Quote:Original post by WillC I work 9 to 5.30, 5 days a week, with 5 weeks holiday a year. I get a reasonable salary, with completion bonuses and royalties on unit sales (and since these are games that sell millions of copies, the royalties are good).
Disclaimer: This an honest inquiry do not take it as flaming please.
Are you working on major systems? >PS2 or PC? The only people I know with these working conditions are in the mobile industry. Well, I also know people in the mobile industry working 12 hours a day.
Royalties on unit sales is almost a thing of the past even for lead coders in very small studios so what you are speaking of sounds close to a dream deal ;).
Normally I lurk around here, but there needs to be a few more experiences given to really give you some idea.
Ive worked at a game middleware company as well as at 2 game companies so far.
In each one the hours have been completely reasonable. Standard 8 - 9 hour days for much of the project, with 1 month or so crunches before major deadlines (on average slightly less than 1 crunch month a year). This is for a company developing an XBox game, and one developing a PS/2 game.
The middleware company was roughly the same.
The hard part for you will be actually getting in. I would recommend writing a couple game demos; full games. Tetris or the like is fine. 3d knowledge is extremely helpful (almost a requirement). To really make yourself stand above the crowd write something on the cutting edge of graphics or AI. Large cityscapes that you can drive around it, huge landscapes that you can drive/fly/walk around in, something like that. Flashiness pays off, so keep that in mind. I had a fully deformable landscape engine: 1 meter resolution, roughly 2 miles x 2 miles with GPU friendly LOD on it.
Something slighly more obscure would be something like a great streaming system (management of assets coming into and out of memory). Retrofitting some open source game with this would both boost that game and make a great demo.
For AI there are some great open source games you could add to such as Quake I-III (FPS) or Vegastrike (Space Game). There is even a really good opensource RTS engine around.
Quote:Original post by WillC I work 9 to 5.30, 5 days a week, with 5 weeks holiday a year. I get a reasonable salary, with completion bonuses and royalties on unit sales (and since these are games that sell millions of copies, the royalties are good).
Disclaimer: This an honest inquiry do not take it as flaming please.
Are you working on major systems? >PS2 or PC? The only people I know with these working conditions are in the mobile industry. Well, I also know people in the mobile industry working 12 hours a day.
Royalties on unit sales is almost a thing of the past even for lead coders in very small studios so what you are speaking of sounds close to a dream deal ;).
I've been working in the mainstream game industry for about 10 years, and have worked on games for the PC, PS1, PS2 and Xbox, and now work with next-gen consoles.
I love my job, I get paid well for it, and I don't work long hours. I don't want to pretend my situation is typical of the games industry, but I Do want to ensure that it gets a fair trial.
In these situations you tend to only hear the views of the people that are unhappy. The happy people who don't have any problems tend to keep quiet as they don't have anything to moan about. The point I want to get across is that there ARE good games jobs out there if you search hard enough for them. Whilst there are definetly some bad companies (that you should steer well clear of) saying that ALL games companies are bad, and everybody works 12 hours a day every day, is simply wrong.
I have only worked for one game developer so far, but here's my experience.
Working in QA was hellish during crunch time, but working on the game team, I found the hours to be very reasonable. I was working standard 8-9 hour days 90% of the time. The culture was very much, "if you are hitting your targets and producing quality work, then you don't need to work overtime, unless we're in crunch time". If I found something very difficult, and I was running out of time, I might voluntarily work a bit of overtime to get it done.
I think things would be a bit different if I were a lead, but to be honest with you, I don't ever want to be a lead, I'd be happy just working on the team as a subordinate. My career is important to me, yes, but I'm very mindful of the fact that I work to live, I don't live to work. I am passionate about this industry, but I want to have a life outside of work, and my employer was always very reasonable about that.
I think it's sad when people get to the stage where work is the only thing in their life. For a start, I think it has to impact negatively on the quality of their work. I know I work faster, and produce better quality work, when I'm happy and have enough free time to myself for recreation outside of work.
I have come across people high up in the industry, who thought that more hours = more quality work on the project, and this is just not true in my opinion.
During a crunch period, there'd be times of about a month where I'd be working 12 hour days to get everything done on time. I didn't really begrudge the company this though, because they were very reasonable about hours normally. Also, if you enjoy your work, then during a crunch period you'll probably find that you WANT to work extra hours, in order to create the best quality product that you can. At least that's the way I felt. I get a buzz out of having to work really hard to hit a deadline.
I think the worrying thing is, not all games companies are like this, and I often wonder if I ended up working for a company, where the culture is 12 hour days, would I have the backbone to say no? Being as I am still pretty low-down in the industry, I'm not sure that I would. I would like to think I would though.
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Original post by CoffeeMug Why do you let them do that? Why let someone explore your passion to get rich? Why not move to Wall Street, make almost double your salary, work eight-nine hours a day, make some money and start your own company?
AP here again.
First off, I never said what I was paid (just that it was less than before I went to this job - per hour). Second, I love the work, the people, and the environment (which I absolutely did not at my previous business style job). Third, I'd have to make double my salary for more than a decade to form the type of company I'd need to get my designs made if I were going to self-fund.
Quote:Original post by Anonymous Poster First off, I never said what I was paid (just that it was less than before I went to this job - per hour).
I know. I was making an assumption based on the generally prevailing opinion that the game industry doesn't pay nearly as much as the financial industry. Since you're an AP, would you mind telling us how much you were making on your entry level gamedev job, and how much you're making now?
Quote:Original post by Anonymous Poster Third, I'd have to make double my salary for more than a decade to form the type of company I'd need to get my designs made if I were going to self-fund.
You don't have to start a game company to be in an environment you'd enjoy. Furthermore, you can find partners to share the risk and the financial burden. Anyway, this is a whole different topic.
Quote:Original post by WillC I love my job, I get paid well for it, and I don't work long hours.
I'm curious, what's "well"? Is it above or below the alternative in a financial industry?
I going to answer that by inventing some new types of currency.
Lets define the units of money I get now as Game Development Pounds (GDPs), and the units of money I could earn if I were in the finance industry as Finance Industry Pounds (FIPs).
For me, 1 GDP equals approx. 4 FIPs. In other words I would have to earn at least 4 times as much in the financial industry to compensate for the mind-numbingly boring work that I would be doing.
I think, at best, I might manage to get twice as many FIPs as I get GDPs (if I had the same level as experience in financial programming as I do now in games), but I have no desire to make the switch.
For me, it's much more important (actually essential) that I'm doing something I really enjoy, than to be earning stupid amounts of money.
[Edited for bad maths]
[Edited by - WillC on September 2, 2005 11:29:47 AM]
Quote:
Original post by CoffeeMug I know. I was making an assumption based on the generally prevailing opinion that the game industry doesn't pay nearly as much as the financial industry. Since you're an AP, would you mind telling us how much you were making on your entry level gamedev job, and how much you're making now?
AP, here again. I never said I accepted an entry level job. I was able to leverage my experience, skills, and track record from my business programming job to go straight into a lead programmer position. As such, I get paid a good amount, but it is a lot less per hour worked than I made before.
quick question, are working conditions in EA any good. I heard it both ways, that people work 10-12 hours a day and I heard it another way saying it was comfortable and it was the usually 8-10 hours a dat, so im kinda lost on that one. But i did see some really nice benefits etc etc EA offered
