Like how many programmers on a game? How long does a game take? Do the people stick together from game to game or get swapped around? How do you get holidays? What happens inbetween games you''re working on? How long must you work for before you get to lead/senior programmer? How do you get to work in management/design - from coding? Sorry but just general stuff about how it all fits together...

Sorry, but the questions are just too general to be able to give specific answers. I''m assuming you mean the retail games industry, but even that doesn''t narrow it down enough. All of your questions really depend on who you''re working for and what the project is.

Mark Fassett
Laughing Dragon Entertainment
http://www.laughing-dragon.com

Teams can be of any size. 2 people to 100 people are not uncommon.

They usually take between 6 months for a simple game to upwards of 3 years for a AAA title. Teams do and don''t stick together.

Its more akin to pro sports where there are free agents that move around and a couple of franchise team members that anchor the company down. On occasion entire groups of team members can and do move together, though typically after they have finished a game.

If you''re lucky you never in between games. There''s always another game to work on for the company or existing games to support. If you''re not lucky, you''re probably visiting the unemployment line.

Sr programming jobs depend on your skill set, the company''s requirements for the position and a host of other factors. Only you''ll be able to know what''s right for you. Your challenge will then be to find a way to execute that timeline.

It typically happens naturally through your contacts. Designer positions are usually not advertised because design is bred from the game idea someone in the company had. Companies develop their own ideas and typically promote someone that has a good uinderstanding of that idea to a designer position. Get in a company as a develop first and weigh your options.

Kressilac

Yep, I''d generally agree with the AP (Kressilac) on most of that - there definately isn''t a set way of doing things or even an average.
It''s also highly dependent on exactly which part of the market GBA teams are smaller than PC teams, PC teams are smaller than cross platform console teams, Japanese teams are larger than UK teams etc..

Like how many programmers on a game ?

Programmers specifically, usually 2 to 10. Even then it''s not so clear cut - the total number of coders per project tends to fluctuate, it starts with just a handful who are also involved with the technical design, prototyping and generally getting things going, it then goes to an all hands on deck peak toward then end, and finally goes back to a handful when all that''s left is polishing/bugs etc.

For example the game I''m working on at the moment is cross platform console (PS2, NGC) - it started with 3 programmers during design, up to 4 during core development, and currently at 5 towards the end. On top of that there are also occasional support programmers since we''re using an externally developed engine.


How long does a game take?

Depends who negotiated the contracts and how realistic the publisher is.

Average for the UK is 12 to 18 months for a console game based on a license. Some people get lucky and get things like 2-4 years, but that tends to be on original titles with tons of PR and good internal sales people OR not funded by a publisher.


Do the people stick together from game to game or get swapped around?

Within the same company? It depends entirely on the company and its size, with a multi-team company there is often the opportunity to move between teams. However if you''ve worked on one game and the company is offered the sequel, you may be considered "key staff" for that and have to stay as part of the core for more than one title.

As well as within the same company, many people in this industry are quite nomadic, moving from company to company after each game (I suppose that also gives you an idea of why it''s difficult for a newcomer to get in).


How do you get holidays?

Games companies are no different than any other company. You send the dates you''d like off to the management for the project, they check those against any important deadlines/cross dependencies in the project and say yes/no/maybe. Sometimes games companies give staff longer than usual holidays to chill out after end of project crunch time.


What happens inbetween games you''re working on?
- Redundancy/job hunting
- Prototyping & R&D for the next game
- Technology development
- holidays etc.


How long must you work for before you get to lead/senior programmer?

It varies - some companies give people titles to make up for poor pay or to fulfil "career development" parts of employment contracts.

More important really is the amount of actual experience and the range of that experience. Someone who''s only ever coded GBA games probably isn''t suitable to be a lead on a PC title for example. The more [commercial, boxed product] games the person has worked on, on a wide range of platforms etc, the more senior. What''s also important is someone who''s been through the development process from concept/design all the way through to mastering (rather than running away when crunch time starts).

IMO a "lead" should have 7+ years of *real* development experience on say 4 to 5+ games AND a suitable personality AND a passing knowledge of every area of the game. (It''s the lead who''s going to have to recruit new staff and take over someone elses code if they leave etc).

For a senior it depends on your definition. Some companies call practically anyone with a title under their belt a senior - at others a senior programmer is around the level of technical director.

For the former I''d say 2+ years and 1+ released title. For the latter, I''d say take a lead and double the requirements.

