Volition and THQ

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Volition and THQ

• Life in the games industry

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THQ

• California publisher with internal studios
• Relic (Dawn of War, Homeworld, Company of Heroes,
  The Outfit)
• Rainbow (ATV Offroad Fury, Motocross, Cars)
• And external studios
• Bioware/Pandemic (Destroy All Humans)
• WWE
• Iron Lore (Titan Quest)
• Spongebob, Pixar, and other kids games

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Volition History

• Founded in 1993 as Parallax in Champaign, IL
• Descent (1995) and Descent 2 (1996)
• Split into Outrage and Volition
• Freespace (1998) and Freespace 2 (1999)
• Volition bought by THQ in 2000
• Summoner (2000)
• Red Faction (2001)
• Summoner 2 (2002)
• Red Faction 2 (2002)
• The Punisher (2005)
• Saints Row (2006)

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Current Focus

• Next Generation games
• Currently this means XBox360
• Open world games
• Goal is to have 2 games in production
• 1-2 games being prototyped
• Tools group that makes and shares technology
  studio-wide

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Growth

• October 1998
• 32 employees
• Max team size 35
• No outsourcing
• 6-8 programmers per game

• Today
• 185 employees
• Max team size 100
• Lots of outsourcing
• 20-25 programmers per game

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Growth Chart
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Requirements

• Proficiency in C/C
• 4-year degree or equivalent software industry
  experience
• Game demo helps a lot
• Previous games industry experience helps even
  more
• Eligible to work in the US
• No tele-commuting

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Desired skills

• 3D math skills (vectors, matrices)
• Bit manipulation skills
• A specialization
• Graphics youre familiar with a popular
  graphics API
• AI you know A pathfinding
• Networking you are comfortable with packets
• Concurrency you can write multi-threaded

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Programming areas

• AI
• Animation
• Audio
• Gameplay
• Graphics

• Interface
• Network/Multiplayer
• Physics
• Scripting
• Tools
• Andtech art?

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Salary ranges

• From a 2006 game industry survey
• gt 3 years experience - 50,000
• 3-6 years - 75,000
• gt 6 years - 90,000

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Other compensation

• Royalties
• Stock options
• Medical/dental/vision insurance
• Reduced price on THQ games
• Free drinks/cheap snacks

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Challenges

• Constrained memory environment
• Streaming from DVD
• Lack of hard drive
• Fast code is essential (33 ms per frame)
• Multi-core development
• Constrained bandwidth network coding
• Rapid development cycles
• Growing team sizes

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Work Environment

• 1-10 person offices
• Action figures
• Posters
• Full-size storm trooper armor
• Casual attire preferably not TOO casual
• Core hours 930 430
• Multiplayer gaming (sometimes)
• Crunch

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Organizational Structure

• One Studio Technical Director
• One Producer per project
• One Project Technical Director per project
• One Project Systems Architect per project
• Team coordinators
• Project managers

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Other Positions

• Designers
• Artists (concept, character, vehicle,
  environment, interface, effects)
• Technical artists
• Animators and cinematic artists
• Audio/music/voice
• QA
• Management (producers, managers, etc.)

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Tools of the Trade

• Microsoft Visual Studio .NET
• Perforce
• Wiki
• Excel
• ActivePerl
• 3DS Studio Max (for artists)
• Propriety tools and bug-tracking software

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Questions?

• Chris.helvig_at_volition-inc.com