The Life of a Game Developer

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The Life of a Game Developer

• Ulric Wong
• Mar. 5, 2009

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First of All

• Thanks for doing my survey!

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Agenda

• Life before Game Development
• Life as a Game Developer
• What I think I learned

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Disclaimer

• my opinions - Ulric-centric
• no longer affiliated with EA or Radical
• I've been out of the industry for 3 years

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I discover I want to become a game developer ...
(1994 - )

• 19 year old from Toronto
• The plan
• Engineer mechanical - mba management
• escape my parents
• played games but had never programmed

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What brought me to Vancity?

• Royal Military College Officer
• Basic Training in Chilliwack CFOCS

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Backup plan

• UBC Computer Engineering
• nearly flunked first year programmingpicked
  Electrical - computer option
• graphics course

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Co-op

• BCTel  (Telus) tech support, network engineer
• Advanced Gravis - test engineer for game
  pads(hey it's Electronic Arts!)
• Motorola - web programmer
• (let's try Electronic Arts again!)
• ICBC - Dsim 2000 OpenGL / C

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Yay! I'm a game developer now

• Graduated
• Leveraged my ICBC co-op

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Radical Entertainment (2000)

• A medium sized 200 people developer
• reasonably successful on playstation
• Free food
• Hired 45000 year

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The situation at Radical

• invested money to publish and develop in the US
• In a bit of trouble - Disney canceled projects
• Laid off a much of their workforce
• Next Gen PS2 had just launched
• Had taken a contract with THQ to create a
  snowboarding game in 8 months

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Dark Summit
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Worked on a plethora of stuff

• NPC AI
• Animation sequencing
• Character model loading
• Model customization
• LOD
• Liason between programmers and Animators and
  modelers

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Working on Dark Summit

• Platforms
• PS2
• xbox - overshadowed PS2 due to ease of use
• Gamecube
• Pure3D made life easier
• 1.5 year project
• 8 months of working weekends and 11 hour days
• Layoffs (producer, 30 of the team)

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Dark Summit Results

• Metacritic score 70

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Career advancement

• Performance ReviewNegotiated my salary to 55000
  yearBonus time5000

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Tetris Worlds

• Quick easy project for Xbox and Gamecube
• Ported from Blue Planet PS2 code
• Responsible forcharacter loading and animation

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Tetris Worlds
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Time to move on

• burnt out
• stressed out from layoffs
• heard of greener pastures...

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Electronic Arts (2002)

• 60000 year
• whoops forgot to negotiate my vacation days

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EAGL

• Platform independent graphics engine
• Abstraction layer for
• PC
• XBOX
• supported Gamecube, PS2, PSP
• Used by FIFA, NHL, NBA, NFS, 007

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How was it?

• PC 50 video cards hell
• long hours from supporting multiple teams
• exacerbated by a lack of testing 
• liked working with - NFL, NFS, FIFA
• ok but underfunded NHL
• bad - NBA lack of identification with game
• facilities were nice...

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Performance Review

• No room to negotiate
• but bonuses were generous - 10000 / year

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Promotion

• Xbox lead - not too difficult
• games led on ps2
• best dev environment msdev, pix

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Next-Gen approaches (2004)

• Dev Kits appeared
• Mac triple corePowerPC
• Hulking cube
• Renderware purchase - working with Criterion UK
  to merge EAGL w/ Renderware

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Promotion

• Development Manager - 75000/year

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My Exit from the Industry (2005)

• Motorcycle accident

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Life is too short...
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Present (2009)

• Final year of Psychology program
• grad school psychology of video games
• virtual worlds and social identity,
• video game addiction

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Summary

• What I think I've learned

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Education

• BCIT and University  (SFU, Waterloo)
• University grads had more leverage  (Young)
• Helpful to know what you want be when you grow up
  Engineering was a waste for me
• Grades and Academics important until you have
  work experience
• Co-op is awesome
• EA Star program

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Work experience

• Most important factor
• technical experience is of most interest
• Personally new grads / co-ops do not write
  robust, maintainable code
• Secondary skills - teamwork, soft skills

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Hobby programming experience

• I didn't have any - my attempts to show my work
  were disregarded
• I worked with some hobbyists but still university
  grads (Matt)
• Challenge make it easy for interviewers to
  observe and quantify your work
• If you have the choice Work Experience gt Hobby
  programming

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(Mad) Skillz

• Graphics programming team
• graphics - direct3D, opengl, shaders
• math - linear algebra
• multi-threaded / multi-core processing
• Game teams
• Have more general programming positions

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Your coworkers

• I'm a computer geek - socially difficult
• Gaming stressed out, socially difficult people
• Artists are pretty normal...

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Interview preparation

• study as if it was an exam - pointers, memory
  management, matrix math (Ian - Koei)
• personality match is important (maybe shirt and
  tie isnt the best idea?)
• game enthusiasm can help if it is relevant

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Cronyism

• Use your contacts (Patrick)
• Can help you bypass the interviewing process

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Small company vs. big company

• small
• more responsibility great stepping stone
• more critical role - more leverage
• less stable
• large
• less responsibility easy to get slotted into
  one role (like build guy)
• more frustrating red tape
• fat bonuses
• more stable

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Impact of the economy

• things are not good right now
• games industry is doing well - only for certain
  companies
• Layoffs - EA, Propaganda, etc...
• Target and time your applications appropriately

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Impact of the console life cycle

• Transition years are weak
• 360 / PS3 has been especially difficult

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What kind of programmer do you want to be?

• Tools and libraries - far from game, more
  technical expertise, support
• Game team - closer to game, crazier hours
• hardware?  EA doesnt do DS in house, but
  Backbone does.
• technical path vs. management path

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Do you know what you are getting yourself into?

• technical path - Live and breath graphics
  programming
• managerial path - "people skills
• unpaid overtime is an expectation firmly
  ingrained. (Even at Propaganda)
• How long do you want to do this for?
• Will you still like doing it at 4am after 3
  months of living and breathing it?