Game Development Lecture from 2k Games

I recently attended a lecture from a developer from 2k Games at my University. This has been our most popular lecture yet with 35 people in attendance (we had to bring in chairs from outside) and it went on for 30 minutes longer than was scheduled.

I want to withhold his name in case I misquote him and just in case he said something he shouldn't have (don't want him to get in trouble for violating any NDA ).

However I will say he was largely a developer on the PS3 port for Bioshock and is currently working on Bioshock 2.

It was a very good lecture. Here's some points I can remember:

-He had no problem in admitting almost all game development is geared for consoles; PC game development is largely an afterthought or a port. He mainly works in XBox 360 development.

-Development is done on PC's (naturally) using Software Development Kits. Often, they actually work.

-He's never done Wii development but working for Nintendo he's heard is like working for the mob. One student who worked in Japan said that change requests to Nintendo had to be delivered to them in person at their Kyoto offices.

--(GB development is particularly bad due to the horrid SDK)

-almost everything is done in C++; at the very least you need a working knowledge of it

-The reason that deadlines are so fixed is because of negotiated marketing with advertisers and especially store displays. Gamespot controls quite a bit of what gets sold or not from their employee worn t-shirts and the recommendations they make as opposed to that box behind the rack in the corner.

--(This sheds some light on Dragon Age IMO when we had all the media blitz recently in spite of the 6 month delay.)

-Development on the PS3 is a lot harder than XBox 360. The PS3 gives you a lot less and less flexibility with the memory.

-The 360 uses 3 processors of course while the PS3 uses their Cell processor which is generally made up of a whole raft of different kinds of processors which subdivide the work in parallel.

--(Parallel and Multithread Programming is definitely the way things are going right now. Its very important to learn and he wished he had.)

-This makes programming in the PS3 quite a bit harder and the two consoles are very much alien to each other making porting difficult. Sony is very good however about showing you how to optimize your code to their system and do workarounds.

-The PS3's Video Card sucks compared to the 360. (I'm not sure if he was mainly referring to the memory issue - he didn't mention to the students the whole nVidia/ATI thing).

-MS in general is very easy to work with because of their history of dealing with 3rd party vendors, and the fact Visual Studio and the SDK are all MS.

-Getting into the gaming industry is difficult. Out of college teh speaker managed to get on as a Playtester for Sony. Its often been said its impossible to move up from being a tester but he's living proof that its simple not a fact.

--The most important thing is being in the game industry itself and showing that you can bring a game to a reasonable conclusion. Things like education are far down the list. The industry wants game industry experience. The speaker was hired on at 2K because of connections with other testers that were hired.

-One way to make contacts is through the Game Development Conference

-Game Development is a very relaxed working environment

-I confirmed that Game Developers (Including Artists) don't make as much money as other software industries because of so much demand to get into it (we had 35 students at the lecture). He said that the marketing people make the most money. He also confirmed that unless your a big name Developers don't get royalties on games except maybe as a bonus if the game does well.

-The industry will actually contract to a firm that represents a company (or companies) that review games and they will tell them how they would review their games and why. The developers often don't like the results they said but they have to listen to them and this why they contracted them (I thought, what great material for conspiracy theorists).

-As a former tester he's very selective now of the games he plays. Bioshock he obviously can't play anymore (He says there are several testers that can now complete it in 45 minutes) but around the office Civ 4 PitBoss is very popular (I didn't have a chance to tell him I almost missed the lecture because I was taking Just One More Turn on Civ 4)

Thanks for the recap, sounds like it was an interesting lecture.

From where I'm at, it's also a pretty good window into what, exactly, is wrong with the games business.

Game development is obviously not a way to get rich. It's like a painter I guess. For every famous and rich painter there are 2000 selling their works of art for $10 at the local fair. But they both do what they like to do, which is basically having an idea and implementing it.

Sounds like I'll have to make a game for my exam work. Since my degree will be worthless without it.

