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Jan posted:Or development should be more involved in marketing. I'm late to the party on this, but this game looks really cool. I'm very excited to check it out and wish you guys the best!
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Jun 15, 2015 07:00
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My part is basically 30 seconds out of the kickstarter video, while the better world gen will be on every fan's stream for the weeks to come. The joys of being a rendering programmer.
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Regarding applying at Blizzard: They really want people who play their games. It's not an explicit requirement, but the company averages 64 applicants per opening, if Fortune is to be believed, so if you can't at least name the major characters in Diablo, Starcraft and Warcraft, you might be in rough shape. Every interview I had with them had questions about what games I played and what I know about their IPs. A lot of non-Art positions will require a game analysis to be submitted. Make sure it's an analysis and not a review. You'll probably have to be pretty patient. The process from application to offer took 3+ months for me. The company's great to work for though. If you like the products, it's very fun and rewarding to work on them!
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Jun 24, 2015 23:30
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typhus posted:Hi guys! I haven't posted in this thread for a million years, but I wanted to point out that we're showing off the game I'm writing at PAX this weekend, and if you come by and check it out, I'd love to solicit y'alls opinions. And say hello if you see me! I look like this tubby douchebag. I got a chance to play this at E3 this year and it was pretty neat. I think I really like the concept and look forward to seeing it come out. To echo Brackhar, visually, it was a bit noisy but I think that's something that will go away if I spent more than 15 minutes with it. The base game looked pretty cool though!
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Aug 26, 2015 07:21
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baby puzzle posted:I get "active release technique" therapy and I really like it but nobody online ever trusts me about it. Yeah, so when someone is selling 'training' so you, someone with no medical background, can become certified to literally practice their medical techniques on other people for the low low price of a couple thousand dollars per course, it's probably bullshit. In fact, their entire site looks like a crock of poo poo I'd put up with homeopathy and crystal healing. I mean, do whatever you feel is best, but 'feels good' does not equal 'actually fixing a problem' (except when it does, because placebo and that complicated mess...). If you are having wrist pain, talk to a doctor, not someone who took 5 courses via interactive DVD and got 'certified' that way.
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Sep 23, 2015 07:13
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Mr Interweb posted:Well good news. After several years, I am finally unemployed. Which means I can once again resume my attempts at getting back in the industry. Blizzard is hiring for a Senior QA position if you want to hang out in Orange County.
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Oct 9, 2015 07:03
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Triarii posted:I personally would love to have some QA, but my boss considers it an extravagant and unnecessary expense. Maybe eventually enough game-breaking bugs will go live to make him change his mind. How is that even possible? I mean, he knows Tony Hawk 5 exists, yeah? QA is expensive, of course, and there is diminishing returns on your QA dollar, but to honestly and truly believe that it's unnecessary is pretty ludicrous.
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Oct 11, 2015 03:00
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Brackhar posted:As an example, back when LoL was in beta we recompiled a material shader and it resulted in all turrets in the game no longer attacking. That was... fun to track down. There is a part of me that really wants to know how the original LoL client looked, technically (Before Riot had $Infinite). From what I saw as an end user, it looked like a patchwork mess of systems that worked well enough to kick it out the door. The sane part of me never really wants to open that pandora's box and witness the horrors within.
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Oct 22, 2015 05:10
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Brackhar posted:Yeah, I'd like to include a FoV slider. I just don't have a lot of data on third person FoVs in general. Slider would be ideal, but as for defaults, I think it depends heavily on what kind of third person view you are using. This is all mostly from memory, and It's hazy at best at this point, but as best as I can remember, Over The Shoulder PoVs e.g. RE4 used a tighter FoV than something straight back, like WoW. WoW defaults to something like 82 degrees while RE4 on console shipped with a pretty tight FoV -- Something probably below 70. The later versions of it on PC had a slider, so that tight FoV might be for performance reasons. Smite defaulted to 65, but later added a slider that went up to 80. In doing some research, it looks like Gears of War has variable FoV depending on the state of the player code:Canine Blues Arooo fucked around with this message at 08:34 on Nov 2, 2015 |
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Nov 2, 2015 08:31
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I think I'm the camp of theflyingorc. Break the map up into regions and then guarantee per region a certain number of necessities. If your regions are small enough and the gameplay allows for it, you wouldn't even have to worry about regular distribution. It also gives you a really easy set of knobs to turn when it comes to tuning up the experience and adjusting difficulty. It's a pretty brute-force solution and something that a CS PhD might say is 'inelegant', but I'd be damned if it doesn't work.
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Nov 25, 2015 19:06
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DancingMachine posted:Also Diablo 3 is a perfectly fine, competent game. It's just not as fun as some other ARPGs. I think this is the point Paniolo was making. If I say 'No, I disagree. I think D3 is currently the most fun ARPG', then we are at an impasse. Either we'd have to start listing out what is quantifiable in terms of technical systems, animation polish ('All these animations are exactly 12/60, giving it a predictable and consistent feel vs...') and sheer quantity of content, or we have to agree to disagree and that's that. Even for the things that are quantifiable, we'd probably place different importance on those things, which is why it's really difficult to say, 'Game X is better than Game Y'.
