Posts by AlexM

Bonjour mon Canadian ami

bookmarked you site. Always great to see careful analysis of level design.

Welcome to mapcore

I'm wating a week or so before I go and redo all the passwords on all my accounts. FFS it's gonna take like 6 hours.

EDIT: CHECK DEM C STRINGS BWAR

Quote from Warby

all the money should go towards science and technology !!!

if we have effectively cured/treated arthritis out of exists by the age i hit 60-70 i wouldn't mind working until i drop dead actually!

that would be great. Although any advances made would be stuck in a mire of patent law.

Quote from Vilham

This is truly fucked up and will be a major problem in Europe. The Dutch have a reputation for solid pensions but that time is gone too. People are getting older, so there are more people who we need to pay. More money out, less money in. The problem will not fix itself and nobody wants to do something about it. The old people have always paid and deserve their retirement. It's unfair to ask them to work longer or receive less.

However, our generation now has to pay more and work longer. Something I can agree with (due to us living longer). But it doesn't make a difference. It's too little too late. Which means by the time we should get our retirement there's nothing left (which isn't fair either). So eventually we'll have to pay for nothing and besides that try and save a little for ourselves on the side. It's no win situation.

Don't really agree that the old people should necessarily get what they think they deserve. If you invest in a financially unsustainable scheme and elect people on unattainable promises that's your problem and shouldn't be the responsibility of people not yet born. You don't get a free pass for being stupid enough to believe in infinite growth.

The problem is that is what the government promised. I'm not saying to trust the government blindly but that certainly is the case.

Also the whole concept of social security could work. It just looks like the current real world implementations are doomed to fail.

Quote from Sjonsson

So you're saying that if an EULA/Contract goes against any law it is nullified? How does that work with multiple-nationalities?

yeah you cant write a contract that would do something illegal. IIRC it invalidates the entire contract in Canada (even the parts that are legal).

My guess is that if you created all the content yourself then it's yours (brushwork, models, textures etc) otherwise you have to strip out everything else.

Quote from Furyo

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.

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I dunno, if I worked in the same office as Michal Abrash I'd be appaled if he wasnt getting 5X my salary at least. I would be ecstatic just to be able to work with him.

It's pretty similar in Canada too

Congrats! Start working now on ways to scare teenage boys who want to date your daughter to death.

Quote from Sjonsson

Last time I checked Gamasutra they took Game Design and Level Design under the same category and to me it feels like it doesn't give me a good picture for what I can expect as a Level Designer.

Does anyone know how much different a Game Designer's salary is compared to Level Design? I'm very curious about this and I don't know where to turn but the salary lists from Gamasutra.

Edit:

It just struck me: why would you want to put Game Design and Level Design in the same category for wages? Aren't there more Level Designers than Game Designers overall on companies?

That's odd. I could have sworn back when it was in printed form they differentiated between the two.

Quote from Minos

Yeah man. That was one of the first advices I got when I started in the industry and it has proven to be a very a good one.

Reasons why you should never talk about your own salary:

- It's highly dependent on several factors, not just "how good" or "how fast" you are. Each person is unique and you can't really compare yourself to others from their salaries alone.

- People get different raises and different bonuses, based not just on "how good they are" but as well as the manager's judgement, how well the company/team is doing, personal skills etc...

- It might lead to competition, even if subconsciously. This is a natural tendency among men and one that I try to avoid personally.

- It's very unprofessional.

It's not hard to find out how much people make at a company anyway. If you feel you are being paid less than others, you can always do some googling or ask people who have left the company how much they used to make.

Personally, I'd rather not know what my colleagues make or even which score they get in their annual reviews, as this often leads to uncomfortable situations. Ex: A friend who has been in the company for a few years was super happy when he finally got a good score and asked me what my score was. I congratulated him and changed subject immediately. My score was a bit higher and had I told him, he could probably take it as competition or even worse, feel like I was diminishing his accomplishment.

