Ask me about the Video Game Industry

[Clan Macleod]

have you had a chance to work on, play next gen DX10 games? are we going to see another huge jump in graphics quality, playability, etc?

[Huckle]

I'm currently on my second year (out of three) studying to be a game designer. In a couple of weeks we're going to
have our big project that includes programmers and graphics artists (12 in total for ten weeks). Pretty much everyone thinks that this is our only chance of having something to show after school, programmers can always code and artists create models/animations.

Question 1: What can I do with this project that's gonna help me get a job? I'm already lead designer and most of the idea is mine (4-player arcade figher-ish) and with a lot of help we might get it onto x-box live.

Question 2: What kind of classes should I pick for next semester when we get to choose freely? I'm considering some english course since it's not my first language and maybe project management. Creative writing sounds like fun but I've heard most companies just hire in a writer for a specific game.

[gurgeh]

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ever worked as a video game tester? if so how was the experience? if not, do you know anyone who did and what was their take of it?

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I was never a tester. Programmers don't often start as testers, but a lot of designers do. Testers usually love their job at first but quickly grow to hate it.

There are generally two types of testers : guys with no ambition who just want an easy decent paying job (these guys suck), and guys who really love video games and want to move into design. The latter guys put in extra effort and are a pleasure to work with and usually wind up getting an opportunity to contribute more.

Also, being a tester differs widely at different places. At Microsoft testers are treated well and respected, they get a lot of say in the design of the game. At EA it's a brutal grunt job and you're totally sequestered away from the developers.

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Well put in my opinion. I would just change it to "The latter guys put in extra effort and are a pleasure to work with and usually wind up getting an opportunity to contribute more unless they work at Atari." I was a tester at Infogrames/Atari a few years ago, and there is literally no place that I have seen that's treated employees worse. I can't way for the day this crappy company folds. That said, I also tested on-site at Bioware, and every one of those guys is fantastic.

Oh and somebody asked about CliffyB. He threatened to kill me once.

[cbloom]

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How long did it take before you were offered some technical creativity/freedom in your work? I mean rather than being assigned to implement feature 'x' in 'y' manner, you were given the freedom to simply implement feature 'x' as best as you saw fit. I ask since I'd previously been pursuing game development. My first games related job left me jaded. It seemed there were a strictly limited few with any true creative/technical freedom. Everybody else was just glorified automatons.


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Well, the smaller the company the sooner you'll get some freedom. At a big company you'll be a task guy for several years until you get promoted to "senior". At a small company if you're good you could have freedom within a few months.

At game companies you have a huge ability to just do things. Say you're assigned X, you do that in the time you're supposed to, and in your free time you work on an alternate way that you think is better. When you show the designers your task X you also show them the alternate way and let them pick what they like best. If you do this a few times and your way sucks you will get shut down, but if you're doing good work you'll get more freedom.

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What studios in Austin were you talking about? SOE and NCSoft are here but.. meh. Know Naylor?


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There's a ton of little companies. Retro and Midway are some big ones. It used to be Origin, Acclaim, Digital Anvil, but they all went busto and the guys who worked there started small shops.

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have you had a chance to work on, play next gen DX10 games? are we going to see another huge jump in graphics quality, playability, etc?

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Not playability, but yeah the graphics quality is pretty unbelievable. The "next big thing" is true photo-real lighting systems. The next gen of Xbox360 games will be the first to really blow people away, I think. The problem with PC games is they have to support all kinds of legacy hardware and there's a huge difference now between a top gfx card & what ships by default.

For coders, the new NVidia CUDA stuff is awesome for using gfx cards to do generic CPU work.

[cbloom]

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Question 1: What can I do with this project that's gonna help me get a job? I'm already lead designer and most of the idea is mine (4-player arcade figher-ish) and with a lot of help we might get it onto x-box live.

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The project is the #1 most important thing at your school, way more important than class work. You need to make sure you are doing something interesting with the game design that you can convey in one sentence. What's the big idea? What's cool and innovative about it? It should be at least a twist that hasn't been done before that you can explain to someone like a recruiter who doesn't play games and have them go "wow that's cool". After that, you need to have specific things that you did on the game when you get grilled. We don't want to hear that you wrote the design doc then the artists & programmers did all the work. You need to be the one laying out levels, tweaking the gameplay balance, playtesting it and responding to feedback, etc. Try to do something that will set you apart from what everyone else at your school is doing, like maybe organize a tournament where other people play your game or something, whatever. Obviously if you can enter your game in something like the IGDA independent games festival that would give you a big boost.

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Question 2: What kind of classes should I pick for next semester when we get to choose freely? I'm considering some english course since it's not my first language and maybe project management. Creative writing sounds like fun but I've heard most companies just hire in a writer for a specific game.

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Yeah, English is a very good idea, if you're not fluent that will be a big negative against you. You need to be able to write and communicate well. Even if you're not writing game story you will be writing design docs and pitches and such which must be clear and correct.

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I was a tester at Infogrames/Atari a few years ago, and there is literally no place that I have seen that's treated employees worse.


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Yeah, they're ridiculously bad. Everybody hates them and makes fun of their retarded French president. A lot of the big publishers treat testers really bad so you have to be careful there. The best testing job is at a small place, but obviously they don't hire as much.

[krishan]

Is there a site that tracks video game sales in US and internationally?

Krishan

[cbloom]

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Is there a site that tracks video game sales in US and internationally?

Krishan

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Nope. The publishers & retailers keep that data secret because they don't want their competitors knowing what's up. A company called "NPD" gathers its own data and sells reports that cost a lot.

People in the business secretly/illegally share the NPD data with each other. If you search around the net you can find some forums where it gets posted from time to time.

[n.s.]

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Any comments on the general sentiment that games today rely too much on crazy graphics and over the top action at the expense of good core gameplay?

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I think that what happens is that as the systems get more powerful, games need more content to drive them. People expect high-res textures, very detailed models, lots of variety in animations and environments, etc... What this means is that the games teams are much bigger than they used to be, and so the cost for making games goes way up. As the costs go up, publishers get more and more risk-adverse - no one wants to spend $20M on a game with a really innovative gameplay mechanic that could flop entirely - so the games end up falling back on an established gameplay mechanic (usually FPS or 3rd-person GTA style) because it's the "safe" thing to do.

It's lot like what happened to the movie industry, with every action movie spending a ridiculous amount on special effects and salaries for big-name actors, but then they all have virtually the same plot.

The interesting thing about video games is that we are seeing lots of games on the far opposite sides of the spectrum - one the one hand there's big-budget games that have really awesome graphics, but all are starting to look and play the same. On the other hand, there's been a lot of movement in small casual games - like XBLA games, cell phone games, etc... The Wii has really helped prove the point that consumers want these.

[KungFuManchu]

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How can a game concept like "Manhunt" make it through all the instances a game has to go through before it is released onto the market. Ok, there are awfull underground games and stuff. But this game is a Rockstar Games XBoX-title.

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One of the disturbing things in the industry is how many unbelievably bad games get made all the time. "Manhunt" is solid gold compared to most of the garbage put out. Generally the people in charge of funding decisions are complete morons who don't play games at all and are old and out of touch.

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manhunt is a great [censored] game. The controls were so so, but I loved everything about it.

[KungFuManchu]

can you hook me up with the very beautiful Jade Raymond? (video game producer of upcoming game Assasins Creed)