I think this is a great answer. I love what I do, and I love where I work, but I know folks younger and dumber than me who are positively coining it in working in the finance sector, for example. If I were tempted more by the cash, it would be much harder to justify doing the job I do.
I can't speak for other companies, but I can speak from my personal experience.
I'm a team manager now, but I still do programming work occasionally. I'm in my late 30s. some of my team are 20s, some are 30s. A couple are over 40, a couple are fresh out of university.
Some of the folks who were older than me when I got into the industry are still working in games, and they are well into their forties now. Granted, they often are team leads or directors, but I think this is a consequence of the industry being very young and mostly populated by kids when it first grew out of the bedroom scene 30 years ago.
Of my last five hires, one of them was over 40.
I do find it interesting that the games industry has fewer older, luminary figures. If you look at the technical leads over at Pixar or Google for example, some of those guys are positively ancient (and I'd hire them in a second).
I've been interviewing and hiring programmers for games companies for the last decade. I look for:
Programming skill, with C++ being the most relevant language (but obvious excellence in other languages is also hugely useful). Demos, contributions to open source, university projects, youtube videos of the results of your work are all good showcases. Having a website with linked examples (executable and source to look at) makes evaluating skill much easier while sifting CVs. We have hired folks recently with no C++ experience, but they had very strong demonstrable C# or Python experience.
Team fit - must be smart, get things done, friendly. People who are passionate about what they do, willing to work on whatever is most important to the team at the time (rather than "I only want to work on shaders", for example) and desperate to learn. I really, really want to hire people who want to do good work. I'm much less likely to hire people if they are not all three of the aforementioned criteria.
Education is a really simple bar for us to use these days, as many people do meet the above criteria. We normally expect at least a bachelor's first in a science. I've hired a few postdocs recently, they're all great guys. If you haven't got good math/physics results at A-level, I'm very unlikely to interview.
We obviously don't expect people to hit every point, but we are lucky enough to be pretty choosy.
I've been making games professionally for close to 19 years. Much of the advice in previous posts is very important, so I'll summarize all the bad points first.
1. Your game concept is worthless to anyone but you. I've personally got 30 ideas for games that will most likely never see the light of day; some of which I honestly believe are better than the very best games out there right now. Without turning that idea into a playable demonstration, no-one will give you money for it.
2. You might think your idea is brilliant (and you could be right) but chances are once you turn it into an actual playable version, you'll more likely than not find flaws and issues with the design. I've never worked on a single game that plopped fully formed from design to execution, it just doesn't happen. Expect 90% of the effort of designing your game to happen after the first implementation is complete.
3. Tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of other people want to do exactly what you're suggesting (sell their idea for money). The people with the money to give you are publishers, and the vast majority of those explicitly will not even talk about your game design, just in case it comes close to a product in development. The last thing they want is to open themselves up to being sued because your idea was remotely similar to a game they intend to ship next year.
now the good stuff:
You can make games yourself, right now. Trust me - making (and playing) your own games is infinitely more satisfying than just talking about it or writing down half-baked ideas on a piece of paper. Do what the Narbacular Drop guys did, *make it*. If you don't know how - learn. Everything you need to learn is out there right now.
There's some really good frameworks for making games out there. look for Unreal Development Kit, Blender you already mentioned, and my personal suggestion for your best starting place would be Xbox 360 development using XNA. The benefits of making your game on a platform where it's easy for everyone else to look at the end results in the cold light of day are huge - plus for a small investment you get to play your game on a proper console gaming environment (big telly, etc). There's also mobile platforms - basically, if you care enough to try and are willing to invest your time and maybe a couple of hundred dollars, you can get started on making a product that will be good enough to get attention from people with serious money.
Rage against the machine are signed to Epic, whereas the X-Factor winners are signed to Syco. Both are owned by Sony, but really... who cares? This campaign was never about the money, it was about doing something to stop the tediousness of X-Factor chart domination.
It was worth it all, just to hear someone swearing on Radio 5.
It's a game. it's not forcing, or even suggesting, that you should go out and perform this action for real. Is this any more contentious than GTA ho-bouncing or pedestrian splatting? It certainly makes me consider the moral aspects of performing those actions for real, but I highly doubt it will provoke me towards them (more likely it will make me less inclined to gun down civs at an airport in future).
Compared to the blood and gore of recent Hollywood fare like Saw, where's the problem?
