So I have a question. I have two .exe files I was given months ago which can crash TF2 servers. I found a relatively serious Steam exploit where you can impersonate another user. I know a lot about Steam's backends (I was a black hat for them), and say what you will about Steam Guard, it just isn't well-crafted or secure at all. Email driller@valvesoftware.com with information on the TF2 exploits and afarnsworth@valvesoftware.com with information on the Steam exploits.
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Apr 18, 2016 21:02
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DeadGame posted:driller Wow, driller's still there?! We used to play CS together like 10218 years ago.
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Apr 18, 2016 21:16
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DeadGame posted:Email driller@valvesoftware.com with information on the TF2 exploits and afarnsworth@valvesoftware.com with information on the Steam exploits. Will do, thanks. Is this information publicly known? Unless I stumbled into this thread and found a contact, what would I have done otherwise?
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Apr 18, 2016 21:22
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Is anyone else going to PAX East this weekend? I'll be there the whole time at the Harebrained Schemes booth demoing Necropolis. Stop by and say hi!
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Apr 18, 2016 21:22
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endlosnull posted:Is anyone else going to PAX East this weekend? I'll be there the whole time at the Harebrained Schemes booth demoing Necropolis. Stop by and say hi! Yup, demo'ing Streamline at our Proletariat booth #11065. (I'm working all Friday, Saturday morning, and probably most of Sunday. I'm Jesse!)
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Apr 18, 2016 21:25
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devilmouse posted:Yup, demo'ing Streamline at our Proletariat booth #11065. (I'm working all Friday, Saturday morning, and probably most of Sunday. I'm Jesse!) Cool, I'll try to stop by when I can. Our booth is #10188. I'm Gordon the asian dude.
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Apr 18, 2016 21:29
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Clearly our avatars are accurate representations of how we look.
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Apr 18, 2016 21:34
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devilmouse posted:Clearly our avatars are accurate representations of how we look. Welp, at least I'm ripped 
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Apr 18, 2016 21:37
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Is it stupid hard for any other freelance 3D artist right now to find work as an environment designer? Because ugh. Even actively looking for job offers simply constantly turns out Character designers, riggers, animators, but nothing for environment. I guess if work can't find me, I'll have to brush up my character skills (it's not really that I'm bad at it, it's just that I HATE it). Also I'm sure it's not my undewear smell, I cleaned that last month. /edit/ precision : I mean paid work, because yes I did have a thousand work for shares offers. Popoto fucked around with this message at 23:46 on Apr 18, 2016 |
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Apr 18, 2016 23:43
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StarMinstrel posted:Is it stupid hard for any other freelance 3D artist right now to find work as an environment designer? Because ugh. Even actively looking for job offers simply constantly turns out Character designers, riggers, animators, but nothing for environment. I guess if work can't find me, I'll have to brush up my character skills (it's not really that I'm bad at it, it's just that I HATE it). Haha, I'm seeing the exact opposite problem, all environment jobs but no character rigging, designing or animating.
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Apr 18, 2016 23:57
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Megaspel posted:Haha, I'm seeing the exact opposite problem, all environment jobs but no character rigging, designing or animating. I've been looking on : Polycount TIGForums IndieDB ModDB They are the four place that I know, recommended by a friend artist that was able to get all his contracts over time from these websites. I'm probably missing a bunch of other important ones then. edit/ looking at OP, it seems I missed these two. cgtalk.com (art) game-artist.net (art) also maybe gamasutra? Not sure, it always seemed more of a designer website.
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Apr 19, 2016 00:11
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How to make a thread go from 2 posts in a week to 32 posts in a day: Start a conversation about Valve.
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Apr 19, 2016 03:44
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Jewel posted:Why would it be rocking the boat? From what I've seen, everyone here loves that game (including me) A certain cameo selection from a certain animated film called Sugar Rush about a certain video game with the same name about a certain competitive sport that may be the same competitive sport featured in the video game with the cameo
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Apr 19, 2016 03:52
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zolthorg posted:A certain cameo selection from a certain animated film called Sugar Rush about a certain video game with the same name about a certain competitive sport that may be the same competitive sport featured in the video game with the cameo Would you like to try that post again, but in English this time?
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Apr 19, 2016 04:03
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