What is your favorite game genre?

I think a lot of gamers would be very surprised to discover the make up of the development teams on some of their favorite games.

Often I've found at the various companies I've worked at that the MAJORITY of people working on the game aren't actually big fans of the game itself or at least the genre of the game they're working on.

Why is this?

The first finger i can point at would be recruiters and human resource teams. Recruiters are fairly active in the games industry and get paid on successfully finding candidates for job... regardless of if they're a good fit. I've had plenty of recruiter calls trying to interest me always using works like "triple a" title and "exciting new game franchise" But they've never actually asked me what games do I like.

The same is true for HR people. In fact i recall sitting down with a senior HR person at a very large game company talking about the possibility of working there. I expressed to her that i really wanted to work on a specific team on a specific game. I game that i had played for a long time and loved. But she was completely dis interested in that. She even came out and said, "Well the important thing is getting you on a team at this company" Basically dismissing what i said altogether.

This isn't exclusive to one company. With Dealing with HR at other companies i had to chose between studios to interview at. The first thing i asked was what types of games they had. When i found up picking one studio letting their HR team know i was very interested in one of their projects i flew down there only to be told they didn't need people on that project only on another game i had ZERO interest in.

It really seems to be the prevalent trend that developers should be more interested in the salary, location, and benefits and just deal with whatever project you get put on. This truly surprised me.


Is this really such a bag thing?

I truly think so. From personal experience when I'm working on a game i LOVE and am passionate about I'm able to make it that much better. I'm able to contribute ideas, feedback, and make sure the tasks I'm implementing make sense based on my experience with the game.

If you're passionate about what you're working on you're going to put a lot more into it. You're going to make it a better game.

If you're working on a game genre that you never really played and don't really like... sure you can implement your tasks as given. But can you really notice if something isn't really correct? Can you really contribute great ideas that make sense with the genre? Are you really going to bed over backwards to make the game great if you're not even a fan of it? I really don't think so.

What's funny to me is i know there is a huge RTS fan somewhere working on a football game that he truly doesn't like... and at some RTS game company there is a huge NFL fan that would love to work on madden.

How to Break in the Games Industry as a Programmer

I recently did an article for gamecareerguide.com titled "How to Break in as a Game Programmer"

I'd like to add a few more bonus tips on my blog.

I'm going to focus on the "foot in the door" as i found that to be the hardest part. I recently received a few e-mails with fallow up questions from other's trying to break into the games industry. They also needed help with the "foot in the door"

SOME people have simply been able to get a college degree, get good grades, and luck out and interview rather well. Even for them getting the initial interview can be tricky. The only game company that i know actually directly recruits at colleges is EA. Other than them you're pretty much on you're own getting the companies attention and getting an interview.

It really comes down to exactly what you want to do? The easiest foot in the door job is as a tester. You don't need a degree or much experience to land this job. All you really need to do is demonstrate the ability to document bugs well and stay highly motivated. A good majority of the mission designers at my company were testers first. And when i worked at EA the lead designers of the entire game was just the year before a regular mission designer.

Another approach is to find a smaller game's company, get to know them very well, and be prepared to intern for them for a rather cheap wage. This approach worked for me. My very first video game internship i worked for free for about 5 months. But having that on my resume was priceless. It opened up all of the other doors for me.

Mobile games have come a long way in the last few years. Getting a job working on a cell phone game or a psp game is a good deal easier than a 360 and ps3 game. This might also be a good foot in the door move. I didn't have to go this route but as a last resort i would have. You're not getting experience in the core game language c or c++ but you're still learning game mechanics and getting decent resume experience.

Last but not least target a company that you know hires interns. Learn their games, do mods with their big titles, and use level editors to create new content from the game. This is a very good way to get their attention. Also the work of creating a mod is VERY similar to the day to day work as a game play programmer.

That's all for now but feel free to ask questions and good luck!

Bioshock - finally a strong advancement in gameplay?

