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ChocNitty posted:I worked for Blizzards helpdesk just before Diablo 3 came out. They put us in a separate building than the developers, because they were too good to be under the same roof as us lowly peasants. Not to play devil's advocate but it's unlikely that they gave a poo poo about "being too good" and more likely due to lack of space. Having everyone in your company at the same location is nice but may not always be feasible (the studio I work at was split over 3 buildings at one point for example). School of How posted:I've been a professional software developer since 2011. My technologies have been Python and web protocols, as well as some cryptocurrency experience. I want my next job to be at a game company, developing video games, especially VR games. What can I do to make this happen? Do I need to make . my own indie game to prove my abilities, or will I be able to get a job without that? I do have a github account with about 60 open source personal projects, will that help me? You need to figure out what area you want to work in. In general, transitioning from that kind of skill set you're more likely to find it easier to land a network/server dev role. Gameplay programming is also a good possibility. Render/AI/Audio would be more difficult since they're fairly specialised. Design is probably hopeless without making a demo or a very very strong case in your CV/cover letter. The github account may help, although make sure when applying that if you're speaking of your personal projects, only mention a few of the most role-relevant ones. Falcorum fucked around with this message at 22:45 on Nov 21, 2018 |
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Nov 21, 2018 22:38
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School of How posted:I've been a professional software developer since 2011. My technologies have been Python and web protocols, as well as some cryptocurrency experience. I want my next job to be at a game company, developing video games, especially VR games. What can I do to make this happen? Do I need to make . my own indie game to prove my abilities, or will I be able to get a job without that? I do have a github account with about 60 open source personal projects, will that help me? The wider the gulf between what you've done on the job and what you want to do in games, the more you'll need to show you can do to be able to approach the money you've been making vs the money you'll make in games.
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Nov 21, 2018 22:48
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Question: If I have the time and money at this stage in my life is "Because nothing like it exists and I want it to" a good reason to make a game or doomed to failure like some half finished classic car restoration?
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Nov 22, 2018 03:27
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Flannelette posted:Question: If you're going to be doing all the work, go for it! You'll learn a lot, probably have fun, and computer programming is a very cheap hobby if you already have a computer. It won't be easy, and you might fail for any number of reasons, but as long as you learn something and enjoy yourself, that's what matters.
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Nov 22, 2018 03:46
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Treat your indie game like a hobby and not like a new business venture, because the odds are very high you won't make money on it.
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Nov 22, 2018 03:55
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ShadowHawk posted:Treat your indie game like a hobby and not like a new business venture, because the odds are very high you won't make money on it. I don't want to make money I want a game to exist in some form so it stops taking up room in my head.
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Nov 22, 2018 04:26
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School of How posted:I've been a professional software developer since 2011. My technologies have been Python and web protocols, as well as some cryptocurrency experience. I want my next job to be at a game company, developing video games, especially VR games. What can I do to make this happen? Do I need to make . my own indie game to prove my abilities, or will I be able to get a job without that? I do have a github account with about 60 open source personal projects, will that help me? I’d head to the game job megathread instead.
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Nov 22, 2018 05:07
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Flannelette posted:I don't want to make money I want a game to exist in some form so it stops taking up room in my head. It's totally doable, depending on the scope and scale of the game (which uh, keep that low starting out). I used a Unity Tutorial and made a really crappy Lunar Lander clone. Like it's bad, but even after making a bad game I was able to add a bunch of extra bells and whistles thought I thought were kinda neat, and taught me a bunch of things.
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Nov 22, 2018 05:46
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Flannelette posted:I don't want to make money I want a game to exist in some form so it stops taking up room in my head. That's the only valid reason to do anything creative - be it art, music or w/e. Do it, try to have fun even during the rough bits!
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Nov 22, 2018 07:57
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while not calling out (ok, i am I guess) fallout76 specifically, one of my problems with games is knowing a game sucks and watching devs who are just working to feed their families get caught in the backlash over a game that critically fails. I always see "the devs suck" etc when a game tanks, but the ceo or whatever gets the praise when it sells a billion copies. How do devs stay in this career path knowing their job is so thankless and abusive from the very people they're making games for? The gaming community in an overgeneralization is pretty lovely, but when Todd Howard would have gotten all their praise (had it not been poo poo) makes me sad.
