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So, ArenaNet is hiring for some positions that sound like they might be interesting. But they want a code sample with 2500 lines of C++ that demonstrates your best work. And they are listing the position as "Senior". This strikes me as misguided. A "Senior" programmer is not likely to have 2500 lines of code they're really proud of sitting around that they can or want to give to you. Unless they are unemployed and having trouble finding work, then they will take the time to write something. But do you really want to limit your pool of applicants like that? I find I am too busy/lazy to do much side-project coding at home these days. But when I do, it's not generally in C++. And then in the unlikely event that I have a big chunk of C++ code that I'm really proud of and that I legally own, it's probably part of my awesome game that I'm going to release eventually and I probably don't feel comfortable just sending it to a random game studio for "evaluation". 
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Jun 4, 2011 07:48
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Eh, I post a little in the Flight Sim threads. As long as you don't take it as a personal attack when people criticize your product and are able to resist the urge to defend it, it's not a problem I think. I don't post that much though since of course working for a giant mega-corporation there's a very narrow range of stuff I am allowed to talk about anyway.
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Jun 20, 2011 04:16
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Sigma-X posted:My buddy who used to work for a company that did F2P games exclusively said their average take per unique account was $80 per account. Those are astronomical numbers. What I've read is more like you're doing really well at $2/month/user. But still, F2P means a lot more users. Or like the article Diplomaticus linked says, those numbers sound like ARPPU, not ARPU.
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Jun 22, 2011 04:27
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devilmouse posted:A handy summary! http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304447804576414111297459234.html Congrats on all those sweet, sweet IPO shares.  Hope they are treating employees well in this!
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Jul 1, 2011 18:30
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Hollywood's model is interesting. Individuals on a project are treated better due to the guilds (especially lower-level folks equivalent to black-box testers in games). But there is no job security. Everyone is essentially an independent contractor brought on for a specific project. When that contract is done its time to find a new job. Games is getting more and more that way but for the most part people still work for a studio or corporation, not a single game.
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Jul 14, 2011 05:15
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Working at Bioware would be so awesome but... Edmonton. 
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Jul 19, 2011 06:45
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Black Eagle posted:The net effect is the same regardless of who removes the opportunity from the marketplace. If a customer chooses a competitor's title, you missed that opportunity to make a sale. If a customer chooses a used copy of your title, you missed another opportunity to make a sale. You don't incur any losses in either scenario; in fact, you've already gained revenue from the first sales of the resold units. This is worthless semantic wankery. The point is retailers who sell used games are are reducing the pool of money that would otherwise be available to produce future games.
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Jul 29, 2011 18:07
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Black Eagle posted:First, the very existence of a retail channel opens new opportunities and thereby expands the size of the total addressable market. Second, you're assuming that used game sales remove opportunities that corporations would otherwise be able to seize. How do you think price-conscious buyers would behave in a hypothetical system where there were no used games? Such buyers would either not make any purchases, which would reduce the profitability of the retail channel and increase the cost of distribution to publishers, or they would buy and return. Returns, in a system where there is no option of reselling used games, would be very costly all around. I think the best responses to used game sales are a) embargoing retailers from the sale of specific used titles until three to six months following the release of those specific titles, and b) investing in customer loyalty programs, which includes DLC and other features that require authentication. I'm pretty confident that most price-conscious buyers who are willing to pay $55 for a used game would be willing to pay $60 for a new game if the used version was not available. There are lots of business workarounds of varying effectiveness to deal with used games, but the underlying problem is that the concept of used doesn't make sense in intellectual property.
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Jul 29, 2011 22:06
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Imajus posted:I always send emails a week or two after submitting a resume just to make sure they received it ok and if they have any questions. I get a steady trickle of recruiters contacting me on linked in. It's definitely worth maintaining a profile on there once you have some experience. As far as I can tell the actual connections don't matter that much, but it's a good place to effectively have your resume posted. Make sure you've got the buzz words in your profile that recruiters will be searching for, and that you've joined the right groups that recruiters will be trolling. The connections might be useful when you get laid off to just notify everybody you've ever worked with that you're looking for a job, but I haven't tried that. I'm not sure how valuable the recommendations are. It's pretty obvious that everybody recommends each other, so unless a rec is from the person's supervisor or incredibly well written I don't pay them much heed. And even then with a grain of salt. I'd actually like to update my profile with more detail but I don't want to freak out my co-workers, heh.
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Aug 1, 2011 22:23
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Kind of related to the discussion we were having about used game sales earlier: Diablo 3 will be on-line only, no mods, loot can be sold to other players for real money. I'm sure there is another thread on this topic but of course I am more interested in the thoughts of industry folks. Personally I think it's unfortunate that we have to go here but if this is what it takes for AAA single-player experiences to have a viable business model in the future I can live with it. I'm actually more crestfallen about shutting down the mod scene than I am about on-line connection being required. Basically I think we're headed for a world where all big-budget games function like MMOs whether they have any meaningful multiplayer component or not.
