I am doing a project on the Gaming Industry. I need to know about the developing team, how big it usually is, what kind members does it consist of, and what each member''s job is. I tried to search for this on GameDev, but found nothing. Can someone help me out? "Pannekoek, Poitjie Kos, ''''n Bier en lekker Braai Vleis!"

Go over to http://www.gamasutra.com/. Go to the features section and look up postmortems. There are a lot of them and they typically list the size of the dev team at the end of each one. It is usually between 15 and 25.


Make it work.
Make it fast.

"I’m happy to share what I can, because I’m in it for the love of programming. The Ferraris are just gravy, honest!" --John Carmack: Forward to Graphics Programming Black Book

Thanks. That helped a little.
But I am still looking for more detail about the team.

"Pannekoek, Poitjie Kos, ''''n Bier en lekker Braai Vleis!"

Hi,

First off, the number of persons on the team depend on the budget for the title, what part of the project you are in, and who you count. It is customary to add mroe people during the development and near the end a lot of people (for testing) gets involved.

On the title we am working on at the moment where I work we are:

4 members of R&D that work on the 3D engine: 1 lead programmer, 1 console programmer (thats me!), 1 physics guy and 1 feature programmer.
4 members of the graphics department: 1 concept artist, 1 lead 3D artist, 2 3D artists/texturers
2 members of the game dev team: 1 scripter, 1 level designer.
3 members of management: 1 creative director, 1 CEO, 1 production manager.
+ other people such as 1 System administrator/QA manager and 1 secretary/receptionist

(and then there are our other projects of course )

We are fairly early on with this title and are therefore expanding (looking to fill 4 more positions within the coming months)

When people list 40+ people on a project they usually also count the the people from the publisher and all the testers - something I have not done above.

I hope this helps.



Jacob Marner, M.Sc.
Console Programmer, Deadline Games

felonius, that helps a lot. But I am looking for more details, such as what is the job of the physics programmer, or concept artist. Understand?

What kind of game are you working on?

"Pannekoek, Poitjie Kos, ''''n Bier en lekker Braai Vleis!"

We are working on a 3rd person shooter. I am afraid that further details still are confidential (and no, it is not one of the games listed on our website )

I will try to answer as well as I can.

The R&D team (Research & Development) are those responsible for create the technologies of the game. We do a service function to the other team in that we make the stuff they need to make games.
- The physics guy is has a Master''s degree in Physics and mathematics and he writes the code that makes sure that things like cars, boxes and exploding/falling objects behave realistically. This same guy also maintains the scripting engine.
- As a console programmer I am responsible for porting and maintaining the engine on the PlayStation 2. This involves much assembler coding for tuning for performance.
- The feature programmer discusses with the graphics team what they need of cool features in the engine and then implements them. For instance, he made the terrain and particle stuff.
- We are also looking for a tools programmer. That is a guy that writes the tools that the level designers and artists can use to build the game for use in the engine. This includes level editors, and various artist tool exporters.

- The concept art artist is the guy that draws the hand-drawn drawings that are to give the feel of the game and inspire the 3D artist into making their models. This is the guy that presents the artists with a unified style and vision.
- The 3D artists draw models in maya or 3D studio max which are then put into the levels afterwards. They usually also modify details in levels and draw textures.

- The scripter writes scripts that explain at a higher level what should happen in the game - e.g. when the player goes to the door, the house should blow up - or what animations to play when. They work very close together with the level designers/game designers. We will proably need more of those.
- Level designers/game designers are the people that decide on the story and the general layout of the levels. They usually write a lot of documents in order to convey their vision to the rest of the team. This is also the people that comes up with the general ideas for the games. Luckily, we take turns on these very popular jobs.