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Nov 22, 2018 08:59
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Catpants McStabby posted:while not calling out (ok, i am I guess) fallout76 specifically, one of my problems with games is knowing a game sucks and watching devs who are just working to feed their families get caught in the backlash over a game that critically fails. I always see "the devs suck" etc when a game tanks, but the ceo or whatever gets the praise when it sells a billion copies. How do devs stay in this career path knowing their job is so thankless and abusive from the very people they're making games for? The gaming community in an overgeneralization is pretty lovely, but when Todd Howard would have gotten all their praise (had it not been poo poo) makes me sad.
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Nov 22, 2018 13:38
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gamers on the internet are in general horrible insatiable turds who spew trash at even the tiniest change or disagreement. you just ignore it and look at the data to get their actual feedback we do have customer service people who reach out to whales and stuff and they are always polite and understanding so it’s not all turds
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Nov 22, 2018 17:29
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I don't have time or energy for so called fans who only spit poison and try to destroy the thing they claim to love. They talk about wanting to fix it, but most of the time I don't feel it. It seems to me to be mostly masturbatory on their part, so let it be a solitary activity, I say. I'm a rank and file dev, though, so it's my job to do the artwork not engage with the public. Companies that encourage dev/player interaction need to provide professional PR training to their people, and many of the big ones do.
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Nov 22, 2018 21:47
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Falcorum posted:Not to play devil's advocate but it's unlikely that they gave a poo poo about "being too good" and more likely due to lack of space. Having everyone in your company at the same location is nice but may not always be feasible (the studio I work at was split over 3 buildings at one point for example). Maybe, but I doubt it. I dont blame them. The developers are typically older and more educated, and the help desk people are younger and more awkward, which could have lead to many awkward moments at the water cooler and lunch room. Plus Blizzard was the bees knees at the time so the developers probably thought the gaming industry was worshipping their balls. We werent even good enough to be put in the basement like the red stapler guy from Office Space.
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Nov 23, 2018 04:57
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Thanks for your replies and encouragement. Of the 2 free-ish engines Unity and UE4 which one can handle high Newtonian physics calc loads better? Mainly for solving thousands of simultaneous collisions, ballistics etc such as a fragment field from an explosion.
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Nov 23, 2018 07:29
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Flannelette posted:Thanks for your replies and encouragement.
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Nov 23, 2018 10:46
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FWIW I'm working on a very physics heavy game in Unreal at the moment that needs to recreate something from real life very accurately, and we had to write our own physics implementation because out of the box Unreal just couldn't be manipulated into producing fairly rudimentary realistic results...
Akuma fucked around with this message at 12:50 on Nov 23, 2018 |
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Nov 23, 2018 12:31
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Akuma posted:FWIW I'm working on a very physics heavy game in Unreal at the moment that needs to recreate something from real life very accurately, and we had to write our own physics implementation because out of the box Unreal just couldn't be manipulated into producing fairly rudimentary realistic results... As long as it can handle lots of simultaneous high speed collisions between point objects against low speed 3d objects without the points slipping through between a frame or other shenanigans it would be fine.
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Nov 24, 2018 02:58
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Catpants McStabby posted:while not calling out (ok, i am I guess) fallout76 specifically, one of my problems with games is knowing a game sucks and watching devs who are just working to feed their families get caught in the backlash over a game that critically fails. I always see "the devs suck" etc when a game tanks, but the ceo or whatever gets the praise when it sells a billion copies. How do devs stay in this career path knowing their job is so thankless and abusive from the very people they're making games for? The gaming community in an overgeneralization is pretty lovely, but when Todd Howard would have gotten all their praise (had it not been poo poo) makes me sad. If I wasn't enjoying the process, I wouldn't be doing it. The audience response is secondary... and ultimately marketing/publishing's problem, not mine. My job is getting the game done and as good as it can be, and there's nothing I'd rather do, even if it's hard and stressful sometimes. That being said, I don't work for a big AAA studio, but a small (25-ish) operation where everyone has a chance for creative input and the CEO would rather see the company go under than make anyone work the kind of ridiculous overtime hours you hear about from other studios. I don't think I'd be nearly as happy at a big studio. Rather be a big fish in a small pond than small fish in a big pond, you know? Especially when all the fishes around here are pretty big.