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Nov 29, 2015 21:14
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Vino posted:
I feel this way for the most part. Broken Age was full of well-presented adventure elements, for better or worse, and I'd call that a success. Massive Chalice was actually pretty decent and I was surprised how much I enjoyed it. But then there is DF-9. I was really looking forward to DF-9 and probably did the thing where I project all my hopes and dreams onto this one game with a relatively small budget which is always a mistake, but what they released is extremely unfinished. That's the project that kinda burned me. That said, PS2 is probably *the* project at the studio and I have confidence that they will put out something worthy of the legacy.
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Dec 4, 2015 17:51
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Studio posted:Can't speak for Blizz, but the best way to approach Riot is to only apply if: This is almost Blizzard to the 't'.
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Jan 21, 2016 07:13
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Hughlander posted:Not sure why people want curation from Steam. Should Microsoft have curated the things you could sell on MSDOS? Should Visa curate what the flea market can charge? No, but that analogy doesn't work. Microsoft isn't a storefront and neither is Visa. There was a time where if I saw a game on steam I was kinda curious about that was on sale, I'd be willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. It had to be at least decent to be on that storefront, yeah? That, of course, is no longer true. Maybe it really is better these days and maybe having to be willing to do a little research about games before blindly buying them isn't so bad, but I think there are some advantages to curation.
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Jan 23, 2016 06:06
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Seluin posted:I worked for a company that laid off almost all their QA department. The CEO felt that having QA was making the developers too lazy to check their own stuff.  How did that end up working out? quote:
If anyone ever wants to do QA for real, this is a good starting point, but also write good bugs. Write really good bugs. Dev loves it when you write really good bugs.
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Feb 23, 2016 07:14
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Vino posted:Wow I've never seen such a strong response to Amazon in this thread before. I've heard some very uh...interesting things about Amazon as well from a few folks that have worked and applied there. The most notable anecdote I keep hearing is the 'replaceable cog in the machine' kind of mentality that permeates the entire team. Ownership isn't for you -- It's for some management you may be two or three times removed from. Three times now people have moved to Amazon only to quit inside a year because of complaints like this. To be fair, I can personally confirm none of this, and I know two people who are still there and really enjoy it. Apparently the pay is above average as well as long as you aren't in any kind of temp or temp-to-hire position. Canine Blues Arooo fucked around with this message at 23:48 on Mar 28, 2017 |
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Mar 28, 2017 23:45
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Studio posted:Incoming hot take: JIRA bad. This is a true fact. It does all the things, and it does them all very poorly.
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Jun 20, 2017 20:49
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Zaphod42 posted:JIRA works pretty well for the most part. Confluence on the other hand is a mess. It is my experience that JIRA scales poorly. Diddo Testrail. Confluence is even worse. I'm honestly stunned that this is the best the industry can offer because these products are mediocre at best. I swear their existence is being perpetuated by middle management that insists on implementing these toolsets because, 'they are the industry standard!'. It's the worst kind of vicious cycle. Canine Blues Arooo fucked around with this message at 03:56 on Oct 24, 2017 |
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Oct 24, 2017 03:42
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leper khan posted:I'm not going to claim jira is good, but it handles large numbers of projects rather well. Scale isn't typically the problem I have with it. Oh, it definitely handles a lot of projects pretty well. It however does not handle big projects very well.
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Oct 24, 2017 17:51
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EgonSpengler posted:JIRA has a fine interface for writing bugs, but terrible for managing large volumes of them, and non-existent you're-on-your-own reporting tools. Maybe my memory is a little busted here, but I think default JIRA's bug writing window is a 600 x 900 screen child window that allows you to see about 4 fields before you have to start to scroll and does not let you interact with it's parent window until you close the child window. That is awful beyond awful and screams to me that the people writing this software aren't dogfooding their product, or they just don't care...
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Oct 25, 2017 08:07
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baby puzzle posted:I'm trying really hard to get a playtest/demo build out on December 22nd. I have no idea how to do any of that but this looks very much like my jam. Hybrid Rhythm Action games are always interesting to me!!
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Dec 7, 2017 05:12
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e: Bad context for a bad post.
Canine Blues Arooo fucked around with this message at 06:33 on Apr 5, 2018 |
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Apr 5, 2018 06:28
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Jira does all the things, and does them all OK-ish to fine. It's on the opposite end of anything I'd call 'elegant' and I really don't care for it as a result.
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Apr 11, 2018 06:37
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Baaulp posted:I'm a software engineer in Boston who is thinking about switching gears to game dev. Aside from the obvious, what are the things that someone with little prior experience can do to make the switch? What field are you specifically interested in? Tools? Engine? Graphics? Something else?
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May 22, 2018 17:43
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baby puzzle posted:I'm curious about contract work... of any kind. How would I even begin? As a C++ programmer. The only place I've looked is upwork, but there didn't seem to be anything for me there. I don't hire or think about outsourcing, and I definitely don't have complete visibility on something like this, but I've never heard of outsourcing non-web engineering work.
