Lucky Day
Daywatch
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)
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)