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PotatoManJack posted:I'm an ideas man.... Sadly, ideas are cheap. We all have great ideas for games we want to make. What would set you apart from everyone else in this respect is having a ton of cash and time to spend on getting a team of other people to spend their time building your ideas into reality. Having a killer pitch indicating you've really put a lot of thought into this idea and can get people excited about it helps, but it all comes down to money in the end. How much money exactly depends on how elaborate the idea is, what exciting features you want to include, fidelity of the artwork, etc.
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Sep 19, 2017 09:54
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I have no idea what game/developer you're talking about but fixing bugs can take a long time if the source of the bug is proving elusive or it's just a hard one to fix. Things like balance changes are probably being worked on by other developers - you can only have so many people working on a bug before they're just stepping on each other's toes constantly. Patches are often put out to some kind of internal schedule(we try not to push patches on a Friday, for example, because if something goes wrong there'll be nobody in the office all weekend to deal with it, we don't have the resources yet for 24/7 support), so if the bugfix isn't ready in time for the patch to go out but the balance changes are, that's how you end up with 'trivial' fixes appearing to be coming out with higher priority than bug fixes.
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Sep 19, 2017 15:59
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I'll chime in to say I've been working in games for about 7 years now and I've never had to crunch in that time. I've not worked in AAA though, it seems much more common in those places. The horror stories are real, but crunch is not completely inevitable in games jobs, and I think more developers are waking up to how harmful and counterproductive it is.
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Sep 20, 2017 07:57
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TheFace posted:I know this varies depending on location, but what's the typical pay like for the assorted roles in game dev?
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Sep 20, 2017 15:39
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mastermind2004 posted:Their sample size for that survey is pretty useless. This is true, in fairness. Based on the number of respondents, the number of female respondents, the number of female artist respondents, etc, my own entry to the survey ends up being a fairly ridiculously significant data point. But I don't know of any bigger recent surveys, unless you want to go aggregate some numbers from Glassdoor.
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Sep 20, 2017 22:47
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Emerson Cod posted:How specialized do developers tend to be? I've seen games where the full credit list is just a few names to games where they rival a big studio film. Do you prefer working in big teams where you are doing a small part or do you prefer small teams where most people wear multiple hats? My current project is 20 people. I am the 3D artist. Anything that needs a mesh and/or textures, I do it. Characters, NPCs, props, items, environments, everything. When we need some concept art that isn't massively important or complex, I can do that too. Luckily we also have a fulltime animator and a UI artist because I hate doing those bits but, again, I could do it in a pinch. There are so many upsides and downsides to big vs small projects. On big projects you can end up feeling a bit like a small cog in a very large machine, with little autonomy or variation in your role. Big projects have bigger budgets though, so you get more people in support roles, more tech, etc. On small projects you take on a lot more responsibility(that in itself is a double-edged sword) and have more chances to make a big impact on the overall project. I like the office atmosphere of my small team better than I did the big one, but being small we don't have the same kind of budget and support that a big project does. When I worked in a big team I thought small teams are better. Now that I'm on a small team there are a lot of things about big teams that I miss. Not sure I can say which one I prefer overall.
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Sep 28, 2017 10:02
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Do you happen to work at Jagex?  I used to work in the same building as the Player Support team(before everyone was brought into the big building with the fingerprint sensors on all the doors) and we did once or twice have an office-wide email telling everyone to just stay at their desks while an angry player was escorted from the building. Runescape players can get pretty... intense. I had one guy actually make a fake LinkedIn profile to try and worm information about the studio's other projects out of me because he was angry about the company spending resources on games that weren't Runescape.I know many studios have had incidents with overly passionate players overstepping a line, but it seems to be more of a problem for online games where people pour thousands of hours into their accounts. I wouldn't trade this work for the world but it does encourage you to be a lil more rigorous about your privacy settings and what you share on Facebook and the like.
