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Working in the Games Industry
- 1. WORKING IN THEGAMES INDUSTRY LESSONS LEARNED FROM AAA, INDIE AND MOBILE
- 2. WHO AM I? KieranNee (@kieran_nee on Twitter) •Lead Client Engineer on •At Mediatonic Games in London •Been making games professionally since 2004
- 3. WHERE? • Lionhead Studios/Microsoft 2004-2012 • The Movies • Fable 2 • Fable 3 • Fable Heroes • Fable: The Journey • Bit By Bit Games – Co-founder in 2011 • It's Tanks! • MMA Manager • Unnamed/Failed Startups in both 2012 and 2016 – Co-founder • Contracted at JiggeryPokery 2013-2014 • GodFinger 2 • Full time at Mediatonic 2016 - Present • Fantastic Beasts: Cases From The Wizarding World • New Yahtzee with Buddies • • Unannounced Title I would love to talk about if I wasn't so scared of lawyers
- 4. Company Culture Everywhere isdifferent, but some things hold true.
- 5. CONSOLE & PCAKA “AAA” • Typically get longer to work on features • Projects have longer timescales • More specialized work/areas • Great for finding your feet in the industry and getting used to doing what so many of us enjoy as a hobby as a JOB • Studios usually try their best to avoid Crunch • But usually fail • Launch windows with Marketing budgets and physical media MUST Be hit
- 6. STARTUPS • Exciting. • Fuzzygoaled. • Often lurching from idea to idea trying to find that massive success. • Smart ones are funded by VC / Investment / Publishers. • Very smart ones get a good deal. These are incredibly rare. • Good partners and initial hires are key. • Good communication with your investors etc is Key.
- 7. INDIE • Small teamsor Solo devs • "Games are Art" / Passion Projects • Often self-funded • Glamourized more than healthy • Devs must be multi-taskers • Publicize game • Handle business side • Talk about their work • Social media • Make a good game • Lean and Mean businesses • What's an Office? • Employees, what are they?
- 8. INDEPENDENT STUDIOS • Canbe thought of as the next step in either Startups or Indie studios • Generally • Specialized OR • Hyper-diversified • Usually ranging between 30-200 staff. • Often composed of smaller teams working on multiple projects on multiple platforms to spread risk and maximize potential chance of success. • Mediatonic for example has 5 projects alone in production and has spun off risky projects with sister studios before. • Live and die on their reputation
- 9. YES YES, VERYINTERESTING BUT HOW DO I GET IN?
- 10. Make Games, makelots of Games. Seriously.
- 11. Play Games, PlayLots of Games. Build up your language for describing problems and solutions that other games have encountered. Appreciate the medium, enjoy other devs work. You never know what kind of games will inspire you.
- 12. Make sure peoplecan find and see your games. A well laid out and written portfolio website or itch.io page with the link in your CV is essential today.
- 13. Make Games WithOther People Work in teams, get involved with jams, find others that share your interests in certain genres or styles and have fun.
- 14. Don't be picky,apply everywhere You never know what studios are working on, NDAs are an important feature of professional game development and you will rarely have any visibility on the projects you might be working on. Glassdoor can be useful, but if you know someone personally that’s worked at a place that’s often better. Mediatonic is
- 15. Be prepared tomove. Game development is a very new industry and has generally developed around hubs where companies did well years ago, there's excellent access to investment opportunities and good support or tax breaks from local government. Often all 3
- 16. Don’t be anarse Game development is a very SMALL industry. Act like a prima donna, treat other people badly, don't pull your weight in projects and that information will spread very easily. Bad attitudes, misogyny and toxic divas will RUIN projects, don't be that person.
- 17. YOU'VE GOT AJOB! Now what?
- 18. WORK HARD! • Butnot too hard • Crunch is real • Crunch is bad • …....Crunch is occasionally near impossible to avoid • Companies that mandate crunch and pile pressure on their staff can produce incredible things • At the expense of your health and wellbeing to allow them to make money.
- 19. KEEP LEARNING • AskQuestions! • Stubbornly attacking tasks wastes your time, the team's time and deprives you of an opportunity to learn • Experiment with non-job-related things outside of work • New Languages • New Approaches • New tools • Areas you feel weak in • Use varying tech! Middleware & Tools come and go. • Unity for example is a single platform that's for profit, you have zero influence on its future direction • Renderware for example ruled the middleware world until suddenly it was gone. • Every single 3d package bar Blender will be bought by Autodesk eventually
- 20. REMEMBER, A JOBIS FOR RIGHT NOW, NOT FOR LIFE • Loyalty, gratitude, fear of change or job searching can keep people in roles/companies that are • Toxic • Manipulative • Underpaying • Stressful • Unrewarding professionally • New opportunities are constantly appearing in Games. There's literally new platforms/mediums popping up every couple of years and new game ideas popping into people's heads every minute.