- The creative director is the guy that makes sure that the vision and creative stuff stays on track are coherent and are of a high quality.
- The production leader makes sure everybody stays on schedule.
- The CEO is the guy who does most of the negotiatans with publishers and manages the the general financial direction (he gets help for this by our finance guy of course)

- Then there are producers from the publisher that we talk to during production and they make sure we don''t waste their money and make something that can make them rich.
- And then there are the testers - those are the people that play the game (a lot!) and tell us what is wrong and when. The QA manager coordinates these tests. And at our place he also makes sure that all our computers work as they should.


Jacob Marner, M.Sc.
Console Programmer, Deadline Games

felonius, thanks a million for your long reply. That is the kind of info I was looking for.

I am not at my home right now, so I only have time to ask one question. I will later like to ask you more about the different occupations (if it is o.k.).

I assume the company you are working for is working on its first title. How do your company manage to pay for all of its expenses (salaries, equipment, etc.)? Is there a publisher sponsering the company?

"Pannekoek, Poitjie Kos, ''n Bier en lekker Braai Vleis!"

[edited by - Boertjie on October 15, 2002 2:53:53 AM]

quote: Original post by Boertjie
I assume the company you are working for is working on its first title. How do your company manage to pay for all of its expenses (salaries, equipment, etc.)? Is there a publisher sponsering the company?

This is our first AAA-title but not our first published game. We have made several kid games, educational titles and casual games mostly for the Scandinavian market (although some are released in France and Germany too). I was hired in to make this AAA-title so I was never part of all these previous titles (they can be seen on the company website)

We are financed partly by our previous products and this is what built the company up from small beginnings. It started as a multimedia company back in 1996 making small low budget games and CD-ROMs on demand. We still make such products to get a steady income to the company.

We get money between each title by venture capitalists who invest money in us in the hope that they can get more back later and then of course from the publishers themselves. Who the main publisher (if any) and venture capatilist(s) are, are still confidential information.


Jacob Marner, M.Sc.
Console Programmer, Deadline Games

Lets say, a developing company wants to create a new game. The manager calculates that it will take the company 2 years, and the budget would be around $2 million.
If a publisher provides most of the money needed, or even all the money needed, about how much of the total profits does the developer get? For example, if the net revenue for 1 copy of the game is $24, and the game sold 500,000 copies, how much of the $12 million profit would the developer receive?

"Pannekoek, Poitjie Kos, ''''n Bier en lekker Braai Vleis!"

I am not an expert at this, and it depends heavily on how good a deal you get with the publisher.

However, the usual business model is what is called "royalties on advance". That means that they pay you the, say, 2 million dollars (it is usually in the range 2 - 4 millions dollars these days) and then negotiate a royalty amount. The 2 mill. is an advance on this royalties. So for the first many copies the developer don''t get anything.

This scheme usually cuts even somewhere between 400.000 to 800.000 copies sold (at full price!) depending on the deal. After that the developer gets paid in the form of royalties for each sold game (how much I don''t know) but it is usually a percentage of the retail price.

Needless to say, most developers never see any additional royalties for the game - however, if you can release it for many of the major console platforms at once the chances of getting a profit it higher.

The publisher is in effect "taking the loss" is the game sells below the cut-even amount - so the developer does not loose a lot of money if the release goes bad. The worst thing that can happen is that nobody want to sign you up for the next title. So since it is the publisher that takes the risk, it is no surprise they get the majority of the money.

I must emphasize that several things we have experienced:
1. Publishers are very reluctant these days to give any one a deal (the recession and the dot com failures has caused them to be very cautious). it was much easier a few years ago.
2. Publishers don''t care much about the PC. The piracy is too high, the support costs are too high, and the competition is harder here than on the consoles so profits are generally lower. So unless a company are able to create games for consoles there will be no deal. Exceptions are, of course, given if the development team has a long line of PC successes behind them.

One more little known fact is that publishers for AAA-titles have to use 3-4 times the amount of money given to the developers for marketing and distribution. So for a 2 mill. dollar game the full price of the game as seen from the publisher is often up to 10 mill. dollars.

Jacob Marner, M.Sc.
Console Programmer, Deadline Games