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Oct 9, 2017 12:18
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hackbunny posted:the circumstances that lead a studio to make a misstep like that I mean, Tomb Raider, Crash Bandicoot, Doom, Warcraft... I think these games did pretty okay despite the 'misstep'. It's just production art. Not all production art is a polished masterpiece.
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Jan 5, 2018 14:58
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limaCAT posted:Save for the various "paperclip maximization" reasons where it would probably be too costly to support a system versus the benefits given, why big publishers haven't yet greenlit a system where their online store are just an already launched game instance with a 3D world (and all the features being represented like if it were in playstation home or second life) and games just sold like access to attractions and launched like entering a section in a theme park? I suppose one obvious drawback to this is that games are not always bought by game-savvy people(or those who don't own a device capable of playing said games) so you'd need a traditional storefront of some kind anyway, unless you want to lock out the 'parents buying games for their kids' demographic entirely. limaCAT posted:On the other hand if the store were the game you could have people learning one set of conventions to operate both the game and store. This only works if your store sells exactly one kind of game?
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Jan 7, 2018 17:28
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My commute takes a little over an hour. Five minute walk, sit on the train for an hour, five minute walk to the office at the other end. I live right at the end of the train line so I always get a seat in the morning, which is not so bad. Nice countryside to look at(especially this time of year!) and I get a lot of reading done. I miss being able to cycle to work though, and the price of the annual train ticket(£4500 this year!!) is a gut-punch every time. Still works out cheaper than living closer to, though! Especially because my husband just walks to work here. At lunchtime I usually eat a sandwich at my desk(so lazy) or pop outside because my office is right in the middle of Guildford center, buy a burrito or a pasta salad, then... come back and eat it at my desk. In nice weather I go down by the riverside, which is very pretty and the further you go aong the towpath from the city centre the quieter and lovelier it is. On Fridays we often go to a local pub for lunch, and there's no lack of those to choose from(although most of them are ridiculously expensive so I always push for the one that does sandwich+chips for just over a fiver).
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Apr 22, 2018 13:36
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I was asked to describe my game in 15 words or less yesterday and it was surprisingly challenging. So, fellow developers, how would you describe your current project in 15 words or less? Here's mine, which is not very good but better than my original idea of 'a cross between Minecraft, but prettier than that, and World of Warcraft, but not as pretty as that': Build a house. Dig a mine. Fight a goat. Work some iron. Make new friends.
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Apr 26, 2018 10:53
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ETPC posted:also when are y'all unionizing We're working on it.
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Oct 17, 2018 23:03
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ETPC posted:how come writing is seen as so tertiary and often unnecessary still in the gaming industry? or is that a falsehood? It's true, writing and narrative in general is often overlooked or left til the last minute in many games, and most studios don't have a full-time writer or narrative designer. I think it's partly a vicious cycle - 'games don't have good writing' so it's not considered important during development and thrown in at the last minute so it's not very good etc - and partly down to the intensely iterative process of game development. For most games, gameplay mechanics are king and all other considerations are secondary at best, and a writer's elaborate, beautiful narrative built around mechanic x may suddenly become completely redundant or nonsensical when that mechanic changes during design iteration. Very few games will determine their mechanics primarily on a narrative, so when the design changes, writers(or whichever person in the studio who's been lumped with the task of 'write something to make this all hang together somehow') just have to try and keep up. Hope you didn't record any crucial VO before that mechanic changed...
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Dec 3, 2018 09:05
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'We don't need a producer! Everyone on the the team is their own producer!'
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Dec 24, 2018 20:39
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If you happen to be in the UK, you may find this spreadsheet of game dev salaries of interest for reference. There is also a North American version!