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Nov 24, 2018 20:58
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Any suggestions for a practical Christmas gift to a 20-year-old who is super into game development? He's currently saving up to go back to school, and already did a Digipen summer program that he loved. I'll probably just give him a Steam giftcard, but I like the idea of giving him something that builds skills too.
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Nov 27, 2018 18:47
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Reporting in from a couple months ago when I asked about game dev jobs, people said that hiring was almost entirely about your portfolio, which I expected. I had very little digital art experience so I decided to go back to school, I'm at a college a fair number of successful industry artists have been to (Riot, Pixar). Now that it's come time for finals, I figure this is a good opportunity for some work to go into the portfolio. The only "real" class I'm in right now is a 2D/traditional animation class (handdrawn, digital drawing, claymation, etc, basically anything except 3d rendering). What are the big selling points for a portfolio? Would it be better to focus on something more narrative, or go all-in on a skill demonstration like a technical demo? I mean, ideally it would be both, but you know what I mean. What sorts of things should I keep in mind about portfolios if I'm making fresh work for it?
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Nov 28, 2018 03:54
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Could anyone who's ever worked at/with 2K tell me what this "Portcullis" file is? I've seen it in the game files for XCOM2, Civ VI and a few other games published by 2K and was wondering what it does.
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Nov 28, 2018 04:50
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RazzleDazzleHour posted:Reporting in from a couple months ago when I asked about game dev jobs, people said that hiring was almost entirely about your portfolio, which I expected. I had very little digital art experience so I decided to go back to school, I'm at a college a fair number of successful industry artists have been to (Riot, Pixar). What role within the industry are you interested in? Character art? Animation? Environment art? Etc
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Nov 28, 2018 06:01
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RazzleDazzleHour posted:Reporting in from a couple months ago when I asked about game dev jobs, people said that hiring was almost entirely about your portfolio, which I expected. I had very little digital art experience so I decided to go back to school, I'm at a college a fair number of successful industry artists have been to (Riot, Pixar). I'm not a game dev but my experience with portfolios is always put just your best work in it and make it about the area you want to work in. It needs to make an impression so don't put a bunch of half finished or generic milk run pieces in it. I'm not sure if its the same for game devs but less is more other people have to spend time looking at the portfolio so you don't want to waste it. This experience was from when you handed a portfolio to them on a VHS so it might be different now. Flannelette fucked around with this message at 06:59 on Nov 28, 2018 |
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Nov 28, 2018 06:56
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Pixelante posted:Any suggestions for a practical Christmas gift to a 20-year-old who is super into game development? He's currently saving up to go back to school, and already did a Digipen summer program that he loved. I'll probably just give him a Steam giftcard, but I like the idea of giving him something that builds skills too. Cracked.com usually sells bundles of game dev software at a hefty discount. It may not be exactly what he needs, but maybe he'll have good experiences coding for himself. My brother makes a killing as a self-taught programmer, and he started by playing around with tutorials.
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Nov 28, 2018 11:13
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mutata posted:What role within the industry are you interested in? Character art? Animation? Environment art? Etc I was thinking character art, but I'm guessing that's probably one of the most common areas people apply for so I wouldn't be opposed to shifting my focus more toward animation or storyboarding or something more specific if the job prospects are better. I'm pretty pragmatic when it comes to the job hunting process.
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Nov 28, 2018 21:10
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I just saw this video about writing competent dialogue in games. The example the presenter used for bad writing was a scene from Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, and to demonstrate good writing he breaks down a scene from Blade Runner and transforms it into game dialogue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vRfNtvFVRo https://kotaku.com/developer-shows-how-to-write-good-game-dialogue-using-b-1830797912 quote:The demonstration that Ingold makes over the course of about 45 minutes is centered on rethinking how video game conversations work. To do this, Ingold looks to the first scene between Rachel and Deckard in Blade Runner in order to reverse engineer what that scene is about and how it works so that he can then implement that back into the interactive dialogue of games. It's a long video but I'm wondering what the experts in the thread think about it. It was also interesting to think about dialogue in games that are widely considered to have good writing, like Witcher 3, and compare it with his "Accept-Reject-Deflect" trinary.
