Making Games

I hear from programmers every now and then who are considering trying to get into the games industry. Our projects are strange beasts that are similar to other software projects in some ways, yet vastly different in other ways. Still, if you look at it from outside, most of these differences will be hard to spot.

With this post, I will try to list what I see as the biggest differences between working on a game and working on a different kind of software project. If you have any questions related to it, please post them as comments and I’ll do a follow-up round.

The Passion and Dedication

It sounds like a cliché, but games are made by mostly gamers. In all the teams I’ve worked with spanning maybe a hundred, there’s only a few people that aren’t absolutely passionate about games, and completely dedicated to making kick-ass entertainment.

The enterprise coders I’ve worked with pretty much fall into two categories: the day job coders who don’t care much and the hackers that appreciate technical challenges. As you move into games, not only does just about everyone fall into the second category, but nearly everyone is also excited about the games themselves, regardless of the technical challenges involved.

If you’re looking for a place to work where your colleagues will be really cool, skilled people with a passion, then the games industry is where to look.

On a cynical note related to that, the abuse of this passion and dedication is what has given the games industry something of a bad reputation (and a well deserved one too). My impression is that working conditions have improved quite a lot across the board, even if there are still the occasional horror stories. If I were to give one piece of actual advice, it’d be to be rather thorough in your background checks on companies.

Creativity

Game developers live off creativity. Even the most simple churn-out-sequels factory will attract highly creative people, and studios will tend to cater to creativity to a much higher degree than most other software development companies.

If you’re highly creative, you will probably find it easy to fit in. My experience is that creative suggestions are almost universally appreciated regardless of source.

Cross-discipline, Bleeding Edge Development

Games teams are made up of a number of disciplines that vary depending on what type of game you’re making, but generally speaking you’ll at least have Designers, Graphical Artists, Animators, Sound Designers and Programmers. Our projects have Mission Designers, Environment Artists, Effects Designers and other disciplines as well.

In a way, this is no different than many other types projects where some end-users create some of the data for the system, but there is a major difference in the fact that the hardware platforms are either consoles or PCs with specs so high that they don’t even exist yet. The coders on the team will be creating a game framework, which is then populated with different kinds of content to produce the game.

The problem with this is that they’re using the software tools you’re building (like the editor and data processing pipeline) to create the game while you’re still trying to build the tools, only to run it in a game engine that is also not done yet.

It’s a bit like trying to produce a business application while part of your team is working on creating the source code editor you must use, and a different part of the team is building your compiler. In some magical way, the components must all mesh together so that not only are the tools done when it’s time to ship the product, but that content creators have time to do something useful with them as well.

This creates an extra layer of complexity to the projects that I haven’t seen anywhere else. Inter-discipline dependencies between disciplines that work in very different manners can cause common project management techniques for software development to break down, because most of the team isn’t developing software.

Performance Focus and Hardware Platforms

From a technical point of view, there is a heavy focus on code performance. This creates a different kind of environment, where some modern programming techniques are simply too expensive to use. It also means you tend to get good at optimizations after a while.

The hardware we run on is increasingly becoming paralell. Using all of the power in the PS3, for instance, requires a fairly well developed parallelism, forcing the shift from single-threaded to multi-threaded coding onto game programming long before most applications need to care all that much.

(Note that my view on the state of the industry is rather limited here. DICE is ahead with the Frostbite engine on current console tech, some other engines are hopelessly behind, but it’s always hard to tell what others have in development.)

The hardware platforms themselves can sometimes be immature and cause problems when you have to jump through hoops to get things working (simple example: graphics driver bugs).

The platforms themselves also impose other restrictions on your code, like the low memory cap of current generation consoles and extreme penalties for cache misses and branching.

Playing Games at Work (!)

I couldn’t leave that out, could I? Yes, we playtest our games at work. They’re a lot of fun, most of the time, so getting to play awesome games before anyone else is quite a perk. To be completely honest I must admit that there are times when it’s not much fun at all… but they are quite uncommon. And hey… you get to shoot your boss.