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Feb 21, 2019 08:52
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I'm curious how you would propose to tackle these issues without the strength of collective bargaining and union action? I mean, I'm biased; as a founding member of GWU UK, I've been very involved in our discussions about what and how we want to fix our industry and how the union can help members(specialist legal advice on tap is real handy!). I've seen members call out for help and advice and the union spring into action to help them work things out. We're a long way off fixing the whole industry, but we're already helping people who didn't have access to this kind of help before. Before I joined GWU, I had the same concerns about young people joining the industry and not caring so much about crunch, allowing themselves to perpetuate the cycle of exploitation. But we talk to students and new grads all the time, and let me tell you - they've heard all about crunch, and most of them are very enthusiastic about putting and end to all that bullshit.
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Apr 5, 2019 22:15
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Star Warrior X posted:Edit: Floof, can you give some examples of how GWU UK has acted to help people? Can any of them be extrapolated to a more general policy? Unfortunately I'm not able to share any concrete examples for fear of people being identified - the industry here is surprisingly small and everyone knows everyone. But we've had members come into our Discord asking about situations at work that they were unhappy or worried about, and we've been able to connect them advice from other members or in more serious situations with the union's advisers and legal team, and it doesn't cost them anything but their dues.
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Apr 5, 2019 23:06
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Join the union, make the plan. Sitting back and waiting for other people to come up with a plan to fix your problems is not going to get you anywhere tbh.
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Apr 6, 2019 10:31
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MJBuddy posted:Cool yeah, I'll just go through an incredibly long process of hostility with my employer on the off chance that a union succeeds so that I can give them a large chunk of my paycheck while I'll then be required to "figure it out" later in a process no one can describe to me ahead of time. Maybe it's different in whatever country you're in, but in the UK you are not obliged to tell your employer that you're in a union, so there's no need to worry about 'hostility' - until you have the critical mass to form a bargaining unit and a need to take action of some kind, in which case you already have a bunch of friends by your side and the might of the union's resources behind you to negotiate for what you need. It bears pointing out too that if your employer does find out and takes any kind of punitive action against you, that's illegal and an extremely winnable legal case that your union should be only too happy to fight for you. This, btw, is why people think 'there's no plan' - every workplace is different, every group of employees have different needs and grievances, and until they come together to do something about it the only 'plan' is 'we should do something together to solve our problems'. Which is why identifying those problems(ie, crunch) and discussing what we would like to see happen instead(ie, a cap on working hours in any given week) is so important, and something we do in every meeting of the union. If you're not coming to meetings or participating in discussions on Discord(and both of these are, to a certain extent, open to non-members to see how it all works), you're not going to see what's happening and what we're doing, because it's necessarily not a super public process. On that note! GWU UK has our first AGM at the end of this month - the 28th of April, in London - and non-members are totally encouraged to attend and find out what we're doing! Join in the conversation, help us form our plans, maybe you'll even want to join us?  If you're not able to attend in person, we'll have a way to join in online, we're still working out the details of that.
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Apr 6, 2019 16:00
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limaCAT posted:Excluding Unreal and Unity titles, which fit this paradigm already, how many of your game/in house game engines have some degree of a scripting engine and a virtual machine? Mine does not. You want something done, you write some C++(or in my case, bother a programmer who can do that) to do it. We're a very small team though.
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Jul 25, 2019 15:09
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Stick100 posted:Employment contracts are pretty rare in the states. Wait, what? How does that even work?
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Jul 31, 2019 15:06
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Move all your studios to Europe where we have non-insane healthcare systems and social safety nets for when the studio does layoffs, thanks in advance.
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Aug 12, 2019 18:26
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It's not 'normal' but it is fairly common in a male-dominated industry built on 'dream jobs' and 'passion' and needing to know the right person to land a sought-after job. There's a lot of weird awkward dudes in the games industry who just don't know how to talk to women that make our lives uncomfortable but there's also a lot of genuinely slimy fuckers who are skilled or charming enough that their compatriots would rather cover for them or look the other way than cause a fuss about all the sexual harassment and/or rapes they're doing.
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Jun 23, 2020 09:52
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You're not paid for your lunch break as standard in the UK, no.
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Jan 26, 2021 17:10
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