Übereil

Sounds like they want to recruit from your university since they sent a lecturer. Companies usually give 1-2 projects that's good for establishing connections. We did a project for a company, but it was somewhat hampered by them having some release problems with a game called Anarchy Online.

It certainly both confirms my suspicions about and explains why games generally suck so bad.

-The industry will actually contract to a firm that represents a company (or companies) that review games and they will tell them how they would review their games and why. The developers often don't like the results they said but they have to listen to them and this why they contracted them (I thought, what great material for conspiracy theorists).

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This is my far favourite part.

And the thing of C++ still used in game development ... You didn't need to go there to learn just that.

Personally, I know of only a single game series developed with Delphi: The Age Of Wonders series, at least the last two games (out of 3).


Anyway, thanks for the text, I learned a lot !

Yeah, those developers really need to catch on and move to a modern language. Something like C# really needs to become the standard. Especially now that most of the work-load is handled by GPUs anyway.

DArtagnan said:

Yeah, those developers really need to catch on and move to a modern language. Something like C# really needs to become the standard. Especially now that most of the work-load is handled by GPUs anyway.

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Hahaha, you're funny. C#, Microsoft's failed attempt at embracing and extending Java. It may be recently developed but I'm not sure it can live up to the standards the word "modern" implies.

If you're looking to get into the industry, OpenCL is the future. Jump all over that, become an expert now before the game companies start switching to that 2 generations of games out. You put that on your resume (and can back it up) you'll get hired by a studio looking to make the transition.

OpenCL on top of a GPGPU has the support of all the big players out there and programmable CPU/GPU hybrids are the future.

LuckyCarbon said:

Hahaha, you're funny. C#, Microsoft's failed attempt at embracing and extending Java. It may be recently developed but I'm not sure it can live up to the standards the word "modern" implies.

If you're looking to get into the industry, OpenCL is the future. Jump all over that, become an expert now before the game companies start switching to that 2 generations of games out. You put that on your resume (and can back it up) you'll get hired by a studio looking to make the transition.

OpenCL on top of a GPGPU has the support of all the big players out there and programmable CPU/GPU hybrids are the future.

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I would kill myself before I got into the corporate gaming industry - and I would kill myself twice before becoming a programmer in that industry.

Anyway, Java is horrible for games - but since I'm not into the whole religious thing, I really don't care if they moved that way. As long as they could get decent performance out of it - which isn't exactly where Java shines.

C# along with XNA is an excellent platform.

Anyway, if this is about anti-MS - I can't be bothered. I don't really care what they do, as long as they go forward.

OpenCL might be good as well.

C# is not portable, which kills it dead for me.

I'd go with a hybrid approach of XML/Python/Lua/C++. Write out the hardware abstraction layers in C++, the data abstractions in XML, put the whole thing together in Python, and script it in Lua. Of course, leverage everything that's out there already (OGRE etc) so I wouldn't re-invent the wheel. And then build a shit-kicking awesome game on it.

IMO the huge unexploited game market, especially for a somewhat nerdy, cerebral, and challenging genre as cRPG's, is Linux. If I built a game, I'd make sure it ran on Linux out of the box. Then I'd open-source the platform, dev tools, and all of the art, music, animation, and model assets, and charge only for the actual content.

My goal would be to recreate the Neverwinter Nights (2) modding community, except that:

(1) it doesn't suck technically
(2) the mod creators, from individual enthusiasts to studios like Ossian or Rogue Dao, are free to sell their creations on their own terms, without having to jump through hoops set by the publisher who owns the platform and IPR's
(3) the community, led by me as the originator of the platform, of course, would maintain the platform as well.

The only problem is that they're used to getting everything for free, which means that it's not obvious to construct a business model around it. But I'm sure that problem is soluble too, given a bit of thought -- it's not like *nobody* manages to sell commercial Linux software. (I use oXygen every day.)

