Game Jobs Megathread: Wear clean underwear to avoid the smellz.

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Game Jobs Megathread: Wear clean underwear to avoid the smellz.

wasabimilkshake: Aug 21, 2007; North Carolina votes yes.

Vino posted:

After putting it off for such a long time I finally downloaded UDK and set off to learning how to code in UnrealScript.

Is it really true that there's no free UnrealScript debugger? The only things I could find were for an old version, $350, severely out of date, or released five days ago and still very crashy. With how prevalent Unreal is I would think there would be lots of free tools to do something as simple as setting breakpoints.

nFringe is absolutely wonderful, and as far as I know it's the only good UnrealScript debugger out there (and it makes a fine IDE overall). You only need a license if you're developing commercial projects: if you're just doing personal or mod work, it's totally free.

The UDK thread is here. I've done a fair bit in UnrealScript, so feel free to post there if you need any assistance.

# ¿ Jun 4, 2011 08:50

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 05:06

wasabimilkshake: Aug 21, 2007; North Carolina votes yes.

Vodvillain posted:

My portfolio is on my site: marcusroth(dot)net. Any constructive criticism is totally welcome.

For starters, don't purposely obfuscate the URL of your portfolio site. Are you afraid that spam bots and search engine crawlers will offer you an interview? :v:

# ¿ Jun 4, 2011 21:57

wasabimilkshake: Aug 21, 2007; North Carolina votes yes.

Quick question: Is it impolite or anything to apply for a job during or shortly after E3? I've heard that about GDC, since a huge portion of the industry is there and everyone is generally drunk/tired/busy and coming back to a weeklong backlog.

# ¿ Jun 9, 2011 11:58

wasabimilkshake: Aug 21, 2007; North Carolina votes yes.

This could only be an elaborate scheme to recruit you as a salesman for Cutco knives.

# ¿ Feb 19, 2012 19:51

wasabimilkshake: Aug 21, 2007; North Carolina votes yes.

Adel posted:

For now I'll just stick to making art. Worrying about having a definite "endgame" for my potential career seems to be counterproductive, especially considering my lack of experience.

Remember that you have time to figure out what you're best suited for. What's important now is not that you make the right decision, just that you have a personal goal that will motivate you to become better and more employable. If, later on, you find that you want to do something else, you can adjust that goal; you're by no means locked in.

If you put the decision off until you're looking for work, you'll be jumping off a cliff into the raging, uncertain waters of probable unemployment. If you make that decision while you have a few years of school left, you'll be stepping off the precipice into a safe, inviting kiddie pool. Splash around, give it your best, and if it doesn't work out, you can always hop out and try something else, emboldened by your previous kiddie-pool-wallowing experience.

wasabimilkshake fucked around with this message at 10:13 on Feb 20, 2012

# ¿ Feb 20, 2012 05:49

wasabimilkshake: Aug 21, 2007; North Carolina votes yes.

Absolutely so. Being a part of the CA network is an invaluable benefit both during and after the conference. Of secondary benefit is having access to a giant room in which to pass out between sessions. Also, the pass is All Access, not just Expo, which means it also includes Vault access.

This'll be my third consecutive year volunteering at GDC, and I've also been invited by a large, generous company to speak at their expo booth, so I'll be experiencing the full week of GDC for the cost of BART fare from the airport :allears:

# ¿ Feb 23, 2012 11:37

wasabimilkshake: Aug 21, 2007; North Carolina votes yes.

At GDC this year I gave a presentation at Autodesk's expo booth, along with a former professor, about a project I worked on in college. I tried to cram in an inspirational message for the kids while also saying a bunch of nice things about Maya and Scaleform:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbmCpVh-ozM (I am the guy at 13:22)

The (gracious and appreciated) feedback I'm getting from friends and family is putting me into a rather vainglorious mood, so if anyone has any scathing critique, feel free to hurl it my way.

# ¿ Mar 13, 2012 05:43

wasabimilkshake: Aug 21, 2007; North Carolina votes yes.

Fishbus posted:

This is why I feel like being someone who developed their skills via a non skill-related website/community is a blessing. I can take so much criticism these days, and I feel like anyone else flipping over a phrase like "I don't like your game" is a big baby.

Although it's a horribly cost-ineffective approach (I graduated last year from "the biggest rip-off in America"), I feel like art school also instilled that in me. I was lucky to have drawing professors who made students cry, taught us how to effectively critique each other, made us work our asses off to pass, and generally got across the idea that no, none of us were special rainbow gumdrop butterflies oozing with pure and perfect God-given talent.

# ¿ Jun 18, 2012 17:48

wasabimilkshake: Aug 21, 2007; North Carolina votes yes.

Nagna Zul posted:

It's been said many times before in this thread, but it's worth re-iterating:

Holding a box of your own, finished game is an awesome feeling.

Hey, congrats! The studio I work for did some animation work for ASM, so we experienced a shade of that feeling today when we noticed the launch videos and reviews.