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May 1, 2019 20:23
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Studio posted:Maybe you shouldn't work in games Counterpoint: games
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May 18, 2021 19:43
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The story of my entry is basically applying pretty frequently to Blizzard for about 3 years before finally being accepted at a very entry level position in QA and even then it was a total fluke that they happened to want someone with a strong background in computer hardware. Getting into the industry is as much luck as it is anything else it seems, unless you are Very Good at your craft.
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May 19, 2021 05:22
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To each there own when it comes to choosing a career (if you have such a luxury), but my main reason for working in games are people and product. I simply cannot pour my heart into something if I don't actually care about the product and for me, it's way more draining to work 40 hours on something I give no fucks about as opposed to working 60 on something I truly want to see succeed. Crunch is bad and while industry work/life balance seems to be getting better in places, it's still not great, but I so desperately need to work on a product I care above almost anything else. Second, I love working with people who I enjoy talking to. Not everyone in the industry is going to be that person, but the concentration is substantially higher. I think for some subset of people, a Games industry job can be absolutely amazing and the sacrifices you have to make are totally worth it. I also think that it's a vast minority of people. To that end, I think the individual needs to figure out what they value in a career and in life in general to better understand if it's worth it.
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May 19, 2021 10:18
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I feel my current job is a strong mix as described by devilmouse. There are some months where I get to go nuts and design/build a new toolset in a largely unexplored space with a loose deadline -- I love that. Then there are definitely a few sprints where my job is to update unit tests and build verification. It's definitely still on average the most enjoyable career I've had in my life.
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May 19, 2021 19:16
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thebardyspoon posted:Anyone got any advice for being the sole QA tester on a project that feels like it is rapidly getting unmanageable. There is a lot to unpack there. I'm reading into a lot of this and making assumptions so bear with me here. What I feel is lacking here is a defined process and points of responsibility. I don't really want to say 'SLA' since everyone hates that poo poo, but...SLAs do help define a lot of that. First, would be understanding what the process is. Ideally, you put in a bug with steps, impact and severity. Producers organize the work based on the information given. Designers make changes. You verify and either close the bug or reset it to active. I feel the key piece we are missing here is that Producers aren't involved in this process and designers are kind of doing their own thing when they want to, which just doesn't work too well around the bugfix/polish step. The producer layer gives you an 'unbiased' 3rd party to assign the work, and also ideally holds the team responsible for those commitments. The project also needs to give the QA process (either through leads, producers, or yourself) enough teeth to say with some authority, 'fix this before we cut an RC' and, 'this isn't fixed yet. Try again'. Is there a body of test cases already available? Is the testing you are doing based on some functional suite per feature, or is this just full exploratory all the time? The latter is pretty dangerous without massive volumes of cheap test (and even then, it's not great). Outsourcing QA is a huge yikes. Sometimes it has to happen, but depending on how complex your game is, and how complex state can be, this might go south super fast. Plan for the worst - you should be able to set some ground rules about how to enter bugs, steps, what the bug verification process is if there is one (there probably should be one). Test cases should be written such that someone that knows nothing about the game or even the genre can perform those steps and enter in bugs. Exploratory should be out of the question. Contract testers should be working off of what is effectively a checklist of functional tests. It's a lot of tedious work, but if it's done well, results are generally positive. Ideally, the discussion starts with, 'how do we make this game more testable?'. Your cheat and debug process should be expressive and accessible. This is pretty easy to do on PC and harder to do on other platforms. Mobile testing actually totally sucks here. Either way, the questions need to be asked and answered. Truly ideally: This is a discussion that happens in pre-prod. Testability should be a foundational goal in debug design and func from day 1. Designers asking for testing to be done is probably OK when the project afford QA more time and individual analysts are encouraged to specialize, but most of that work should be dictated by QA, not by the game team's ICs. If it must come through that way, then it should be coming through producers, who ideally have a better sense of what the whole state of the project is. In short, it really sounds like you need to stand up a real process to handle work that is both flowing into design, and requests coming from design. Producers should be shouldering that work where possible. Outsourcing QA requires very, very specific tests for both test steps and entering bugs. Focus on process and then start calling out risks where you see them. The job of QA isn't necessarily to make sure All The Things are fixed, but rather to facilitate the fixing of the most things as possible, and make production and design aware of the state of the project by documenting risk through the lens of QA. PM if you want to chat more - QA process is kinda my specialty and junk. Canine Blues Arooo fucked around with this message at 22:23 on Jul 6, 2021 |
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Jul 6, 2021 22:05
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Be very careful you read and understand any agreement. Probably hire a lawyer to represent you if you get that far. The whole 'TLC only got paid $50,000 for CrazySexyCool' thing can and definitely does happen in the games world.
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Jun 14, 2023 06:09
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I thought Maxis was gone completely. Glad to hear that they are still around!
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Jun 21, 2023 21:23
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