A Tour of the Games Studio

There’s a hole slew of misconceptions and weird comments that inevitably go around as soon as any large game studio announces a game, or releases a game, or… well, just about anything else. So with this post, I’d like to welcome you to a small sightseeing tour of how a games studio works, on the inside.

I hope to give you a chance to see how a games studio works — maybe it’ll create better understanding of what it is you’re saying when you chatter around forums about the latest greatest game from some studio, or maybe it even gives you valuable insight if you’re looking to get into the games industry.

The Myth of the A-Team and the B-Team

Somewhere in the DICE Office

As soon as a game announcement turns up, knowing fanboys will appear on all forums around, claiming grand things like “Wow, this sure is great. Now we know DICE has the A-team is working on this while the B-team was doing (other title here).” Substitute with “good team” and “bad team” or whatever you will.

The reality is not only that there isn’t any first or second-rate teams, but that the teams themselves don’t really exist as a concept. People move between teams constantly — some project doesn’t need any more audio work now, so the sound designers move over to the next one. Meanwhile, the programmers are fixing the remaining bugs and getting set to ship the game. Most of the artists left the project before that.

That means that there’s rarely a situation where a team in a large studio makes one title and then immediately goes on to make another one — more likely the team will split up and head to other projects. Some may jump on to help another project get the final bugs squashed, others may jump on to prototype a new game.

The Life of a Game Project

That leads us to the life cycle of a games project, because another misconception is that the team making a game will remain the same group of people all the way through.

A project generally starts out small. A few designers basically start up by spending some time trying to answer the simple question of “What game do we want to make?” Sometimes this is more straightforward than other times — but more often than not it is somewhat complicated and difficult. Even sequels usually start out in a state of “don’t really know what this is about”.

There’s this nice thought many people have about games as having this brilliant idea first, and then just making the game. This never happens. The project will probably get to some kind of rough concept of what they want to do, what kind of technology platform to use, what setting, and so on… and then go into pre-production.

The pre-production phase of a project is when the project starts taking on more people. Coders join, artists join, and most probably more designers join. The mission now becomes trying to prototype, test and prove all the different aspects of the game — figure out the core game mechanics, make art target concept environments, make sure all the tools needed work properly. The goal is usually to build a small section of the game as a proof of concept.

The project has probably been running for at least six months by the time it finishes pre-production and heads into production. It staffs up even more, and sets about building all the levels, missions, features and content needed for the complete game. The amount of time it takes to do this varies wildly depending on the game.

Still, through production concepts are refined. As playtests are done, the developers think of new ways to improve the game, and the new ideas are worked into the concept.

What You See Is All There Is?

By the time you hear of a project, it’ll generally be in production. Conceptual prototyping is relatively cheap, so studios can afford doing concepts for games as a test, and if they don’t turn out well then cancel the project. This means that at any time, your favourite games studios out there are probably doing cool stuff you have no clue about.

This way of doing things also means most views on the state of a game are somewhat flawed. By the time a game hits beta and you get to see it, it’s virtually completed and only bug fixing remains. Comments like “well this is an early beta, they’ll change lots of stuff” are quite common and somewhat funny to see — very few game changes will be done once a game is in beta.

That doesn’t mean quality doesn’t increase though — much of the quality you see in a game comes from the actual fixing of bugs, not the adding of features.

“Not that the devs are ever gonna care”

Gamers tend to show a pretty large dose of resentment towards game developers. In general, what you see is an announcement met with awe and comments like “this’ll be the most awesome ever”. This attitude then changes over time, until at release, the comments tend to sound more like “they messed it up”.

A strange aspect of this is that many gamers seem to be deep into the belief that game devs don’t care about them, about the games they make, or about anything at all other than earning a quick buck. This is strange because the games industry is not the place to go to make the good money while slacking — it’s generally a grind of long hours of dedicated work and not as well paid as other comparable areas (making business apps is definitely much more lucrative for a programmer).