Amid cries of "I animated that!", I was content in knowing that the MotionBuilder tool I wrote to streamline the process of adding blinking animation to characters in a small fraction of that game's cutscenes meaningfully contributed to its success :v:

# ¿ Jun 27, 2012 12:31

wasabimilkshake: Aug 21, 2007; North Carolina votes yes.

GetWellGamers posted:

I can't even make the "I didn't know they were making a new Descent game " joke because you misspelled your synonym.

You mean homonym?

Man, that's so ironnic that you corrected his grammer but then you're grammer was wrong how about LEARN TO READ BUDDY

# ¿ Jul 25, 2012 16:09

wasabimilkshake: Aug 21, 2007; North Carolina votes yes.

icking fudiot posted:

aww ye

Hey, I recognize that bridge! ...and those conspicuous, omnipresent cranes.

I just bid farewell to my fourth-floor window overlooking Balboa Park, as the company is moving its operations over to Mission Valley

# ¿ Aug 24, 2012 01:42

wasabimilkshake: Aug 21, 2007; North Carolina votes yes.

The view out my window as of today:

It's stirringly beautiful. I still get goosebumps every time I look outside.

# ¿ Aug 25, 2012 08:06

wasabimilkshake: Aug 21, 2007; North Carolina votes yes.

devilmouse posted:

assuming your NURR/CURR/RURR are good

Those acronyms are hilariously difficult to Google, but what they mean doesn't interest me nearly as much as how you'd pronounce them when you're talking about this stuff out loud. Does anyone ever walk into a conference room and say, "good news, team, our nurrkurrrurr is looking up this month?"

# ¿ Nov 15, 2012 07:55

wasabimilkshake: Aug 21, 2007; North Carolina votes yes.

I bet you're one of those NoSoSoCal squares, though. The true SoSoSoCal is right on the border with NoBaCal.

# ¿ Mar 3, 2013 18:02

wasabimilkshake: Aug 21, 2007; North Carolina votes yes.

That Gobbo posted:

Still not really sure what position I want to work toward yet, thinking Technical Artist might be a cool career that lets me keep a foot in both art and programming. Any TAs here have any advice on where to start learning that path?

Learn to use Maya as an end user (PROTIP: It's used for way more than just creating models). Once you have some practical experience, learn to use the commands API in Python (Help -> Python Command Reference) to write scripts that do novel and useful things for the benefit of an end user.

# ¿ Mar 30, 2013 20:04

wasabimilkshake: Aug 21, 2007; North Carolina votes yes.

Shalinor posted:

Eeeh. See, I don't buy this. There isn't some great divide between C++ and C#.

The big one (and practically speaking, the only one relevant for gamedev) is pointers / memory management. That's kind of "it," and I ran into plenty of C++ engineers whose understanding of memory management was already vague at best. Yes, there are a lot of other differences internal to C#, but in terms of writing C++ as though you were still writing C#, memory management/pointers is the one stumbling block.

I feel lucky that C++ was my first language, so I had the opposite problem when I first used C#. I was very perplexed that I had to new everything, and that there didn't seem to be a way to explicitly delete things. (Another consequence is that languages without separate header and implementation files feel wrong and dirty to me.)

But aside from memory management, what about templates? A lot of "modern C++" requires an understanding of templates and how they're specialized and instantiated. Are these so-called "modern C++" features relevant for game development? Litmus test: is boost commonly used in games? Is C++11 being widely adopted among developers targeting PC and consoles? Are smart pointers scoffed at for their perceived performance drawbacks? Are RAII and CRTP and RVO familiar terms to every game programmer? What percentage of game programmers follow Alexei Alexandrescu on twitter?

Anyway, speaking of tools...

The Oid posted:

Generally speaking in AAA, tool development is done by tools programmers and not the same people that program the game. Even then, most if not all, tool programmers have a strong grasp of C++.

I've worked on a few games, but for an animation/VFX production studio that did some cutscenes and trailers under contract. Recently, I was politely turned down for a technical art position at a AAA developer after taking their test. Parts of it ("write a tool in Python") were a cinch and a lot of fun, but the rest of it involved doing things that at my studio were traditionally handled by Character TDs and Lighting/Effects TDs. In the same system of job titles, I was a Pipeline TD -- a guy who writes tools and automates stuff, particularly in DCC apps like Maya.

To wit: I can't rig a character worth a drat! The thought of painting skin weights makes me a little nauseous, but I'd be thrilled to write a tool that made painting skin weights easier and more efficient.

Anyway, failing that test made me realize that I need to seriously refocus my job search. I haven't been sitting on my hands for the past two years -- I've learned and improved a lot, just in a way that's seen me drift further away from a "technical artist" role. As I've spent the past year writing stuff in C++, I've become a much more competent programmer. I really enjoy making things that allow artists to work more efficiently, but I have basically zero interest in creating any art/animation myself and would much rather concern myself with creating well-designed, well-written software. Basically, I'm thinking that I'm barking up the wrong tree by applying for Tech Art jobs, and that I should instead apply as a Tools Programmer wherever I can.