I frequently interview programmers, and having them take a short test (approx 30 minutes) and then discussing this with them in their interview is incredibly useful to determine their skillset. I could ask similar questions directly and have them work through the answers on a board, but then they would be under pressure to provide an answer on the spot to questions that probably deserve some thought before providing a solution.
None of the questions on the test are unduly taxing - any person we interview who has a few years professional c++ experience under their belt should be able to provide at least a working solution, with potential better solutions open to discussion face to face.
I've had 15 years doing what I do, and I'd be happy to take a test if asked - if I can't pass whatever hurdle the company sets, then I'd rather not sit there for a few more hours trying to win them over with my sparkling personality, and if the test is a pile of rubbish I know early on that I probably don't want to work there.
I second this. most folks I know who love programming learned a nice easy language as a kid (BASIC in my case, a long while back). Python is easy enough to learn how to program in, but flexible enough to draw stuff on the screen, play sounds, talk to remote machines - mess with what the machine is capable of.
I'd definately pick a friendly language to begin with (and I'm not sure C or C++ fit that bill, I'm still learning good C++ practice after a decade of commercial use).
If I didn't ask you to send me email, then it's spam. And brother - I didn't as you.
I use gmail primarily because it allowed me to make use of me email again, after years of spam abuse. I also liberally use the "this is spam" button, and most of it is of the dubious type. Occasionally, I'll get mail from companies that I have used (I always opt-out if I have the option). The first time, i'll follow the unsubscribe procedure. The second time, you're tagged as spam, and you deserve it.
If you run a business - any kind of business - and you want to send information to existing or potential customers, here's my list of do's and don'ts...
1. don't send me email unless I ask for it by explicitly opting in.
it's really that simple. If i'm a potential customer and you send me unsolicited email, you've just lost my potential custom.
good lord, it's a game - if you're crazy enough to play it to the point where it's detrimental to your life, then you probably have bigger issues - and at least you're not spending the time robbing houses to pay for drugs, or fueling some other potentially devastating addictive behaviour.
I've managed to go without purchasing music (or downloading music) for months at a stretch, the last couple of years. I listen to Classic FM, Shoutcast and Pandora - and that covers me nicely, thank you very much. Oh, and my massive MP3 collection i've built up (legitimately, I might add) from records and CDs that I purchased long-time-gone.
the RIAA managed to lose me as a customer a few years back. Too late and too far, dumbasses. It may annoy me to hear a great new tune and not buy it, but at least I get the joy of picturing you leeches starving to death.
No, the problem is the assumption that commercials are the correct mechanism to pay for viewed content. As a british TV viewer, I pay my TV licence and my SKY subscription, yet I'm still expected to sit and watch commercials under the mistaken apprehension that by being a passive eyeball I'm somehow "paying" for the content.
Except, in reality, it's a fallacy.
The people who are paying for the content are the people who buy the advert slots. They buy the adverts in the hope that if they shout loud enough, they will recoup some or all of that money through consumers (who may have viewed their advert) buying product.
Of course, the cost of the adverts is already folded back onto the consumer - in the price of the goods that you just purchased. So really, we (the consumer) has already paid for the TV by purchasing the goods - regardless of whether we watch the advert or not!
it's time we started cutting out the middle man. I don't want to watch your adverts. i'm not interested in you forcing your product upon me. if I am interested, I'll ask people I trust, who may recommend you to me - until then, shut the hell up.
I'm also happy to pay for TV I watch - it would give me the opportunity to NOT pay for the TV I don't watch.
>> Secondly, MMOGs are not chemical addictions and should not be treated as such.
> Wrong.
MMOGs are not chemical addictions! just because they stimulate a response doesn't mean you're putting chemicals in your body.
> Gambling isn't a chemical addiction either, but it's just as damaging as alcohol and drugs, and needs to
> be treated the same.
maybe so - but MMOGs are not gambling either. nor are they eBay addiction, or any other substance abuse addiction - they're simply experience addiction, and there's plenty of those go without all this palaver (TV addiction, movie addiction, etc).
The only reason people keep coming back to MMOGs being addictive is because they are more fun than most other time-wasters.
it depends on the seeds. if the swarm is majority leech (or virtually totally leech), then the best ratio you'll get will approximate 1:1, and you'll cap at your upload speed.
if there's lots of friendly seeders who keep BT open once they're done, then the amount of "free" download you can get without needing to upload rises. this is where you'll see your download speeds outpace your upload speeds.
today's lesson - be nice, and leave your torrents seeding. everyone benefits.
if you're in a swarm with 20% or higher seeds, and you still cap out at your upload speed, then you need to examine your local settings - make sure ports are open in your firewall, make sure you're not swamping your upstream and stopping downstream acks from going out, etc.