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Aug 2, 2011 05:20
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The Cheshire Cat posted:Well, what I was going for is that "lost sales" is completely irrelevant if there's no significant difference between piracy rates for DRM and no-DRM games. If DRM literally makes no difference in how much something is pirated, then why bother with it at all? If you spend $100K or even $1MM to make a game, piracy is not that big a deal. Either the game takes off and gets popular, and you make a bunch of money, or it doesn't. But if you spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to make a game, piracy is a big, huge deal. And making a game function technically like an MMO is a very effective (probably the only effective) piracy deterrent. Server-side game logic and data storage is beyond DRM... it actually works, heh.
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Aug 2, 2011 07:27
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I think the $60 shrink-wrapped AAA title market is definitely shrinking, but I'd hesitate to say that big-budget AAA titles in general are shrinking. There are a number of factors that will make 8 and 9-figure budget titles continue to be viable in my opinion. Cutting retailers out of the equation, eliminating used game sales, new/supplemental business models like PDLC, freemium, ad revenue, and subscriptions. No doubt that mid and low-budget titles are where the major growth is/will be. But I'd say AAA revenue will grow as well, just slower and from a much bigger baseline.
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Aug 11, 2011 04:32
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Retailers won't get booted over night, in fact they won't be completely out of the picture ever. But their share of the pie is already shrinking, and I would be very surprised if it doesn't shrink dramatically in this next console rev. You know on further reflection I think maybe if you are defining "shrinking" as the number of titles in development, you are probably right that AAA console games are shrinking. I don't think AAA budget games broadly as a category are/will shrink in revenue or investment. DancingMachine fucked around with this message at 04:53 on Aug 11, 2011 |
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Aug 11, 2011 04:51
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I can't remember if we've done this excersise before: please forgive me if this is a repeat. If you were starting your own dev studio, how many people would you hire before you would bring in someone who wasn't a programmer or an artist? Let's assume your ambitions are fairly large and you intend to build something that could use dozens of people. But you're not going to scale to that number overnight. I assume pretty much everybody would start out with a programmer, or at least a level-design/scripter person if working in a very high level engine. Ideally a programmer-artist but those are pretty rare. Then obviously person #2 is an artist. But where to go from there? There are needs in game design, testing, PR, and business development that will arise early on, but in my opinion they could be covered by the founding programmers and artists as side-efforts for quite a while. At 5 or 6 people I probably bring in (or transition an existing employee) a dedicated game designer. This person is responsible for level scripting and game data tweaking, as well as writing design specs for upcoming features. As the studio grows this person hires another tech designer or two to do the scripting etc. and spends more of their time on the creative vision and design specs. Around 10 people you probably need a lead artist and a lead programmer (the founders are probably the de-facto leads anyway, though), though these leads always have direct hands-on development responsibility. I think I get to 20-30 people before I bring in a dedicated BizDev/PR person, and a dedicated studio manager/producer (probably one of the founders). I would never hire dedicated QA staff. QA would come from a combination of team members wearing a QA hat at various times, publisher-provided QA (if applicable), and alpha/beta community.
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Aug 16, 2011 19:21
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Vino posted:Yeah, but define "good code." If they're just sorting people by skill level and culling the bottom then I'll turn out on the top of the list. But I've done a few programming tests where they're looking for more than just that during the test. They want to see if I do "extensible/data driven" versus "quickly written and fun" or if I'm thorough with test cases and thinking about security or if I'm more of a systems architect or whatever. Concept artist and PR are pretty niche roles. It seems like the founders ought to be able to cover these while in lean-and-mean mode. Edit: Gaslamp Games is one dev and one artist (plus some contractor/vendor part-time help with web and bizdev stuff). They did a fantastic job with PR and obviously with art concept/style.
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Aug 17, 2011 01:23
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If you file another minor cosmetic issue as "must fix for ship" I am going to burn down the building.
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Aug 19, 2011 18:17
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Fishbus posted:CLASS D / Suggestion: Not enough red in the level I would love it if people would file their suggestions as suggestion rather than "defect".
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Aug 20, 2011 05:07
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A co-worker brought his kid in to work today. 8 hours of sittinq quietly in a cube while his dad writes code. Game developer is not as cool a job as he thought it was!
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Aug 22, 2011 21:41
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Believe it or not the Xbox 360 almost released with half as much memory as it has. It only has the 512 total as a last-minute change due to outcry from internal and external game devs. I remember the huge cheer that went up in the meeting they announced this.
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Aug 24, 2011 07:03
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Microsoft Game Studios does a small number of internships, but as far as I can tell the program is exclusively with students from USC and Digipen.