This is my website -- http://awforsythe.com/ -- any feedback? If I were an artist or a designer (as I originally marketed myself), I'd obviously have a showy, multimedia-rich showcase of previous work. Do I need that as a programmer? For the record, this is what I work on now, but there's no obvious way to show what work went into it without going into tedious technical details that would break confidentiality anyway.

# ¿ Jun 4, 2013 06:00

wasabimilkshake: Aug 21, 2007; North Carolina votes yes.

DancingMachine posted:

Did you self-teach C++? Seems unlikely they're teaching that in the BFA program you graduated from. :)

It certainly took a lot of self-teaching (and on-the-job experience) to become proficient enough to confidently apply for programming jobs, but I actually do owe the initial interest in C++ to my time at SCAD. When I was there we had a great professor who earned a CS degree in the 80s and made his subsequent living as a game programmer. His two classes were mostly an attempt to familiarize artists with programming, but they were very fun and well-presented, and for me they kindled an interest that's never gone away. Since then I've learned from online courses (Harvard's CS50 is excellent; also Stanford's CS106/7 and some Coursera stuff more recently), books, and tens of thousands of lines of code written professionally without any sort of technical supervision.

Oh, and spending a month or two one summer to participate in SA GameDev was an immeasurably educational experience, I tell you what :D

Those titles on the resume (plus one other game canceled / in limbo) were all at the same company. Thanks; I'll try to make that clearer the next time I revise my resume.

emoticon posted:

I don't follow him on twitter, but I recognize the last name. He wrote Modern C++ (something), a book with a lot of template-based design patterns, right?

Yeah, he's the foremost expert on C++ templates and template metaprogramming, and he's also involved with the design of D.

Keeping up with the state of the art in C++ and following/reading people like Alexandrescu, Sutter, Meyers, Lavavej, and Stroustrup has been instrumental in helping me shift from a naive understanding of C++ as C with some extra features (or else Java with some low-level semantics) to understanding its power and flexibility as a continually evolving modern language of its own.

emoticon posted:

...the idea is to make your game engine less confusing, more transparent, and easier to debug. Performance and maintainability generally trumps fancy polymorphism tricks.

There have been times when I've used some arguably obtuse and overly fancy template tricks, but it's been in service of performance and maintainability (compile-time polymorphism means less decision-making at runtime and less code repeated). I can definitely see the downsides that limit the cases where such esoteric chicanery is occasioned, but I'm hopeful that those downsides will be increasingly diminished as useful new features like variadic templates (C++11) and concepts (C++14, maybe) become standardized and adopted.

...geez, there's a game development thread in SHSC/COBOL that I feel like I should probably read more often.

# ¿ Jun 4, 2013 07:42

wasabimilkshake: Aug 21, 2007; North Carolina votes yes.

Paniolo posted:

(For example: what circumstances to use an array of structs vs a struct of arrays?)

Out of curiosity, would your answer be, "it depends on how you access the data 'cuz CPU cache lol?"

# ¿ Jun 21, 2013 16:50

wasabimilkshake: Aug 21, 2007; North Carolina votes yes.

Gearman posted:

This is doubly true if they have any kind of experience with Motionbuilder.

What, really? I don't have a very good read on the popularity of MotionBuilder, because there doesn't seem to be any sort of community attached to it. I've never fully worked out whether a.) nobody talks about MotionBuilder because it's a niche thing that's not used in a way amenable to posting about on polycount, or b.) nobody talks about MotionBuilder because nobody uses MotionBuilder.

A huge part of my work over the past two years has been programming for MotionBuilder, and I feel like I'm part of a cadre of enlightened souls who actually understand its obtuse SDK. At the same time, it feels like an underwhelming skill that not many companies have a need for.

But while we're on the topic of experience with MotionBuilder, here is a plug for a thing that I did: http://awforsythe.com/tutorials

# ¿ Jun 23, 2013 07:13

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 05:06

wasabimilkshake: Aug 21, 2007; North Carolina votes yes.

In the first half of the year, I was working for the same guys I'd been with for two years. Halfway through the year, I took my last paycheck and left Southern California with the understanding that said guys would soon reinvent themselves in a new city thanks to a pending business deal.

In the second half of the year, I sat around waiting, working freelance here and there, as that business deal fell through.

Now the same guys are talking about reinventing themselves in another new city thanks to another pending business deal. Continuing to stick with them would be the most convenient career move for me, but given the lessons I learned in 2013, I'd just as soon find a better opportunity somewhere else.

This is my portfolio: http://awforsythe.com/. I'd like to write software to support the production of games and/or film, in Los Angeles or elsewhere. Do I have a shot? What could I be doing better?

# ¿ Jan 1, 2014 20:35

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