Posts by Furyo

Fantastic stuff Kacper, congrats

Hello straw. Let me grasp at you.

Has anyone tried this game yet? Just bought it on Steam (some friends worked on it back at Ubi Montreal) and I wanted to show support for a different way of producing games within industry giants. Throwback RPG title with platforming

The game was made with roughly 40 people (aka indie team with Ubisoft resources) and no real marketing budget to speak of. It was made with the engine made by Ubisoft Montpellier for Rayman Origins and Legends

Yeah that's been making the rounds. Only a game dev (and a good experienced one at that) could have written this so well. Best description of games jobs I've ever seen

Quote from Warby

DOPE

Furyo (yeah look at all of us crossbreed bastards with our polycount impurities)

, no polycount here, pure VERC/HL2.net/DoD.net

Get the job and you'll be the very first 100% Mapcore-trained professional out there

If I'm still in Europe by then, I'll make the trip too. Could even already be in the UK...

There are problems with the Big Mac index, mostly the fact that the cost of big macs is not adjusted by McDonald's with inflation every year, and remains essentially identical throughout very different economic zones.

Not only am I up for that, I offer my services to set that up.

Sure, it's not gonna live up to the original series. Sure, some of it is cheesy as fuck, but I'd be lying if I said I'm not gonna watch it. And enjoy it.

Quote from FMPONE

This. Everyone should do Glassdoor.

Question, do we think the game industry would have higher salaries if salaries were made more public? Would that raise the average salary if people started to figure out they were being paid less than they were worth?

Rather than on a company level, how do you think publicly available salaries might affect the industry? A lot of you have been in the industry a lot longer than me so I'm curious to see opinions.

Salaries would be higher if other companies knew what they were paying their employees. There's a natural incentive for the companies to offer more, in order to lure talent.

Any attempt at collective collusion would be undermined by the companies' desire to get the best talent.

That's exactly what drove the Montreal scene for years. Ubisoft pays least but offers a bunch of perks like on site doctor and banking and nursing for kids, other companies can't do that and arrived in Montreal later so they had to jack up prices (by about 30/40%)

You guys could be biased by your own work cultures. In Europe, salary grids are a lot more common, and it's therefore easier to accept talking about salaries as everyone within the same seniority and job has about the same pay.

In Canada and the US, I've experienced vast differences, that are mostly justified by individual history and "cred" based on previous games or ability to negotiate once inside a company. There are also companies that are so cosmopolitan that expecting everyone to share their salary essentially calls for a revolution. You simply can't recruit the absolute best in the world in a given field when the competition is international, if your salary grid is only local. And when it is international, how do you want the local senior guy who's spent 15 years inside the same studio to understand that the brand new recruit who is an absolute expert was paid 50% more?

Sharing salaries is all fine on paper, particularly when individuals are essentially all the same (same background, national citizens, same studies, same local experience, same experience give or take a year or two). Once you start recruiting on the international scale, and you want to have the greatest graphics engineer from Google, Naughty Dog, Valve or what have you, be ready to break the bank, or Europe simply cannot compete. And salaries at this point should absolutely be off-limits, because you don't and cannot have a good frame of reference for everyone to understand.

And yes, of course, that also benefits the employers. They're all too happy keeping salaries secret, as that's employee retention 101. Why pay someone more when he doesn't know he's not getting paid as much as someone else? Unions could be a way to mitigate that, but at the cost of personal achievements, something some cultures would be very reluctant to accept.

It's actually because the bridges, like the highways in France for instance, are no longer built with public money (they don't have any, California is bankrupt). Private companies (construction) work and put the cash upfront, then sign a licensing deal with the state for a number of years to cover for their cost/work/interest. Decades or more. Once that deal is over, the licensing is over and all leftover tolls go to the pocket of the state, which of course remains sole proprietor for the entire time.

5% of the taxes in Germany go toward helping fund the recovery of the former DDR (East Germany) since the reunification. Of course, we should all expect that rate stay the same well after they've essentially caught up (which they more or less have)

A regular level designer at Ubisoft doesn't make that, that's a senior pay. And that's only in Montreal/Toronto, ie CAD not USD. If Europeans at Ubisoft made that kinda cash, no one would ever leave their studio....

To add to this, make sure the company you're talking to is actually versed in international hiring. If it's the first time they do it, or are generally new to the business, you will absolutely need to do their homework for them.

Keep in mind many studios do not have a clue what work visas are and how hard they can be to get. They also can apply a base salary for your position as if you were local to that country, which may not work in your favor.

Congrats, that's a good company to be at. Sleeping dogs was very enjoyable.

If you're anything like me, you never delete your PMs....

I just spent the past 10 minutes reminiscing on all the good times over the past 8 years of being a part of Mapcore. I clearly don't have that many PMs, but what I do have I cherish. From my first attempts at getting a job through the old timers around here, to helping others getting their first steps in the industry, Assassin's Creed 2, Porto Alegre, Crytek, it's just an all around great time...

I'd love to work on something like that for a while, but can't move to NY on a part time job, and it's probably not going to sponsor me a new visa

Great to see some maps still being made for the game that started it all for me

Some feedback, based purely on the screenshots (take them with a grain of salt)

- Exterior lighting needs more work. Not sure how large the area outside is, but it feels very white everywhere, lacking contrast that would otherwise indicate in clearer terms where your entries/exits/chokepoints are.

- Be careful with the interior of the base. From what I'm looking at, most places look exactly identical (washed out concrete and the same tanks and railtracks) which will not help with player orientation. Consider adding distinctive signs to your environment design to clearly indicate where players are headed.

On a side note, in that 5th screenshot, your tanks couldn't possibly have reached these locations by themselves, unless the railtrack were made AFTER they got parked there. Think about that when you place your items and try and tell the story of this base as you do. Why would tanks be there? Why place them here and not anywhere else? Where do they go from here? How are they useful in this situation? etc.