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Sep 1, 2011 16:56
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No engineering manager in the world cares what the bizdev guy thinks about the style of his/her candidates, folks. Use common sense and don't look/smell like a slob. Beyond that all that matters is that you feel and look comfortable and confident.
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Sep 10, 2011 22:56
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Black Eagle posted:A typical engineering manager might not weigh appearance too heavily when making a hiring decision, but game development isn't a solo sport. It seems like this is all covered by the part of my post that you didn't quote. And yeah you may need to go above and beyond for inter-corporate meetings depending on the firm you are meeting with, sure. I guess the key insight I am trying to impart is that looking decent doesn't correlate directly with level of formality. I actually hire developers for a major studio so I thought the perspective would be useful.
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Sep 11, 2011 21:53
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Aliginge posted:Not to turn this too much into chat about a particular game, but working on games definitely gives me more of an appreciation that there are real people behind these games pouring themselves into it. Being faced with nothing but the corporate front of a game development team really detaches you from that reality I think. I actually find this kind of stuff even more frustrating from the developer side. There's nothing more demoralizing than working on a game that you know is going to be a disappointment to its primary audience. The FASA guys absolutely adored their multiplayer shooter. They were totally proud of what they had built. But of course the way it was marketed and calling it “Shadowrun” doomed any chance it had of finding its own audience.
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Sep 12, 2011 17:31
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I want to work for Bethesda but they have to move to me, I'm not moving to them.  Same deal with Bioware. Incidentally Valve actually is in my area. I'm sure I'd enjoy working there but it seems like it might be a bit chaotic and the career growth would be non-existent.
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Sep 22, 2011 05:15
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My understanding is that Epic is pretty awful in terms of work-life balance. Great place for single early-twenty-somethings who want their life to be pretty much 100% about making video games, probably not so great for the rest of us. But that is 3rd-hand information so take it with a grain of salt.
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Sep 22, 2011 07:28
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devilmouse posted:My whole interview with him was around how to simulate and build economies where people are less attached to their wealth than they are in the real world and behave even more irrationally. Hahaha that is so evil/awesome.
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Sep 27, 2011 05:13
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So I want to try and do an html5/javascript game on the side (since that's what all the cool kids are doing these days) but I have absolutely no intention of authoring html5 in notepad. Are there any flash-like content/code integrated development tools out there for this stuff yet? I think I read that Adobe is working on something but I don't think it's out yet?
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Sep 27, 2011 05:15
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M4rk posted:Too good for notepad? Try notepad++. Not an IDE, but all you have to do with HTML5 is save and open the page in a browser. What I mean is I don't really want to write html layout by hand. I want to write javascript code and use some kind of content creation tool for the html/canvas parts. Like doing flash and actionscript. But I'm not sure if such tools exist for html5 and javascript yet. Basically I don't really even know what I'm talking about. I have a bit of knowledge of flash and assume this newfangled html5 stuff is similar because it seems to target similar results.
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Sep 27, 2011 07:23
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Vino posted:I heard back from SCEA where I interviewed two weeks ago. They told me that they were very impressed and I am a very good programmer. They expressed a lot of concern about me having gaps in my knowledge, things I would know if I had gone to school. They eventually turned me down over this. As distraught as I am that I didn't get the position, I can see exactly why they decided that, given they're a tools shop and you need a good fundamental foundation working at a position like that. That sucks man.  Be careful about going back to school. After you're done the HR person will be saying "Well, you haven't worked in the industry in 4 years..." Is it at all possible for you to have relevant part-time work while going to school? Do you already have an AA or anything or will you need the full 4 years?
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Sep 29, 2011 04:33
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Pfhreak posted:First evening with the UDK done. Worked me up a little isometric camera, scrolls smoothly in and out. Got a pawn moving to the clicked area on the terrain. Figured out how to make and light terrain (which turned out to be a challenge in itself...) That's pretty impressive for one night! How much code did it take to figure out what part of the terrain the user clicked on and get the pawn to move there?
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Sep 29, 2011 18:37
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M4rk posted:Ah, well, just go read up on HTML5 then. BTW I'm not ignoring this, thanks for the link. Site looks super useful, just haven't had a chance to dig into it yet.