How was Iraq a security threat (any more when this "war on terror" was started, compared to the previous ten years?) most of Sadaam's weapons (which the US so graciously provided, for the most part) were on the way out - there's still never been any evidence found of WMD, and there's been no conclusive proof of any links between the 9/11 terrorists and Iraq at the time of the attacks (although there sure as hell are now).
Iraq's fundamentalist loonies and their friends all over the world are now more of a threat to the western world than they ever were before, mostly due to the US and UK's ridiculous stance on terror.
if you seriously think that there's been some kind of mission accomplished by invading Iraq under some mis-guided pretext and a bunch of blatant lies, you're just plain wrong. around the world, people are telling you you're wrong. open your eyes, for god's sake.
if only I had mod points./agree.
my condolences to anyone personally involved, but otherwise - you can't legislate for crazies. the sooner this "war on terrorism" / grab for oil and power bollocks is shelved, the better for everyone else in the world.
A domain is more than just a website.
I have one page hanging off my domain, which normally says "go somewhere else". the main reason for me owning the domain is for mail redirection.
For someone who says that the conference was full of despairing developers, he describes an awful lot of people who sound like they're desparately interested in creating new and innovative product. and these guys *are* the professionals, the ones who work in the industry. that doesn't sound like the industry is fucked to me, it sounds as though the only thing that needs to change is the publishers.
Slashdot Mirror
I think this is a great answer. I love what I do, and I love where I work, but I know folks younger and dumber than me who are positively coining it in working in the finance sector, for example. If I were tempted more by the cash, it would be much harder to justify doing the job I do.
I can't speak for other companies, but I can speak from my personal experience.
I'm a team manager now, but I still do programming work occasionally. I'm in my late 30s. some of my team are 20s, some are 30s. A couple are over 40, a couple are fresh out of university.
Some of the folks who were older than me when I got into the industry are still working in games, and they are well into their forties now. Granted, they often are team leads or directors, but I think this is a consequence of the industry being very young and mostly populated by kids when it first grew out of the bedroom scene 30 years ago.
Of my last five hires, one of them was over 40.
I do find it interesting that the games industry has fewer older, luminary figures. If you look at the technical leads over at Pixar or Google for example, some of those guys are positively ancient (and I'd hire them in a second).
probably ;) If you'd like to enumerate their specific failures, I can give you yes/no answers.
I've been interviewing and hiring programmers for games companies for the last decade. I look for:
Programming skill, with C++ being the most relevant language (but obvious excellence in other languages is also hugely useful). Demos, contributions to open source, university projects, youtube videos of the results of your work are all good showcases. Having a website with linked examples (executable and source to look at) makes evaluating skill much easier while sifting CVs. We have hired folks recently with no C++ experience, but they had very strong demonstrable C# or Python experience.
Team fit - must be smart, get things done, friendly. People who are passionate about what they do, willing to work on whatever is most important to the team at the time (rather than "I only want to work on shaders", for example) and desperate to learn. I really, really want to hire people who want to do good work. I'm much less likely to hire people if they are not all three of the aforementioned criteria.
Education is a really simple bar for us to use these days, as many people do meet the above criteria. We normally expect at least a bachelor's first in a science. I've hired a few postdocs recently, they're all great guys. If you haven't got good math/physics results at A-level, I'm very unlikely to interview.
We obviously don't expect people to hit every point, but we are lucky enough to be pretty choosy.
I think this is the key thing that is missing from the originally stated problem.
the actual selection set before removing girls is:
girl (named), girl
girl, girl (named)
girl (named), boy
girl, boy (named)
boy (named), girl
boy, girl (named)
boy (named), boy
boy, boy (named)
and then we're saying "the named child is definitely a boy" which removes:
girl (named), girl
girl, girl (named)
girl (named), boy
boy, girl (named)
leaving the following four (equally likely) selections:
girl, boy (named)
boy (named), girl
boy (named), boy
boy, boy (named)
meaning the collapsed (boy, boy) option isn't a 1/3 probability at all, it's 1/2.
I've been making games professionally for close to 19 years. Much of the advice in previous posts is very important, so I'll summarize all the bad points first.
