Posts by sensee

sounds very cool!

any chances that some of you guys might actually get a job there?

although I think it COULD get kinda boring modeling cars and racetracks every day. or maybe not.

I guess the best way is to become someone whose imput can't be replaced by a noob that easily. Maybe aim for leading design position?

Of course that takes a lot of perseverance & talent and also hoping that the producer or director isn't just some dickhead who got his position by a stupid business school degree, but someone who really acknowledges your skills.

2 things I often hear about the industry:

- There a big demand for employees (almost every publisher/developer has lots of job openings on their websites)

- Companies treat their employees rather bad (overtime, low salaries, no creativity)

How do these two things go together? Shouldn't companies try to attract more workers with good salaries and good working conditions? Or does nobody want to work for the game industry because of the present conditons? Are managers at game companies just plain stupid or are there other reasons for this obvious contradiction?

Quote from MJ

i heard the pay isnt that great either..

From what I've heard it's about 10-20% less than in other software industries. That's for programmer, I don't know about 3d artists.

As far as I know Rockstar has to pay those guys the regular salary for some time because labour laws in Austria are very strict and you can't just fire people over night.

They used the security guards for keeping the employees away from their computers so they wouldn't steal any assets. Stupidity :roll:

I don't know if or how many years of industry experience the guy who wrote that comment actually has. Maybe he just worked in the wrong company or maybe he's a starter who got frustrated because nobody at the studio gives a damn about his leet game ideas.

Quote from Taylor

The Escapist is rather a poor soapbox powered by a stock photo archive.

hehe, that made me smile

Maybe some of you know this article from the escapist magazine:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/40/23

I found an interesting and also kind of depressing post in the comments:

Quote

This article definetly paints a broad stroke covering both the artist and developer ways of life in the games industry. Everything I read is accurate except the positive light cast on Producers, Managers, and Directors in the industry. Artists and Programmers burn out because:

s step 1) We are talented and innovative people who enter the industry with bright eyes wanting to contribute our know how into making great innovative games so we work insane hours whether we are asked to or not. We do it because we love it.

Step 2) We work and work and gain experience with the good, bad, and ugly. Because we are talented and innovative we set out to innovate and fix the way games are produced. We attempt to align depts, plan smarter, find quicker methods of creation, streamline etc. We have some success and we hope we get recognized for these contributions but they are overlooked or forgotten quickly because of the turn over rate in our industry directly inclusive of the team members which helped to make these accomplishments.

step 3) As we begin to see we can make a difference with successful changes we have made to production practices we grow to care more about this kind of innovation and improving the process of making games that we begin to feel more passion for our work improving the process of making games than we do for our art and coding work which were hired for.

Step 4) This gets noticed by managers and we get put back in our place with management mumbo-jumbo side speak coraling us back to our cubes. We realize our innovation and bright ideas are being squashed..the very reason we got into this buisness in the first place (because we hoped to express ourselves through our talents and innovative thinking has now been shot down). Depression, Reflection on our accomplishments, quality of life, and questioning of authority sets in.

Step 5) We get frustrated and begin curbing our labor hours until managment asks us to work longer hours and we get pissed. It was one thing to do it when we were passionate about making innovative games but now that we've been squashed our attitude has changed. Who is this manager anyway and what the heck did they do to get their job? Who is this Producer that creates these unrealistically scoped projects and what the heck do they know about making games? What did these people ever contribute to a game before? What are their viable art or coding skills? Lets see them make a game! Did they get their jobs because they have talent or because they kissed lots of butt? Arggghhh.

Step 6) We take a long hard look at who our managers are: people who's careers are from another industry. Retail regional managers, Film industry managers, or Import Export Managers, and on rare occasion someone who actually has been promoted internally to a managerial position. Well what the heck qualifies any of these people except the last choice for a games management position? Being pleasant doesn't make for good game development scheduling. Knowing management software shouldn't qualify someone to be a manager. Years of game development experience and the desire to manage projects for the cause of keeping a team healthy should. Most of these managers don't know anything about making games. It becomes the artists and programmers jobs to teach the managers how to manage and do their jobs. That means that on top of performing as an artist or programmer we are also teaching our bosses how to do their jobs. This is a poor hiring practice.

Step 7) We take a long hard look at who our producers are: people who love playing games but don't know any of the details of actually making games. People who make minimum wage in QA are then promoted to manage entire game teams. The only prior management experience that someone who would accept a minimum wage position as an adult to play video games professionally would be at a place like Arby's or Burger King. These types producers sit on their keisters and dream. They dream and dream and never actually create anything worth while for the games. Instead it is the job of Artists and Programmers to clean up the Producers mess of poor scheduling, budgeting, scoping, milestone tracking etc.. This is a poor hiring practice.