Any takers? I had a bad day at work and am considering a new career.*

*Not really. Quite. Yet. But someday. Someday... soon.

Portable?

This is about the PC gaming industry. Gamers have Windows.

Even if it was about the console market, the 360 is covered.

I'm using C# and XNA for my own game, and I do so for several good reasons. Among them:

Excellent support
Excellent documentation
It's free
It's powerful
It's easily ported to Xbox 360 (which is the only other platform I MIGHT care about)
It's suited to Visual Studio which is a fantastic development environment
It's made by the guys who made the OS I'm going to support

Those are some of the key reasons.

As I said, it's really not important what developers do - and I really don't care. But I think it's about time they moved forward.

If four years (19 years?) of University has taught me this is that the latest and greatest languages come and go..a lot.

This is exactly why C++ is so emphasized in the industry over say Python, Lua, or even Java - because its seen as a building block or even a basic for any other modern language.

Many languages the speaker pointed out again, were "C like" like the one used for the Unreal Engine I believe he pointed out. It certainly is that way for Torque and even NWN.

One important thing I forgot to mention in my notes is about memory management and speed optimization. The speaker noted that this was critically important in game development and with C++ you get the flexibility to optimize it with the platform and specific hardware tweaks. When its "under the hood" there tends to be a lot of overhead.

This is the same reason my own university is going "back to the basics" and has even ditched Java in favour of C++. (On that, even our electrical and computer engineers love C though they can't seem to get their heads wrapped around C++ or anything more abstract generally speaking).

I didn't bring up the fact that their own Civ 4 uses Python because of that very point. The real idea being is if you can start with C++ you should be able to move on to anything else.

--

I don't think the speech so much illustrates what's wrong with the industry as a straightforward statement of where it is today. The speaker as a former tester as I said is very selective of what games he plays today as I've said - he made the point there are a lot of bad games out there because he had to test everyone of them it seemed. Barbie Unicorn edition is not a good game - especially when you have to test that all its fonts are compliant to Sony Standards.

I mean, let's face it, when a company produces something like Pitboss for Civ4 not really meant for public release, something slower than even turn based (its play by email), I think that says something.

We may not like games on consoles but that's not only what sells its far more easy to develop on because there are so many different combinations of PC configuration to try to get it to work on. The last near standard I remember on PCs was Tandy 1000.

I know I myself I'm in an extreme minority at our University LAN parties. We have a weekly Warcraft 3 DotA match up and I got huge laughs in the room when I suggested they should make it turn based.
--

Another interesting I forgot to mention is that since 2k games now has the rights to GTA they have to document every single possible Easter Egg in the game - nothing hidden is allowed.

One of the less mature students asked if game skins, such as one he hinted at doing using male body parts, would be useful to show work. The speaker politely advised him that it could but that a company may be more likely to wonder what sort of Easter Egg he would hide in the game.

---

The contracting of the review company(ies) I thought was mind blowing as well.

It lends substance to what we had complained about on this site for years: that review sites were on the take to give positive reviews.

The thing is, at least in this case, its quite different from what we thought. The review companies are paid to review the games beforehand as a way to tweak the games to buyers acceptability.

In the same vein he talked about focus testing, where they bring in a group of people to play test the finished game having never seen it before.

Of course, if you've ever designed a game or done as much as game mapping or level editting, you realize quite quickly that you can't see if its fun. You need objective viewpoints. The example he repeated was the Bioshock testers who could finish the game in 45 minutes.

--

The last major thing I forgot to mention was how problematic the websites that compare versions of game on different platforms to each other. Showing how this graphic is slightly fuzzier on this console or how you can get better framerate on this one is a nightmare because it certainly doesn't make the console mfr's happy with the dev.

--

I would agree that 2k has a vital interest in our University. Many of our graduates have gone on to nVidia for example and one of the profs is very much into 3D graphics - teaching his classes with OpenGL. That might be a comfort for PJ and his future Linux based gaming mod community.