1. Your game concept is worthless to anyone but you. I've personally got 30 ideas for games that will most likely never see the light of day; some of which I honestly believe are better than the very best games out there right now. Without turning that idea into a playable demonstration, no-one will give you money for it.
2. You might think your idea is brilliant (and you could be right) but chances are once you turn it into an actual playable version, you'll more likely than not find flaws and issues with the design. I've never worked on a single game that plopped fully formed from design to execution, it just doesn't happen. Expect 90% of the effort of designing your game to happen after the first implementation is complete.
3. Tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of other people want to do exactly what you're suggesting (sell their idea for money). The people with the money to give you are publishers, and the vast majority of those explicitly will not even talk about your game design, just in case it comes close to a product in development. The last thing they want is to open themselves up to being sued because your idea was remotely similar to a game they intend to ship next year.
now the good stuff:
You can make games yourself, right now. Trust me - making (and playing) your own games is infinitely more satisfying than just talking about it or writing down half-baked ideas on a piece of paper. Do what the Narbacular Drop guys did, *make it*. If you don't know how - learn. Everything you need to learn is out there right now.
There's some really good frameworks for making games out there. look for Unreal Development Kit, Blender you already mentioned, and my personal suggestion for your best starting place would be Xbox 360 development using XNA. The benefits of making your game on a platform where it's easy for everyone else to look at the end results in the cold light of day are huge - plus for a small investment you get to play your game on a proper console gaming environment (big telly, etc). There's also mobile platforms - basically, if you care enough to try and are willing to invest your time and maybe a couple of hundred dollars, you can get started on making a product that will be good enough to get attention from people with serious money.
Rage against the machine are signed to Epic, whereas the X-Factor winners are signed to Syco. Both are owned by Sony, but really ... who cares? This campaign was never about the money, it was about doing something to stop the tediousness of X-Factor chart domination.
It was worth it all, just to hear someone swearing on Radio 5.
It's a game. it's not forcing, or even suggesting, that you should go out and perform this action for real.
Is this any more contentious than GTA ho-bouncing or pedestrian splatting?
It certainly makes me consider the moral aspects of performing those actions for real, but I highly doubt it will provoke me towards them (more likely it will make me less inclined to gun down civs at an airport in future).
Compared to the blood and gore of recent Hollywood fare like Saw, where's the problem?
I frequently interview programmers, and having them take a short test (approx 30 minutes) and then discussing this with them in their interview is incredibly useful to determine their skillset. I could ask similar questions directly and have them work through the answers on a board, but then they would be under pressure to provide an answer on the spot to questions that probably deserve some thought before providing a solution.
None of the questions on the test are unduly taxing - any person we interview who has a few years professional c++ experience under their belt should be able to provide at least a working solution, with potential better solutions open to discussion face to face.
I've had 15 years doing what I do, and I'd be happy to take a test if asked - if I can't pass whatever hurdle the company sets, then I'd rather not sit there for a few more hours trying to win them over with my sparkling personality, and if the test is a pile of rubbish I know early on that I probably don't want to work there.
I second this. most folks I know who love programming learned a nice easy language as a kid (BASIC in my case, a long while back). Python is easy enough to learn how to program in, but flexible enough to draw stuff on the screen, play sounds, talk to remote machines - mess with what the machine is capable of. I'd definately pick a friendly language to begin with (and I'm not sure C or C++ fit that bill, I'm still learning good C++ practice after a decade of commercial use).
If I didn't ask you to send me email, then it's spam. And brother - I didn't as you.
...
I use gmail primarily because it allowed me to make use of me email again, after years of spam abuse. I also liberally use the "this is spam" button, and most of it is of the dubious type. Occasionally, I'll get mail from companies that I have used (I always opt-out if I have the option). The first time, i'll follow the unsubscribe procedure. The second time, you're tagged as spam, and you deserve it.
If you run a business - any kind of business - and you want to send information to existing or potential customers, here's my list of do's and don'ts
1. don't send me email unless I ask for it by explicitly opting in.
it's really that simple. If i'm a potential customer and you send me unsolicited email, you've just lost my potential custom.
mod parent up!
First sensible reply i've seen so far.
good lord, it's a game - if you're crazy enough to play it to the point where it's detrimental to your life, then you probably have bigger issues - and at least you're not spending the time robbing houses to pay for drugs, or fueling some other potentially devastating addictive behaviour.
