Posts by Hourences

I didn't knew him that well, but my sincere condolences none the less. At his age it is a damn shame.

I think they are rather fun to kill. And really, the 1000th soldier or sci fi trooper is no different really.

I am looking into doing a big survey on this since I got the software for it anyhow from last time.

So. The survey would focus on amateurs and professionals and how they look at overtime, crunch, and the regular working hours.

Any ideas for questions? I already got a whole list but I want to know what others would like to see asked. Especially for amateurs, how they expect their job to be? I only got three questions for them yet so I need some more so we can get a view on how the developers of tomorrow see their job.

Help me out.

IGDA Forum where there is a heated discussion on this, don't have the exact link.

It are all the regular IGDA members who pay and who are left out in the cold. They are the hands.

Sure Epic can do whatever they want, but you can't go advocate these kind of things publicly. Epic is indeed special, and with that position come certain responsibilities. Very stupid example but imagine president Obama calling his wife a slut in public. If his wife would be ok with that, it would be fine right? And he didn't do anything illegal right? And still it would create a massive outcry because that is just done not, it would create a very bad example, and it will considerably lower the respect people would have for him. The same is true for this situation. This impacts our industry as a whole, this impacts your local german studios, and all of them now got a perfect excuse to exploit their employees "Epic does this too - and they are succesful because of it!!!11" while they forget the Epic standard salaries and projects... We already have a huge problem with studios exploiting graduates and all that. We really really do not need this.

In a way I can see where hes coming from. I mean I have worked 12 hour days with pleasure...on my own stuff... If you really are passionate about what you do, you can indeed easily work more than 40 hours. But that is the thing... Passion. And forcing people to stay late to work on some low budget game, in which they have no or very little creative input does not create passion. If you really want your people to work more than what you pay them for, one of the most important things to do is to make sure they want to work more, out of their own free will just because they like the project and their work so much. Achieving that however, is a whole damn lot more difficult than just forcing people to work over...

Improve the quality of life (both in the office and outside), and your people will become more productive by themselves. Force people and the opposite happens. That is not really rocketscience.

I think it is far worse that IGDA acts as it does, than that Epic says this. Where as it is irresponsible from Epic to say, IGDA is meant to represent us. It is far worse when they fuck up...

For example:

Quote

We do not all agree on the details. I, for example, think that the 40 hour per week gold standard is BS. At least here in the US, the people who work 40 hours per week are not more productive. They punch a time clock, do as little actual work as possible, and then go home. They are the people who look at work as necessary evil they put up with to make enough money to pay their bills. They think that a job is just showing up and their work is devoid of passion or even a modicum of pride in their work. For the most part, IMHO (and experience), people like this may have a place in our industry, but they are poison to a creative team.

This guy is one of the leaders of IGDA. He litterally says we should work more than 40 hours and those who do work only 40 hours "do not care about their job".

Epic aside, this is also about IGDA and what they can mean for us and apperantly that is not exactly much. IGDA refuses to support quality of life and stand up for their members. If they can't stand up for us, then what the hell is the point of it all really. It's just another meaningless organization that pretends to be a lot but doesn't seem to achieve anything at all.

This caused a huge uproar in the dev community, on some private pro forums I am on this discussion has been going for 2-3 weeks now. There are a milion reasons why you can't possibly work like this.

Just to name a few:

According to studies people become less efficient the more they work. Everyone knows this and there is a reason why everyone works 40 hour weeks. Ford figured this out a 100 years ago.

Forcing your employees to work late regularly just means you either suck a whole lot at scheduling or you try to get cheap larbour. Either is really bad.

Promising royalties in return for working over regurlarly is stupid because the employee usually loses out on that deal and in many many cases the game flops and no one ever sees any money.

Promising people royalties is cheaper than just paying overtime, if it weren't most companies would just pay overtime and keep the royalties for themselves. They don't and there is a good reason why they don't. They try to protect themselves and shift the risk to their weaker employees. That is not very nice.

This may work for a studio like Epic, but Epic also serves as an example to many many other studios in this industry. If Epic promotes this way of working many smaller studios will take over their line and also force people to work over regularly, only they usually forget the Epic standard salaries and force people to work over on the next barbie game instead.

And lastly, what do royalties mather if it makes you lose your life and your family really.

And to repeat: you should never ever ever ever ever work harder just because of "royalties". In 99 percent of all situations you will never see any money what so ever, and even if you will it will be hardly enough to compensate for all the time and effort. I have seen plenty of peoples lives go to hell because they tried to rescue already dead projects, and ended up with nothing at all in the end.

I do that stuff but I stick to Unreal and Level Design lectures. I think it is weird that they contact you to speak for people that are outside your field of expertise. Perhaps they just want to have you talk about the industry? It doesn't has to be about your work, you could just talk about how to get a job in this industry, how most post graduates feel when they start their first job and their common issues. That kind of stuff.

Or you could explain level design to the artists so the artists understand the position of the LD better and why they can't just move a crate when they want, for example.

Thats a cool course. It is exactly what I would want to do. Three months is just about perfect, and he asks a boatload of money for it. I wonder if anyone bites? Anyone happen to know anyone who attends it?

You mean qantm? They are private, at least in Holland and charge 12000 euro or so a year.

Sentura sure, some info is never bad. Tak!

Quote from Furyo

Yes but also don't forget that most people who stay in the industry for that long don't stay level designers for 20 years, they climb up the ladder and become managers, producers, etc.

They need degrees to do that, which reinforces my point that people should get an education

At Ubisoft yes, but there are plenty of places and ways to become a manager in this industry without a degree. It largely depends on the type of company, their leadership, and the age of the industry in that particular area.

Where do you live Sentura?