Seems it wouldnt be an issue if people could control their ego's and look at the situation objectively.

Both solutions have major issues and are open to abuse.

Websites like glassdoor help prevent companies exploiting people who don't know any better.

Alf-Life's post is far more eloquent than mine.

Updated for March/April

I start my first job in the AAA games industry Monday at United Front Games. So excited and so nervous.

Engineer

Edit : It's so awesome that studying up for this job involves playing sleeping dogs, modnation racers and tomb raider

Minos wrapped that up pretty good.

The only thing i'd like to add is it's worth looking at the gamasutra yearly game developer salary surveys to get a little bit of a ballpark on what jobs similar to yours earn.

Nice!

Must resist..... buying 5.....

So is this more about how to organize yourself?

If we're talking about getting design ideas. I would say one of the most important things to do is have hobbies and be involved with things that are really out of your comfort zone. If you suck at painting take a painting class. Watching a movie from a genre that makes you uncomfortable..

If we're talking about more pragmatic tips then besides what's already posted here I have one suggestion. Keep a notebook for random stuff when you are working, if you get an idea for something cool but not related to the task at hand don't let it sit in your head and distract you, just write it down in the notebook. Generally once you do that it will leave your mind and you will be able to focus on work again.

EDIT

Quote from Campaignjunkie

Oh, hmm... one thing I try to stress really hard is pushing back vs. workaholic crunch culture. I mandate breaks every hour during class, and I tell them not to spend 8 hours a day on their games. To some extent, I suppose this makes them less "employable", but I think less-crunch is the way the game industry is moving (especially re: tech industry's concern over work/life balance), at least in the US where it's a big problem.

You could spend a little time having the students investigate the Pomodoro technique. Or you could go full out and recommend they read a book like this

[Blocked Image: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e1/Getting_Things_Done.jpg]

Quote from TopHATTwaffle

This becomes an issue of "What if that person deletes his DB account?" "What if they just remove the files?" With them being hosted on a website, whilst management can only be done by a few members, this will ensure that the content will be kept there forever.

Obviously my inclination as a recent web programmer would be to create an application specifically for this use case but there must be an existing framework or application out there that fits these needs. ]

Gotta rack my brain here.

There is a dropbox API but that seems like overkill.

I'm willing to front Web hosting for this as I have unlimited space available to me. If an application can be made as a front end for FTP that will work fine. Assuming each user only has access to their own folder yadda yadda.

Linux host I'm assuming?

I just accepted a new job so I'm not sure how much time I have but I have a week off leading up to it. At the very least I'll see if I can find anything that's largely boiler plate that might work.

A web app as a FTP front does sound like a good idea.

what was the drinking game?

holyyy shit

Abrash is leaving valve for occulus? Carmack and Abrash together, that seems like a major advantage to me.

Quote from TopHATTwaffle

This becomes an issue of "What if that person deletes his DB account?" "What if they just remove the files?" With them being hosted on a website, whilst management can only be done by a few members, this will ensure that the content will be kept there forever.

Obviously my inclination as a recent web programmer would be to create an application specifically for this use case but there must be an existing framework or application out there that fits these needs. ]

Gotta rack my brain here.

There is a dropbox API but that seems like overkill.

Could you not just have every artist open a dropbox of their own and just list the links to their public release folder per artist?

Sounds awesome!

How would it be handled? One large file? Some sort of searchable database? I'd be willing to help out if that's at all needed.

I have 2 thoughts

It could be where you are advertising. For instance mapcore seems like a bad place to sell an art pack since like 95% of mapcore are artists. Have you compared the price of your content to the unity marketplace? Are you selling your content on the unity marketplace?

Personally on a game project I can't really imagine using a generic art pack. I just can't see some art pack aligning with the game's artistic vision. That's a personal thing preference though.

edit: Also I think you posted this in the wrong section. You are ultimately selling a service so it would be more appropriate here : https://migrationtest.mapcore.org/forum/30-services/