Game Developers (artists and programmers (excluding producers and managers) burn out because there is now way for us to innovate and be recognized for it, we get tired of doing our jobs and the jobs of our "superiors" while they reap the rewards, and with this we begin to realize as we age that there are more important things in life like quality of life, family, and the outdoors than creating video games.

The proof is in the pudding as far as stifled innovation goes. Look at how un original games are today. That's because producers who have no innovative ideas are incharge of innovation yet they got their jobs from being content living in their parents basement at age 30 playing video games as a tester for a living. Managers who are put incharge of managing innovative people see any innovation as wild, crazy, out of the ordinary, and must be corralled, punished and put back to our little cubes.

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Is this the common life of an avarage game developer or just an extreme case?

For those of us, who aren't industry yet: Do such articles (and there's been lots of them lately) scare you? Maybe scare you away?

Discuss

looks very good.

how did you make that floating river effect?

I agree with the simple props, that makes sense. Also using automatic tools like speedtree is ok.

I was more talking about the stuff that takes creativity. I can't imagine that Bungie for example would ever consider to outsource the level design/art of the Halo games to a team in India or something like that. It just wouldn't work.

Outsourcing concept art is unfortunately becoming more common, although I think it can be a big mistake not having modeler and concept artist work together in one room (or at least in the same building). Freelance artist are one solution.

outsourcing scares me, but on the other hand a AAA developer can't outsource all the production. maybe you can outsource the sound departement or even the engine programming (i.e. buying an engine) but you can never outsource the art creation and especially not the game design. maybe it's possible for crappy GBA carton licence games, but never for next-gen AAA titles.

sounds cool but I kinda understand why people here have doubts about the whole publisher thing.

I mean there are tons of HL2 mods out there with WAY more media content and they don't get any publishing offers at all.

/hmm... the more I think about it the more I assume that this is some kind of cheap way to get members for your mod. feel free to prove me wrong though.

bevel & emboss in photoshop are a big no-no

The face of that girl looked very weird and unnatural. It almost creeped me out. Maybe it has something to do with the Uncanny Valley: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_Valley

I don't see why people make such a big deal over Heavy Rain. The characters in HL2 looked more sophisticated, had better facial animations and way better lip synch. And HL2 is almost 2 years old. Also you could clearly see that the kitchen later in the movie is only a flat texture. I'm quite sure you could run that demo on a mid-class PC or even an XBox1.

I really admire Quatic Dreams for their work ever since Nomad Soul, but that Demo didn't impress me at all.

Quote from PS_Mouse

In the NS mapping community, a number of guys had a hardon for Feng Zu. So if you look for it, you can see parts of maps that are either copied wholesale or heavily inspired by Feng Zu's designs.

Feng is probably the most copied artist in the concept art community. I even saw some professional concept artists copying his style.

It's not necessarily bad thing though.

hmm maybe you should have chosen the submarine. it's an incredible model.

i wanna vote for peris submarine, but where is it?

i got it and it's nice

thx valve

Mod development is so wrong these days.

First of all, it's been almost 1.5 years since Half-Life 2 was released and there are very very few mods you can actually download and play. For me this is a clear sign that something is going terribly wrong.

Do you remember what the first Counter-Strike beta looked like? It had very cheap maps and no custom content except the weapons and the player models who looked like terrorist in pajamas and yet it did work and it was fun.

Nowdays mods are trying to compete against professional games in terms of graphics and content. They try to make total conversions with custom textures, custom models, custom animations... hell, some mod teams even have concept artists. Mod leaders are more acting like some executive suits with their "recruitments" and "NDAs" and b.s. like this.

There are tons of mods being developed for HL2 and only a smaller part of them will actually ever be completed. And even if they come out sometime in the year 2007, who's gonna play them?

Let's take a look at Dystopia for example. It's good looking mod with fun and innovative gameplay. They were also supported by Valve and got some publicity via Steam. The first demo was released long time ago and there were several updates since then. And guess what, less than 80 people are playing it right now! (http://steampowered.com/status/game_stats.html)

Maybe the mod teams of all these countless military shooters ("no, our mod is not like CS. it has different objectives and the M4A1 looks different...") should reconsider their philosophy.

I have lots of years of modding experience and I've been watching the whole scene for almost 8 years and I can't help but feel that there is (almost) no more love in the community.

gearbox should make the half-life addons again.

opposing force ftw

The second time when the "player" gives a command, the arm is waving before the marker appears.

It's not as bad as Killzone2 and I'm sure many studios retouch their videos/screenshots when the game is not done yet, but still it feels a little bit cheap and fake.

I'd like to hear a comment from the gearbox guys though. Maybe I'm getting it all wrong.