Yet people still do it? Why? Because these people are gamers and love what they do. Maybe somewhere there are big-name execs that don’t care, but I haven’t met them yet. I’ve only met the EA execs who beat half the dev team on Battlefield: Bad Company (though dogtagging your boss is sweet indeed).

That’s all part of what makes the games industry such a great place to be if you love games — not only do you get to work with games, you get to work with gamers.

Yet most people seem to think that game developers isolate themselves in a small glass jar somewhere, and start ignoring the internet as soon as their project becomes public. Nearly every forum or blog post about a game has a bitter comment about “no chance the devs will bother to read this”.

Guess what — we do read stuff on the ‘net. Not only because we’re gamers but because we care deeply about making the best game possible. So why don’t we answer? Well, I think you could imagine what’d happen. Half the people would call you a liar, and the rest would bombard you with even more. There’s no way for a game developer to answer questions or opinions on a forum without immediately being subjected to at least twice the amount of new questions or opinions. We’d simply run out of time.

And well… at the end of the day, we have games to make.

For my own part, I’m more connected than most. Toss me a line on twitter if you have a question.

A Spectacular Failure

Back in the day I worked with the startup independent developer Limebird Entertainment, we entered into a few game development competitions. You know the kind — make a game, show it off together with lots of others and then a group of people select the best ones for some prize.

Usually, the competitions themselves were not that exciting, but you know you take what you can get in terms of exposure and if you’re making a game anyway, then why not enter it into the competition? So we did.

The immediate result of this is that we now had a deadline. Deadlines can be incredibly healthy things because they force you to pull together and produce something solid. It doesn’t matter how many subsystems you have in place or how brilliant they are unless you’ve got something you can actually show off to impress people.

Another thing about deadlines is that you’re always behind for them. We were no exception here… I’ve done some crazy crunching at my current job, but for a single crunch, the one we did on Velox for that competition must be the absolute worst kind of crazy. The setup of the competition that year was that you bring your machine in (unless you liked the ones they had), and you show off the game on a big projector screen.

We worked incredibly long hours the week leading up to that deadline. The game was coming together really well, but we were working ourselves dead. We didn’t really have all the stuff in that we wanted, however, and the deadline loomed. We worked all through the night to the presentation day, and then finally packed up our demo machine and left for the presentation.

At this time, I’d been awake and at work on this thing for about 30 hours. I was dead tired, and I’m sure my colleague wasn’t much better off. I was running on fumes and Coca-Cola.

Anyway, we set up the game, show off our menu system, host and join a network game and fly around for a bit in the hovercraft. Really high-tech stuff for the kind of level the competition was at, but it was also pretty rough around the edges. A minimap bug led to us having a hard time finding each others, for instance. Also, not having prepared any presentation as such, we sort of played around for a bit and showed off most of what we had in a rather unordered manner.

Then I went home, slept for 4 hours or so, got up, fixed most of our major bugs, and slept for another 10 hours.

The competition? We lost it to a team who’s game was an un-innovative re-make of an old game and whos engine was basically a Maya file viewer that needed really top-end hardware to even run properly, despite the really simple stuff they were doing.

So just what happened there?

The first thing to take away from this story is hidden in what happened after the demo. I slept for just a few hours, and was so conditioned to working with the game that I went back to it, even though we didn’t have a deadline anymore. But something had changed — I wasn’t dead tired anymore, so my mental clarity was much much better, which meant I could do much more good.

If you ever think about doing an all-nighter to hit a deadline, think again. If you’re crunching hard for long periods of time, stop to think, because chances are you’ve crunched so long that you now produce less in 12 hours than you normally would in 8.