Nice to see some mapcore representation in the contest

I'm in the jury panel, so I'll reserve my comments for later.

Because for that you need flawless English. If its face to face theres more to it than just your English, plus, not living in the UK or the USA most of my students wouldnt be native english speakers anyhow. Now that would be different if I were to sell videos.

I also think it is important to give face to face feedback on issues, and talk things through. It is about more than just explaining how to make a cube basically, and stuff never works out like you explain it. You can explain how to do this or that but the guy is likely going to experience something that wasnt planned nor mentioned in your video.

And, there are quite a few videos and tutorials already. Specialized classes on the other hand...

I have considered setting up a net education environment though and do full online courses, but Im not sure much interest there would be in that, and perhaps more importantly, if I would be able to handle the much larger workload that brings.

It's still something I consider doing though. Plus its an idea I could really far by taking in additional people later on and all.

And about teaming up with a uni: then you get the crap that the uni would like me to have at least a bachelor in whatever, or perhaps even a teachers degree. And I'd have to listen and convince people that know nothing of this all the time...

Then develop a basic artistic skill for 2D Art? If you want to do level design you better understand why textures have the colors, shapes, layouts, etc they have anyhow. It is a small step up from that to creating your own textures. They don't have to be briliant, but basic knowledge really...

Rockdude when I started there were no educations yet. The same goes for many people. We all got in through modding and just working really hard and getting lucky. Times have changed now though, so again, the question whether or not to attend a school is a rather complex one and depends on many things.

I am partially Dutch, there are indeed many bad schools but also a couple of good ones apperantly. The one in Breda seems quite decent for example. I have been considering starting up my own level design education, not a full time one, but a one day in a week type of course. It would be quite costly though, to get the expenses covered, so I wonder how much someone would pay for such a very specialized course?

Yeah have a look at my book: http://hourences.com/book/book2about.htm

It talks through the pros and cons of this industry, ways to get in, schools, mods, etc. All kinds of information and advice basically that will help you make a decision and get a better view on how this industry.

I am not Swedish but I do live here. I have also been teaching occasionally in The Garden, level design education, and Future Games, game design in general. I think there are roughly 20 people a year who would like to become a level designer in Sweden, and there are absolutely not 20 positions available a year in Sweden. So is it difficult to get in? Yeah it kind of is but you also just have to be lucky, and good. I think it is about 50 percent luck (right guy, right time, right place), and 50 percent skill. Work really hard and stick to it. It took me 2-3 years of making custom levels before I got a job. I already made about 15-20 entire levels when I was hired. To go to school or not is a difficult question. It probably is a good idea to go to one though. Just as a backup. You can always apply to studios while you are in school. If you do happen to get hired, hey all the better and you can just quit school. If you don't, you still got your education.

The Garden will stop next year I believe, but Future Games continues. You should have a look at it, may be interesting. You should also be aware that all those people currently attending those courses will also soon look for a job or an internship. They will take whatever positions there are available.

Is it low pay and unstable? Yeah it could be, but you also have studios that are stable and pay decently. It depends where you end up. If you end up at a small start up studio you are much more likely to end up with unpleasant situations. On the other hand do not underestimate small companies and teams. They will give you a lot more creative freedom usually which is also worth something. You could go work for Dice for example, but if you're just a robot in between 300 other developers it's not very fun really, even if they do pay nicely and even if the job is stable (kind of).

I think you should continue with everything you're doing. Try to do as much as possible, and get into as much as possible. Have a go at Scripting in source, but also at scripting with for example Lua and Kismet. Learn basic 3D modeling. Learn some basic level Photoshop. Learn something other than Source. Do singleplay and multiplay. And just make damn good levels.

Yeah the admin of game-artist.net started at Dice as an intern. So you got two Belgians there again

Sad to see a fellow country man return home, and how can the Belgian summer be better than the Swedish one ?

Many people seem to be leaving Dice?

Thinking about leaving the games industry or just need some time off? Determined to stay in Belgium now?

Nice

Though this one isnt a joke:

Seriously bright monitor you got

The shoulder was too blocky, I smoothed it in PS. Shoot me

Thats a weirdly shapen bit of his shoulder Dux, nothing is on his back.

Atelierz, if we do that then the focus shifts from the puzzles, to playing with the ball. That is changing the core mechanics of the gameplay. That is too late to do so right now, and I don't think it is very fun either. I much rather try to solve puzzles and explore the environment, than having to pay close attention to where my ball is all the time. Especially when dealing with mummies, you would end up paying attention to both the mummies, and the ball. That really wouldn't work out. It would be very frustrating while this whole mod is meant to be anything but frustrating. It is about soft challenges (aka non Portal Prelude type of challenges) that are relaxing to solve, and about exploring. I don't want serious challenges. I want the fine line in between boring and frustrating.

It would be incredibly incredibly frustrating and unfun to play if you die all the time from the very thing you must use all the time.

Thanks!

We are going strong - almost one month until the next release. The Ball is set to be released on May 7, 2009! We now have 5 large singleplay levels offering at least 4 hours of gameplay to new players!

We are implementing our own menu, we added about 15 secrets to find, and dozens of other additions and improvements. It is slowly starting to be very polished and large. We have hit the 1 GB filesize (uncompiled - so the public version will be smaller).

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Gorilla by Pestibug and animation by Whackzero. The indoor level shot by Setheran, and the remaining screenshots are a combined effort from Hourences, Setheran, and Sklare.

We are still looking for a voice actor:

-Will be telling our story - our story is less than half a page worth of text so it is not a lot of work.

-A standard male voice with a neutral accent - think Hollywood voice over style

-You need to have a decent microphone and a recording environment with no background noise

Contact [email protected] if you are interested.

http://theball.toltecstudios.com/