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Dec 2, 2018 05:06
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Tias posted:Cracked.com usually sells bundles of game dev software at a hefty discount. It may not be exactly what he needs, but maybe he'll have good experiences coding for himself. My brother makes a killing as a self-taught programmer, and he started by playing around with tutorials. I also started out that way. 15 years later I'm still looking for that first job in the tech industry.
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Dec 2, 2018 16:22
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RazzleDazzleHour posted:I was thinking character art, but I'm guessing that's probably one of the most common areas people apply for so I wouldn't be opposed to shifting my focus more toward animation or storyboarding or something more specific if the job prospects are better. I'm pretty pragmatic when it comes to the job hunting process. Environmental artists seem to be the most in-demand position for the few companies I worked for.. in terms of always needing to hire more and more and having a heck of a time filling seats or stealing people away.
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Dec 2, 2018 18:48
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how come writing is seen as so tertiary and often unnecessary still in the gaming industry? or is that a falsehood?
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Dec 2, 2018 19:28
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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? Maybe almost every person who does game dev thinks that they are bad at writing so we'll find someone else? Except for the devs that did writing before being a game dev. Pixelante posted:Any suggestions for a practical Christmas gift to a 20-year-old who is super into game development? He's currently saving up to go back to school, and already did a Digipen summer program that he loved. I'll probably just give him a Steam giftcard, but I like the idea of giving him something that builds skills too. This is more general but if he's super into it you're probably better off asking him for things he wants instead of guessing because he'll probably have a few things he really wants and already have the rest taken care of.
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Dec 3, 2018 06:17
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Dec 3, 2018 06:18
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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 like running a marathon to deliver a pizza and then the customer complains that the pizza got shifted around too much inside the box.
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Dec 3, 2018 08:47
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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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It seems to me that even before those considerations, the interactive nature of games makes it harder to write a good story for it. Most great books/movies have a carefully and specifically crafted experience to get a story across. Of course there's also opportunity there to create something new and original, but it's an area that's much less developed than story creation in books/movies. Most game stories that play with the interactive nature seem to mostly be trying to hide the fact that your choices mostly don't matter rather than creating a wildly branching story with alternate paths. Which is also logical - even just 3 binary choices ends with 8 different paths, and writing an amazing storyline only to have a fraction of players actually experience it (1/8th of the players that actually finish the game, which isn't that many to begin with) is probably not a great use of good writing skills. Caveat: I have no experience with this, it's just what seems logical to me after thinking about it a bunch. Maybe someone who knows what they're talking about can correct me/elaborate?
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Dec 3, 2018 09:37
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I do have to say that the false dialogue choice kind of drives me nuts. You’ll get an NPC saying something like  What do you say, shall we avenge King Genericas death? :A - Yes! B - Yes, and lets kill all the puppies we see along the way too! *twirls mustache* C - *exasperated sigh* if we must... D - I’m sorry to hear about your fathers death. He was a good man. And you’re right, his death must be avenged. (Only if you picked D) Aye, he was a good father. And a good ruler too. (No matter what you pick) I’m glad you agree. Let us muster the troops!Honestly, I’m fine with being railroaded. It makes the narrative realistic within the context of the game. But since the choice is forced anyways, why not just skip the dialog options and write something that fits the character?