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Sep 29, 2011 18:39
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Chef Boyardee posted:So I'm in college working towards a computer science degree, but pretty soon I'm going to need to start applying for jobs and I need to know what I should put on resumes. Even though I'm a computer science major, I'd much rather do design stuff. Should I apply for a design position and mention my CS background or go for a programming position? Should I start with QA? I've also done music for like dozens of games (seriously a lot), should I mention this or leave it out, and if I do mention this should I put down all of the games I've done music for or just the best ones (in terms of my own work or the product as a whole)? Lastly, I've also made my own games, the "biggest" of which is a really stupid one called Barkley Shut up and Jam: Gaiden. Should I put this on resumes? Does this count towards anything? I never talk about it in real life because I'm embarrassed by it and I know most people wouldn't "get it". Should I leave it off of a resume? I'm almost positive a potential employer wouldn't "get it". There is no reason you should even consider going the QA route if you have a CS degree and some games programming experience. Unless we're talking dev in test which some larger companies do have (they're programmers who work in the test org writing test tools and automation). More people would get the Barkley game than you expect, and like r2x says, even if they don't a finished game that was played by a non-trivial number of people is very noteworthy anyway. Getting hired directly as a designer is hard. When it happens it pretty much happens on portfolio, which means you're looking to get hired by somebody who thinks BSUAJ:G is AMAZING. So your best route is probably programmer->lead designer. (typically programmers don't move to junior/associate designer because they can't stomach the pay cut)
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Oct 2, 2011 03:33
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We're looking for a community/web manager.
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Oct 13, 2011 21:13
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Maide posted:I would avoid it unless they specifically say you can use it. They want to see your programming logic/thinking more than they want to see your ability to use libraries. Totally disagree. Like devilmouse said, unless the question is obviously about implementing the data structure boost gives you, it's a totally valid tool to use in solving a problem. If I want to see if you know how to implement a hash table I will ask you to implement a hash table. More likely I want to see if you are aware that a hash table is the right data structure to use for the problem. Bash Ironfist posted:I'm on the interwebs all the time! I could totally do this job. I would assume several years of professional experience relevant to the job would be the bar.
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Oct 13, 2011 23:46
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You guys know you can override the memory allocator stl uses, right? We use stl in-house fairly often, though this is PC stuff not console. I've never seen stl show up on a performance profile in a way that was a problem with stl itself (vs. the way the code calling it was organized).
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Oct 15, 2011 05:05
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Torabi posted:Bah, I am struggling to even get started with our UDK project. I am the "lead" of a three man team and we barely know anything when it comes to UnrealScript. We have until April 2012 to do something, the work it self probably won't be graded as much as the whole "planning" since I do not attend a fancy game design school. Still, I want this to work so I can continue with it on my own outside of school. You're going to have to get it started yourself. You need to get an app up and running. With a bunch of scaffolding and //TODO: implement this comments. Then, give very specific, narrow, well-defined tasks to your team members. You'll have to have already done enough of the work yourself that you can define these tasks well enough that they don't feel lost at the start. Some (all?) of the team members will still fail to get any traction after you spoon-feed them the work. Write them off. The ones that get anything at all done, spoon feed them a little more. Soon they'll be defining new work that needs to be done themselves and telling you what needs to be done. Congratulations, you won. But really just getting something up and running with some clear footholds in it for people start at is the key. It's really, really hard to create something on a blank page. Most people just can't or aren't willing to put forth the effort to do it.
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Oct 18, 2011 05:03
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So I guess I'm not the only one who finds it a little off-putting that the most prolific posters and advice-givers in this thread don't actually work in game development. Broader and more diverse perspectives are valuable but it can wear a little thin at times.
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Oct 27, 2011 01:25
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Sigma-X posted:Who else doesn't make videogames aside from Book Eagle? I thought we were all cool kids living the dream. Eh, it's probably not productive to start drawing bright lines between people who are "in" and "out". But I think it would be useful for folks to think for a moment before they post about whether they should be posting with the voice of authority (i.e. I directly do thing x and am qualified to judge or advise on topic y) or the voice of "my $.02".
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Oct 27, 2011 01:57
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IANAL but as far as I can tell if you intend to make millions of dollars it seems like you just need to be owned or published by a big company that has its own umbrella of protective ridiculous patents. Software patents are all about mutually assured destruction between the big kids, putting the little kids in a very bad situation. Nobody really has the bandwidth to research every single facet of the game to make sure they're not violating some patent or another, especially given how fast functionality changes in a game right up to the ship date. But of course I couldn't speak on the topic with any authority.  Edit: I did actually co-author a single software patent, much to my shame, so I do know a tiny bit about them.
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Oct 27, 2011 19:12
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Shalinor posted:To also contribute along this line: I'm confused, why are you considering 2D engines like HTML5 and Flash alongside 3D engines Unity and Trinigy? It seems like those are 2 totally different discussions? Diplomaticus posted:Meh, I'm one of those prolific partially in partially out types. In the past I've worked directly in development (production) as well as QA and writing. But the majority of my long term work has been in support functions like management, law, and PR; or in ancillary functions like journalism; and currently I'm double-hatting with both my firm in the industry and other work outside the industry. You certainly have valuable perspective to provide on matters of law and PR. And I think your contributions on other topics are also often interesting. It's really a matter of tone more than content that I'm getting at, and of course not just with you specifically. I may be a delicate flower or something but a little humility helps me digest communications a lot better.
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Oct 27, 2011 19:25
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