Though of course you then get start up companies formed by people at the lead level who then get (self) promoted to senior/technical director level. So there are shortcut paths.


How do you get to work in management/design - from coding?

For management, lead programmer IS management, senior programmer in "head of programming" type context IS even more senior management - at the senior level you''ll be dealing with company directors etc anyway.

Design has nothing to do with management, and isn''t even a higher role than programming - it''s a sideways move and is entirely unrelated to programming. And a very rare job.
If you want to be a games designer, getting some art skills and starting as a games tester would be a much more realistic path. There are only a very rare few programmers who''ve gone over to become uber designers - and they''ve usually had #1 smash games and are directors of the company they''re at (Molyneux, Romero etc).

The lead programmer is usually involved in working with the designer and producing the technical design doc (which describes the constraints, forseen issues and rough way things will be approached), but not so much else apart from ideas input which all the team are involved with.

Skills for a designer are:
- a tiny bit of knowledge about technical constraints (definately no programming)
- knowledge of how long the art side will take
- excellent communication skills - written, oral, and artistic. This is **essential**, you have to get the ideas across in such a way that the development staff can implement those ideas AND in such a way that the people in suits can see what the whole product will do and do differently
- excellent ability as a games player AND an excellent knowledge of all genres of games AND an excellent knowledge of all games and genres that have gone before. This is **essential**, and why testing tends to be the route into design.
- a liking for all genres - if you''re thinking you can just design games for your favourite genre or make up your own original games, forget it. In most cases the publisher obtains a license for "something", the developer you''re at gets a contract to work on that "something" and the designer has to work out what can be done with the license that''ll be fun and be agreeable to the license holder and publisher and development team.


500

--
Simon O''Connor
Creative Asylum Ltd
www.creative-asylum.com

Thanks. So there''s basically no jub security at all ? Don''t you sign a contract? Cos unless you''re in the SE of England that means you could have to move every 2 years! For someone getting married in a year job security suddenly starts to be a factor! Is it more normal to be retained by a company i you''ve done nothing bad, or better to move on to increase salary more quickly - I take it you''re not going to get a raise each game but you might for each new job?

quote: Original post by d000hg
Thanks. So there's basically no jub security at all ? Don't you sign a contract? Cos unless you're in the SE of England that means you could have to move every 2 years! For someone getting married in a year job security suddenly starts to be a factor! Is it more normal to be retained by a company i you've done nothing bad, or better to move on to increase salary more quickly - I take it you're not going to get a raise each game but you might for each new job?

A company with X number of teams aims to keep all of the staff on all teams employed for as long as possible, ideally eternity. However if a game, even one game does badly, a publisher withholds payment too long, the next game isn't signed etc, then companies have to let people go. That's happening an awful lot at the moment, particularly in the bloated companies.

When you read stories in the press about games being a 1.whatever billion dollar industry they are true - but it's the people who fund and sell the games who are making the lion share (like 80-90%) of that (i.e. publishing & retail).
In terms of the advance on royalty used to fund most games, the figures are forced right down to absolute bare minimum by sheer competition (i.e. if company X won't develop the game for $1m, then there's this company of talented people in say Bombay who'll do it for half that). The amount a developer gets during development is literally stripped to wages and operating overheads.
So unless the developer tells the publisher a few porkies (i.e. fraudulently claiming more people are working on the project etc) the *only* funding for those months when there isn't a new project come from royalties on sales or bank loans. And since royalties only come in after break-even it can be a while before there's cash to keep people on (one of our past titles took 2 years before we started to see royalties!). Worse still many games don't even read break even (crap games, piracy, naughty accounting, yada yada...).

No money in the bank means the less valuable and important you are to the continued running of the company, the more likely you are to be made redundant when the company doesn't make what it thought it would off a game.

During 2002 I've seen very talented, industry experienced friends made redundant from the companies they've worked for due to combinations of the above. Luckily they all walked straight into new jobs due to experience, albeit in different areas.

Realistically though you'd get the same amount of guaranteed security in a sales job selling vacuum cleaners - jobs for life is a thing of yesteryear. The only difference is you're less likely to find online forums where people will tell you what's going on in the vacuum business


Don't you sign a contract?

A standard employment contract, yes. A per game contract, no. A contract ensuring that you'll be kept on at a company if it can't afford to keep you, no.


Cos unless you're in the SE of England that means you could have to move every 2 years!