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Dec 3, 2018 13:32
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Also; ludonarrative dissonance is a bastard. It's not just that you're getting railroaded, but that the actions in the core cycle of a lot of games make for characters that are hard to write for. Take Tomb Raider. They present a victim character to us, but the reality of gameplay is that we left being the victim a long time ago, after we savagely murdered someone from behind for the 200th time. Lara is an aggressive psychopath. But Rise of the Tomb Raider won awards for it's writing. DOOM is a great counter-example, where the narrative presents you as the boogeyman of Hell. A being of such destructive power that Demons are afraid of him. I'd argue that DOOM has "good writing" because it is aligned with the mechanics. But you can't write every game as the player character being an elemental force of pure destruction and violence. Some games also deliberate subvert and comment on that dissonance, such as Spec Ops : The Line, being very clear that you are not a hero. My personal opinion is games should be games first. Sometimes a great writer can encapsulate the mechanics that make it up into a pretense and narrative that fit. But the mechanics themselves tell the weight of the story, and should be given precedence. A lot of the time, those great mechanics come about because someone is trying to tell a particular kind of story, give the player a particular experience. In my eyes, being a great game maker is constructing a set of mechanics, as in something like Papers Please, which deliver that without having to use excessive prose.
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Dec 3, 2018 14:25
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FourLeaf posted:I just saw this video about writing competent dialogue in games. The example the presenter used for bad writing was a scene from Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, and to demonstrate good writing he breaks down a scene from Blade Runner and transforms it into game dialogue: Ingold is great and more people should pay attention to him.
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Dec 3, 2018 14:26
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MissMarple posted:
No, just put all your story in little text pickups or terminals the player finds, everyone likes that! Question: Is there a community or board where I can do little game dev "jobs" (art, animation, code, debugging, anything really) for free for people who are making little non-commercial personal projects so I can practice with more random things and maybe help someone too?
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Dec 3, 2018 15:43
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Griefor posted:It seems to me that even before those considerations, the interactive nature of games makes it harder to write a good story for it. Most great books/movies have a carefully and specifically crafted experience to get a story across. Of course there's also opportunity there to create something new and original, but it's an area that's much less developed than story creation in books/movies. Most game stories that play with the interactive nature seem to mostly be trying to hide the fact that your choices mostly don't matter rather than creating a wildly branching story with alternate paths. Which is also logical - even just 3 binary choices ends with 8 different paths, and writing an amazing storyline only to have a fraction of players actually experience it (1/8th of the players that actually finish the game, which isn't that many to begin with) is probably not a great use of good writing skills. I don't have games experience, but I do have script writing experience. There are two interconnected issues that I imagine make it very hard to write compelling dialogue for games. As Ingold points towards, natural sounding, compelling dialogue is often high context and carries most of its meaning through subtext. If you pick up your wife from work, the beginning of your conversation in the car is much more likely to look like this: You and your Wife posted:You: How was your day? Than it is to look like this: You and your Wife posted:You: How was your day? I'm exaggerating slightly, but the second one is what you see in most video game writing. Questions are a huge part of what drives narrative interest, and the first version delivers a number of questions: Who is Nancy? What is your wife's relationship to Nancy? What does your wife do? It also potentially tells me something about your relationship to your wife—she either has a potty mouth, or you share a certain candor. The second version has the virtue of giving you some very explicit information: Your wife's job title, and that your wife hates her boss. The first issue, I imagine, is that in many video games, it would be foolish to assume that players are really going to engage with your narrative or with your dialogue beyond whatever you make them do to click through it. If all of your dialogue has an appropriate level of context, there is every chance that some number of your users will be completely loving lost by the time they get half way through the game, which makes it even less likely that they will engage with your plot or your dialogue. And the second issue is one that I think Ingold, by picking the scene he did in that talk, sidesteps. He takes a very high level view of the scene from Bladerunner as he rewrites it, which gives him a great deal of latitude in writing alternative dialogue paths; all that he's attempting to carry is the general thrust of the scene. The scene, and the thrust, only works if the viewer already has an understanding of what a replicant is and has at least some inkling of how Deckard feels about them and so on. The subtext of the scene, and most scenes, builds on the subtext and context built by the scenes that came before it. Identifying the path-critical context and subtext and making sure that your players are aware of it no matter what path they take without exposition-dumping seems like a rather difficult problem. Doing that while also fulfilling whatever structure has been imposed on dialogue options (e.g. good, neutral, evil, funny) seems even harder. Wallet fucked around with this message at 21:15 on Dec 3, 2018 |
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Dec 3, 2018 21:13
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