The second question is the key to why we lost the competition: Polish and show. We failed to analyse the situation of what our target was, so instead of locking down early and polishing what we had, we forged on adding stuff to our game. If we’d come to our demo in a better shape with a presentation we’d practiced for beforehand and a polished game, we might have done a lot better. Now our high-tech stuff just looked bland next to the shiny effects of the winner-to-be (as did many other teams’ high-tech stuff, by the way).

Whenever you’re up against a deadline and need to show off what you’re working on, take a few minutes to identify what could give you the maximum impact with the people who’ll be watching and judging your stuff. Focus on the right things.

And have a good night’s sleep before you go there.

The Economics of Making Your Customers Hate You

The spectacular trial and marketing disaster against the Pirate Bay continued today, with the verdict of the first court (no doubt this will be appealed a few times around).

The three guys from the pirate bay, and their internet co-location and bandwidth provider were sentenced to one year in prison and a total of 30 million SEK of damages today. Whatever you think about the pirate bay, the sentencing of their internet provider is nothing short of incompetency from the Swedish court.

But let’s put that aside for a moment.

Let’s just look at the costs and benefits. These guys now have to pay 30M SEK for their sins of building a search engine. Let’s put that into perspective, shall we? 30M SEK is (with today’s exchange rate) €2,680,246. Contrast this with the spendings of the industry: 75M Pounds is what the record industry spends each year hunting pirates, apparently (only the record industry… who knows what the international movie associations’ and games associations’ and writers’ associations are spending…). With today’s exchange rate, that’s €81,466,099.

That means it’d require 30 such spectacularly unpopular court cases against major file sharing sites won just to win back the costs spent on hunting pirates. Really, who is it that thinks this is a good idea?

In other news, if you’re going to pirate a game, please do it off the ‘net and where it wont hurt the companies that tries to support it for the people who buy games. If you pirate a game and then try to get support for it, you’re a real asshole.

An Exceptionally Stupid Idea

I’ve been asked a fair few times how to get into the games industry. It’s one of those job sectors where there’s tons of people who want to work, but still a shortage of people due to the lack of actually qualified people. Some of this is because there’s been a lack of education, some because it’s a somewhat harsh business to be in with a high turnover. Either way, it means there should be openings, if you’re interested.

So how do you get in?

The answer is very dependent on what you like, and what you do. The lack of education for designers has been solved lately with game design schools popping up like mushrooms all over the place. That creates a new problem though, as some of these schools aren’t exactly viewed as top notch by game studios. If you choose to go that route, be very careful about what school you pick.

If you’re a programmer, however, do not go anywhere near specialized “games” schools. What you need is a regular Software Engineering / Computer Science college. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that game coding is some special form of coding, that doesn’t abide by the normal rules of code. When choosing classes, go for anything in connection to games — graphics courses are common. Take anything they have with low-level programming and hardware. And take at least one programming project course.

Regardless of what education you end up in and what field you’re in, I have two generic pieces of advice that should apply to just about everyone:

1. Have a side project.
2. Put your heart into it.

I’m not going to claim this is the only way you can do it — but I’ll offer you a way that’s very effective if you’ve got the energy to stick to it.

Side Projects

And by side project, I don’t mean “implement space invaders”, I mean make something about two levels above your own experience and ability, and a lot larger than anything you’ve ever made before. Get at least one other person on board in the project, and work hard on it, reworking it and trying to perfect it.

The point of doing this is not the project itself, though it certainly helps to have a major project to show as a demo when talking about getting that job, the point is the experience you get while doing it. There’s a range of vital skills that nothing in any formal education will teach you, so you better get those skills for yourself.

I teamed up with a classmate and started writing a game engine while I was in college. It turned out to be a project that lasted four years, and that with a bit more luck could have led to something more than just a side project. The experience was invaluable.

Trying to tie your courses and your side project together is also a worthwhile enterprise. We ended up doing a number of home works in several 3d graphics courses in our game engine, and even made a game prototype as a software project course.