Lucky Day said:

We may not like games on consoles but that's not only what sells its far more easy to develop on because there are so many different combinations of PC configuration to try to get it to work on. The last near standard I remember on PCs was Tandy 1000.

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I never understood what the problem here is. Everything in a PC is standardized, so shouldn't it be possible to simply set up a minimum system and make sure it works for that, and then it will follow that every better computer works too?

Lucky Day said:

I know I myself I'm in an extreme minority at our University LAN parties. We have a weekly Warcraft 3 DotA match up and I got huge laughs in the room when I suggested they should make it turn based.

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lol, DotA turn based... :lol:

Lucky Day said:

I would agree that 2k has a vital interest in our University. Many of our graduates have gone on to nVidia for example and one of the profs is very much into 3D graphics - teaching his classes with OpenGL. That might be a comfort for PJ and his future Linux based gaming mod community.

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My graphics course was in openGL, and I'll read an advanced graphics course that will be in openGL as well. So yeah, maybe I should steal PJ's idea there...

Übereil

LuckyCarbon said:

Hahaha, you're funny. C#, Microsoft's failed attempt at embracing and extending Java. It may be recently developed but I'm not sure it can live up to the standards the word "modern" implies.

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Isn't C# standard in building tools? I don't do C++ anymore but building GUI was a damn atrocity in C++.

I do know if a game programmed in Java: "Tribal Trouble".

The demo is nice. Don't expect great graphics at all, it's rather like a small Indie game.

But I was deeply impressed as I found out that they did the whole game in Java !

RuneScape is a small game in Java too. I've personally always had nothing but contempt for the Java platform, until I was forced to migrate from Flash. I think the Java Virtual Machine is pretty awsome since you don't need to program in Java to use it. I'm using Scala but there are plenty of other programming languages too. Sun, the owner of Java, was just bought by Oracle, so I don't know what that will mean for the future of the Java platform for entertainment.

During my training several years ago, Java was my favourite programming language (next to SQL, which I liked even more).

Unfortunately I learned programming everything manually, so when I tried to work with Eclipse, I couldn't, because I had never learned to use visual tools for that.

Sounds insane, I know, but it's the way it is.

First of all, read that guy was mainly doing work for XBOX 360, some of what he said was obviosly biased.

-Game Development is a very relaxed working environment

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This is either lying, or he is working at the best game developer to work for in the world.

I never understood what the problem here is. Everything in a PC is standardized, so shouldn't it be possible to simply set up a minimum system and make sure it works for that, and then it will follow that every better computer works too?

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You would wish so, but it is a nightmare? ever heard of bugs which only appeared on certain video cards or certain proccesoors, or games running a lot slower on a certain kind of setup, or not working at all ? or a new driver being released breaking some games and fixing others? Crashes which only happen on windows XP with a certain setup? Unexplainable performance drop which only happen on certain rigs...... PC developing is a nightmare , compared to consoles, althought with the different console versions out it is becoming a bit harder for them to. But nowhere near the jungle which is PC.

C# is not portable, which kills it dead for me.

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Not portable ? it can even run on cellphones. It has a Virtual machine simular to java which makes it possible to port it to almost any platform.

Alrik Fassbauer said:

During my training several years ago, Java was my favourite programming language (next to SQL, which I liked even more).

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Programming in SQL?

GothicGothicness said:

You would wish so, but it is a nightmare? ever heard of bugs which only appeared on certain video cards or certain proccesoors, or games running a lot slower on a certain kind of setup, or not working at all ? or a new driver being released breaking some games and fixing others? Crashes which only happen on windows XP with a certain setup? Unexplainable performance drop which only happen on certain rigs...... PC developing is a nightmare , compared to consoles, althought with the different console versions out it is becoming a bit harder for them to. But nowhere near the jungle which is PC.

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That's odd. That should only be a problem if developers aren't following the standards closely enough. The only difference between different cards should be speed and nothing else.

Übereil