- 21. NETWORK! AKA TALKTO PEOPLE AND BE NICE • As I said, it's a small industry • Learning new things and meeting new people is important • Few people get game dev annoyances like other game devs. Let it out! Down the pub, on Twitter, private Discord server, Industry Slack, whatever. • People knowing you, people knowing your work will get you new jobs and opportunities • You'll almost always hear about some cool shit you'll find fascinating • That was probably NDA-ed and you should never ever repeat. Snitches get... • Help other people when and where you can. • Unless you have a good reason not to, it’s rare that helping someone out with advice or suggestions is going to swallow too much of your time. • DON’T WORK FOR FREE THOUGH! • Application tests are fair, work to go in someone’s game or for use in marketing etc is STILL WORK. • At an absolute
- 22. LOOK AFTER YOURSELF! •Physically • Free food isn’t always good food • Staying at your desk for hours is bad • Don’t go to work sick • Plus producers hate when you spread it about • Mentally • Take Breaks • Do different things • Speak up • If something is wrong, tell your manager. If your manager is the problem, tell someone you trust to be on your side and get their opinion. Don’t suffer in silence. • Game Workers Unite! https://www.gameworkersunite.org • Use your Vacation!
- 23. ENJOY IT! Making gamesis FUN! The people are in general amazing. The emotional rewards can be fantastic.
- 24.
Editor's Notes
- #2 Bit of a wanky title, but good place to start. Worth pointing out that I’m aiming for lessons and advice that are largely discipline agnostic.
- #3 This one is a good one to give out some information on Mediatonic. - Who & where we are - What we make and have made - What we're doing now that's non-NDA-ed
- #4 Don't spend to long on this. Key points to get across - AAA Console & PC - Startups - Indie - Mediatonic – flexible independent studio that's worked on pretty much every type of platform bar VR (so far). Size of some AAA studios, but works in smaller teams, around 40 at most.
- #6 Use Fable examples, multiple years working on single systems
- #7 Use experience examples of Kinaesthetic & MLF partnerships -
- #8 Caution that thought it sounds scathing, it's because I've been there and it's damn HARD. Honestly think Indie Game the Movie did a lot of damage in the short term. Very few true indie's that are genuinely good at it and almost all of them treat it just like any other talented entrepreneur treats their business. Seriously and professionally. Bit By Bit as example. Explain the highs and lows of this approach, utter devastation of savings, obsessive work ethic.
- #9 Worth explaining why Specialized or Hyper-diversified - Specialized, survive via being best in class & extremely focused on serving passionate audience - Hyper-diversified, don't have all their eggs in one basket. Experience has taught them to be careful about dependence on single projects or platforms Mention Mediatonic in this context. Explain that we're very diverse in terms of projects and risk
- #11 NOTHING beats experience. Good grades can get you in the door, but actually showing passion for what we do and being able to talk about your experiences is critical. -Example here, Lionhead interview & 20 minute rant on what I did wrong in my previous project.
- #12 ESPECIALLY the games of anyone you apply to work with. It's basic courtesy and if you don't know what they've made before and can find at least something to like.....why do you want to work there? Pro-tip: I work at MEDIATONIC, not Media Molecule
- #13 Prime Example – Recent graduate hire at Mediatonic was very nervous doing an interview over Skype and the overall impression wasn't great. But looking at his portfolio site should a very broad range of skills that came across better than his nervous interview, with an interest in areas that would benefit working on projects, tools and interesting new ways of approaching problems. He was hired and has been VERY successful
- #14 If you're applying to work at a company, you're going to be working with others. Interviewers can tell a lot from questions about your team experience how well that will work. Prime piece of advice here imo is that you need to be honest about your experiences. Why did projects fail? Why did they succeed? What went right/wrong? How did you/your team cope with problems/changes/drama?
- #15 My interviews at Mediatonic are a great example. I had no idea I'd be working on a tie-in game for the restart of the Harry Potter Cinematic Universe in Fantastic Beasts, or a tie-in game for a (now cancelled during Soft Launch) title that was linked to one of the greatest TV series of the last couple of decades. I should feel free to hint about my current project and mention Mediatonic is hiring.
- #16 Guildford, Birmingham, Dundee, Toronto, Vancouver, London. Talk about flexibility and ability to work from home. Emphasize that unless the team is fully remote, having that kind of trust as a junior is unlikely and in fact not beneficial to your professional growth as the best bit about being a junior is the ability to learn from those around you.
- #17 Six degrees of Peter M. Example of recent candidate at Mediatonic. I had tangential experience of their attitude & behaviour more than 14 years ago, while also knowing they were exceptionally talented. 3 emails to people I know that may have worked with them confirmed that they hadn't improved much in the intervening time and that information was passed on to our recruitment specialist.
- #19 Use my LH examples and general poor health destruction from working like that.
- #20 Rapidly changing industry with different approaches and powerful new tools being invented and applied every day. Techniques like procedural generation and machine learning are things that are easy enough to dabble in for a few hours a week without having to spend all your spare time on but they will be useful one day, even if it's just when you're rubber ducking for someone or spitballing ideas. Growth is important
- #21 Lionhead example - Comfortable - No professional advancement - Stayed for all the wrong reasons Remember, at the end of the day it's a JOB, you have bills to pay and the job you want one year may not be what you want to do the next. Own example, didn't particularly want involved in management for a long time, felt I was better at the implementation side of dev. Experience taught me that I had things to contribute and that by holding back on that I was doing both myself and my colleagues a disservice
- #22 Again, use self as example. 2 interviews, lots of projects I've been approached for based on personal connections.
- #24 At the end of the day your making things aimed at creating emotional reactions in other humans and there's few things as interesting as that.