Put Your Heart Into It

Lots of students seem to go to college more for the college parties than for the college studies. That’s fine, in a general sense, but if you want to get yourself set to get any highly sought-after job, really, you’ll want to do everything you do with a sense of perfection.

Make it a goal to do well even on the difficult and boring things, and to excel on the interesting things. Take one step further than you really need to, and if things are interesting, keep walking even if it seems silly. Far too many people stop when they’ve completed an interesting task because that’s as far as they needed to take it, even though they were interested in the subject and could learn more by just keeping at it.

If I were to describe my method of doing things in college in one word, it’d be “Overkill”.

An Exceptionally Stupid Idea

Let me illustrate the above with a story.

In a course on mechanics we were making differential equation solver calculations on a housefly walking across a surface — calculating how the limbs and body moved while keeping the feet steady. The calculation application we were using was fancy enough to include a 3d visualization of the process. Cool idea, but to someone used to working with 3d graphics engines it was brutally ugly.

So the afternoon on the day before we were due to present it, we got an exceptionally stupid idea: “Let’s render this thing to a movie instead — it’ll look sweet”. The presentation was the morning after, we had the Solaris environment on the Sun boxes in the computer rooms to toy with, and my incredibly underpowered PC laptop… not much to cheer for, when looking for 3d graphics tools on a tight notice — but we did have POVRay on the Solaris boxes.

We looked at the file format of our calculation tool, looked at the povray file format, and set off writing a converter. A number of hours, a break for pizza and lots of fiddling later, we had a converter and something that key-framed each frame into a separate povray source file. By now it was evening and the place was near-empty.

We ray traced the first frame. It took a disheartening amount of time. We had a couple of minutes of video to render, which turns out to be several thousand frames. I don’t remember the exact numbers now, but at the speed we were going, we’d be done a few weeks later. Give up, go home time?

Not for us. We had a near-empty room full of Sun workstations, and a way to run remote commands. So we tried to build frames remotely, but had no way to make a direct copy to the computers. Home directories were on a tight quota, which meant we couldn’t work online.

So we set to work creating a script that set up packages of work, copied them onto the home directory, started a remote job which copied the package to a local temp drive on the remote computer and rendered the frames.

We shipped packages to every free computer in the room, which was basically all of them by that point. Midnight came and went with a frightening speed. Still not good enough. A scan of the computer net confirmed that the rest of the rooms were as empty as the one we were in — so a list of computers with no-one logged in later we’d shipped off packages to every available computer on 3 floors, and 100+ computers were happily chugging out frames for our video.

By sunrise the next day we’ve got thousands of frames of video data spread out across every computer on site. An epic struggle of sending off remote jobs to copy these onto the network home drive started, moving them down onto my laptop as soon as they were online. We managed to get them all copied in time, and set the laptop on encoding them all into a video file.

Encoding videos isn’t the quickest thing you could do, and on a laptop at the time it was painfully slow. It was still building by the time the class started. Clock’s ticking, and the progress bar’s hardly moving… but our presentation was scheduled for the second of two hours of class, so we let the laptop encode as the first presentations were held.

In total, working all through that night, we managed to get the video together with 15 minutes to spare. And it did indeed look sweet. People went “ooh” when they saw it.

The Point?

So what was the point of the entire thing? We had been done with the actual assignment before this story even started. We had the idea at about the same time anyone else would have stopped because the assignment was done. It didn’t give us any academic benefits. But we learned a lot. We took on a challenge and grew with beating it.

By the time we were forced to give up the development of our game engine, and I went to work on Battlefield: Bad Company for DICE, we’d already created a fully networked multi-player hovercraft racing game with fully scriptable game modes that had error-correcting network transfer, could automatically send you any maps or game modes you were missing when you joined a server and worked on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and Solaris.

With that kind of experience and track record, getting a games industry job won’t be hard, and performing far above everyone’s expectations will be something that comes naturally.