I've managed to go without purchasing music (or downloading music) for months at a stretch, the last couple of years. I listen to Classic FM, Shoutcast and Pandora - and that covers me nicely, thank you very much. Oh, and my massive MP3 collection i've built up (legitimately, I might add) from records and CDs that I purchased long-time-gone.
the RIAA managed to lose me as a customer a few years back. Too late and too far, dumbasses. It may annoy me to hear a great new tune and not buy it, but at least I get the joy of picturing you leeches starving to death.
no mod points, so I'll just have to pretend. score +1, Nostalgic tear.
If only I had mod points, I'd be throwing one in your direction. +1 insightful.
No, the problem is the assumption that commercials are the correct mechanism to pay for viewed content. As a british TV viewer, I pay my TV licence and my SKY subscription, yet I'm still expected to sit and watch commercials under the mistaken apprehension that by being a passive eyeball I'm somehow "paying" for the content.
Except, in reality, it's a fallacy.
The people who are paying for the content are the people who buy the advert slots. They buy the adverts in the hope that if they shout loud enough, they will recoup some or all of that money through consumers (who may have viewed their advert) buying product.
Of course, the cost of the adverts is already folded back onto the consumer - in the price of the goods that you just purchased. So really, we (the consumer) has already paid for the TV by purchasing the goods - regardless of whether we watch the advert or not!
it's time we started cutting out the middle man. I don't want to watch your adverts. i'm not interested in you forcing your product upon me. if I am interested, I'll ask people I trust, who may recommend you to me - until then, shut the hell up.
I'm also happy to pay for TV I watch - it would give me the opportunity to NOT pay for the TV I don't watch.
>> Secondly, MMOGs are not chemical addictions and should not be treated as such. > Wrong. MMOGs are not chemical addictions! just because they stimulate a response doesn't mean you're putting chemicals in your body. > Gambling isn't a chemical addiction either, but it's just as damaging as alcohol and drugs, and needs to > be treated the same. maybe so - but MMOGs are not gambling either. nor are they eBay addiction, or any other substance abuse addiction - they're simply experience addiction, and there's plenty of those go without all this palaver (TV addiction, movie addiction, etc). The only reason people keep coming back to MMOGs being addictive is because they are more fun than most other time-wasters.
Whoever modded the parent as flamebait obviously doesn't live in England, else they'd realise just how spot on Neoprofin's comment really is.
it depends on the seeds. if the swarm is majority leech (or virtually totally leech), then the best ratio you'll get will approximate 1:1, and you'll cap at your upload speed.
if there's lots of friendly seeders who keep BT open once they're done, then the amount of "free" download you can get without needing to upload rises. this is where you'll see your download speeds outpace your upload speeds.
today's lesson - be nice, and leave your torrents seeding. everyone benefits.
if you're in a swarm with 20% or higher seeds, and you still cap out at your upload speed, then you need to examine your local settings - make sure ports are open in your firewall, make sure you're not swamping your upstream and stopping downstream acks from going out, etc.
How was Iraq a security threat (any more when this "war on terror" was started, compared to the previous ten years?) most of Sadaam's weapons (which the US so graciously provided, for the most part) were on the way out - there's still never been any evidence found of WMD, and there's been no conclusive proof of any links between the 9/11 terrorists and Iraq at the time of the attacks (although there sure as hell are now). Iraq's fundamentalist loonies and their friends all over the world are now more of a threat to the western world than they ever were before, mostly due to the US and UK's ridiculous stance on terror. if you seriously think that there's been some kind of mission accomplished by invading Iraq under some mis-guided pretext and a bunch of blatant lies, you're just plain wrong. around the world, people are telling you you're wrong. open your eyes, for god's sake.
if only I had mod points. /agree.
my condolences to anyone personally involved, but otherwise - you can't legislate for crazies. the sooner this "war on terrorism" / grab for oil and power bollocks is shelved, the better for everyone else in the world.
If you don't want people who visit your site to block your adverts, don't put adverts on your page. it's that simple.
A domain is more than just a website. I have one page hanging off my domain, which normally says "go somewhere else". the main reason for me owning the domain is for mail redirection.
For someone who says that the conference was full of despairing developers, he describes an awful lot of people who sound like they're desparately interested in creating new and innovative product. and these guys *are* the professionals, the ones who work in the industry. that doesn't sound like the industry is fucked to me, it sounds as though the only thing that needs to change is the publishers.