Bioshock Trailer - Narrated by Ken Levine Starting right where the last post ended. Will we finally see some really good advancements in gameplay this generation? Kevin starts of to say what their goals are with the game: -"Re-define what it means to be a fps" -put and end to games with "Linear corridors, static environments, cookie cutter AIs." music to my ears! Let's take a look at each gameplay advancement the game is going for. AI This is what Kevin has to say about the AI: -"it's all dynamic none of it's scripted" Many games AI is done with 100% scripts. Meaning if you walk into a room the game will trigger an already written script that will tell all of the NPCs where to go and what to do. Keep in mind this script was written months before by some engineer who has know knowledge of your type of gameplay or your actions so far in the game. Keeping the AI dynamic is a huge step. This will keep the game experience different (to some degree) for each person that plays it. For example the "Big Daddy" units are patrolling around dynamically searching. So something as simple as delaying them for a few moments at some point in the game could effect something else further down the road. This also means the AI can adjust to you're actions in real time. That leads to the next AI quote. -"Re-define what AIs can do in FPS.... by giving them unique relationships you haven't seen in other games" Because the AI isn't static and scripted you can have unique relationships with it. Like Kevin said you can make enemies, ignore, or take advantage of different AI units in the game. Open Unique Gameplay -"We don't make moral choices for the player we leave it up to them" -"open ended, go anywhere, go into any store...freedom of exploration" This element of freedom is something i really love in games. Again in games that are highly scripted and linear there is no way for them to allow a unique experience driven by the players choices. Because this game has a dynamic AI they can allow the player to make their own choices and their own path because all of their code doesn't rely on when and where a character enters a room to trigger some script that was written months ago with know knowledge of the players actions. It's too early to tell if all of what Kevin claims is going to happen in Bioshock. But it's rather refreshing to see a game team focusing on these great gameplay advancements.

Why graphics over game play?

At some point game developers made the conscious decision to focus on graphics over game play.

Every new hardware generation in video game consoles there tends to be a lot of excitement about "next gen" games. But what seems to happen is all of the hardware's power and the developers focus goes towards getting the best visuals out of the game possible and not the best game play.

Things are so bad and gamer's are so starved for new game play they even get excited for game play features that had been done before 5-10 year early but finally just re-introduced. Gamers running around screaming "innovation!"

Good example of this is Prey. Take a look at this video from 1998.

• Game features 100% real time destructable environments
• And Gasp! A system where you can shoot two portals and walk through one to get to the other.
• They have this running on a voodoo 2

This video is depressing on two levels.

1. The first one is Prey did finally come out in 2006 and it doesn't even include real time destructable environments or controllable portals.
2. Valve is now coming out with a game called Portal that pretty much revolves around the game play aspect of being able to shoot a two portals and walk through them. This is a game play feature that was being done 8 years ago just coming out today...

If real time destructable environments were possible in 1998 on a voodoo 2 then why don't ALL of current gen games feature this?

Why do so many games put you on a super linear path full of fake doors and buildings, with only 5-20 NPCs on the screen at once, and with static non interactive environments?

Because by taking away interactive environments, more npcs on screen, and real large worlds game developer can add that many more polys to a player model, add high resolution textures to the walls, and make that none moving static box in the corner look so real!

Personally the game play advancements I'd like to see are the following:

1. 100% destructable / interactive environments
2. Great Physics
3. Great AI
4. Massive open worlds
5. No fake static buildings and fake static doors
6. Non-linear open ended game play
7. 1000's of on screen characters

Could one game pull all of this off? Imagine GTA. Taking place in NYC rush hour with thousands of cars and people. All the buildings in NYC would be walked into or even destroyed.

Can this game be made? Of course! The only problem is if you were to pull a game like this off on the xbox 360 or PS3 you would need to sacrifice cutting edge graphics. You couldn't spend all of your time, effort, and hardware processing power on the highest poly and best looking player models. In other words taking and xbox game and putting it on the 360 and instead of upgrading graphics focus on the game play!

To some SMALL extent this has been done. Look at Oblivion (even though the environments look amazing) and Morrowind. The player models are fairly poor, animations are horrible, and most objects and buildings in the game are square and low poly. It still sold millions. Bethesda chose to focus on game play and provided a huge open world with no fake static buildings or doors. The game was absolutely great and the fact that the player models didn't look amazing didn't break the game. I wish more developers would see the success of this game and go even further.

The problem is when you look at the back of a video game box you can't tell if the doors are fake, you can't tell if the physics suck, if the game play is linear, if the AI is horrible. The only thing you can see is how pretty the graphics are.

Will things get better? I hope so. I see very promising things on the 360 so far. Dead rising has a ton of on screen characters, saints Row has amazing physics and a good deal of the buildings are real and can be walked into real time, and Oblivion has a HUGE open world with NO fake buildings. None of these games pull all of my most wanted game play features off but I really hope we see more of a trend towards game play.

Welcome to The gaming Generation. My name is Steve and I count myself as one of "The gaming Generation". Those of us that grew up with video games and now are in the game industry and have a chance to impact the future of games.

I plan to use this blog to share my thoughts and ideas about the current state of the games industry and what can be done to improve it.