The North of England has plenty of games companies too - but expect to commute some distance to work regardless - I work in South Manchester, and people on the project I'm on at the moment commute from Leeds, other people in a neighbouring company commute from Derbyshire, Liverpool etc...

But remember that there's a lot of people willing to move about *all over the UK and beyond* after each game. Look at the demographic of games development staff - you'll find an average of something like "Male, single, 30".
I'll give you an example of the rough movements of an industry friend of mine since about 1996-7 (in terms of companies):

- West Midlands
- Cheshire
- London
- Oxfordshire
- Liverpool
- Manchester


For someone getting married in a year job security suddenly starts to be a factor!

Many, many other people in the industry will sympathise - that's when people start commuting 40-50 miles a day to get to work!...

I know a few people in the industry who are married, and some with kids, - it can work - but with a partner who's understanding of the hours, and an acceptance that if the work dries up there's some serious commuting required.

Not knowing what's round the corner is something which affects everyone in the games industry, but it affects everyone else just the same - only difference in games is stuff happens much quicker. The more employable you are the less you have to worry about that (e.g. at the moment, if you're a low level PS2 coder).


Is it more normal to be retained by a company i you've done nothing bad

YES. Unless they can't afford to keep you on. People lower down the chain (i.e. easily replacable when the company starts making money again) and "dead wood" (i.e. too out of touch, not enough energy etc) at the top of the chain being the first to go.


or better to move on to increase salary more quickly

It varies from person to person, neither is better - I've been at Creative Asylum since 1998. I tend to stick around until I have to.
Salary wise you CAN bump salary by hopping from job to job, but personally I'd just move into shirt-n-tie IT programming if salary were all that mattered (e.g. I've had two phone calls in the past couple of years with people offering me literally more than double my salary to move back that way). Also when you move from place to place you get to see a wider variety of development methods, but you don't get to see how one team can grow/make mistakes/learn over time.

The longer you stay at the same company, the more likely you are to get a higher profile job title, and more company benefits (for example I'm a 10% shareholder in Creative Asylum). Once you leave a company, you tend not to be entitled to any royalties on games you made there (well known example: Toby Gard, one of the Tomb Raider creators). Another example, it took us 2 years to start getting royalties off one title. (Bear in mind though that many games don't even reach break even so never make royalties...)

I take it you're not going to get a raise each game but you might for each new job?

Maybe, maybe not - companies aren't blind to the fact that the more titles you've worked on, the more employable you are (witness the amusing day when a headhunter phoned almost every staff member of Creative Asylum without realising that we're a small company so we only need one main phone line, i.e. people were passing the phone between each other waiting for the HH to phone).



Hopefully from these various responses you get a feeling for why it's difficult to get a foot in the door at the moment (i.e. nomads & redundant experienced people) and why development isn't as healthy on the inside as it looks from the outside at the mo. This is all of course linked to general financial climate - to make a game a developer has to borrow money from either a publisher, a bank or similar - the publisher and bank in turn raise that money from the stock market - the stock markets round the world aren't good at the moment (witness Enron, Worldcom, recession etc) - and investors aren't willing to invest so much in IT after the "dotcom bubble" (games=computers, games publishers & banks funding developers=IT...).

It's not the best of times in the industry at the moment, you have to have a hard shell and some good contingency plans - but things are cyclical - when the economy etc starts on an upturn, the games business is a great place to be (it was the same with the 80s-90s "recession", just not as big business).


--
Simon O'Connor
Creative Asylum Ltd
www.creative-asylum.com


[edited by - s1ca on January 10, 2003 9:28:47 PM]

All most interesting. Does anyone know what the UK industry''s predicted to do in the next year or two - better or worse?
I guess if you get kicked out a normal coding job is always an easier backup...?


Read about my game, project #1
NEW (18th December)2 new screenshots, one from the engine and one from the level editor

John 3:16

Thanks for the posts, S1CA.

heres a link that takes you through the making of a commercial game:

http://www.gamespot.com/features/halflife_final/

I have a question regarding this:

If you make it as a game programmer do you have influence on the game itself. Can you give input on the gameplay or add ideas regarding the game in general?

I''m curious because I almost finished my first intern-period at a company that makes/programs embedded systems, but from what I have seen is that the influence the programmers have on the actual product is very limitted.
I was hoping that in the game industry I could use my artistic abilities and ideas together with my programming skills, instead of being the ordinary coding-grunt.