Game Developer - April_2012.pdf

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coNTENTS.0412
PoSTmoRTEm
VoLUmE 19 NUmBER 4
28 kingdoms of amalur: reckoning
Making an open-world role-playing game isn’t easy—especially if
your studio is used to developing strategy games instead. Despite
two acquisitions, senior management shuffles, and numerous false
starts, Big Huge Games turned out a big huge game indeed. This
postmortem explains how usability testing, production processes
that kept developers accountable, and a good relationship with
Electronic Arts made
K
ingdoms of
A
mAlur
: r
ecKoning
happen.
By
Mike Fridley
F E aT U R E S
7 11th annual salary survey
We’re back with our 11th annual game industry salary survey!
Whether you’re an indie developer, contractor, or a salaried
employee, we’ll help you find out how your earnings stack up
against the average, how Europe and Canada stack up against the
U.S.-based developers, and which development discipline brought
home the most bacon in 2011.
By Patrick Miller
13 fire, blood, explosions
Creating effects for open world games is a significant challenge
P
rototyPe
2?
Senior rendering coder Keith O’Conor walks you how
the Radical Team built a particle effects system that made things
burn, bleed, and blow up even better than before.
By Keith O’Conor
21 needs more blur
A good depth-of-field effect can help your player focus on the
important things in a cutscene. Serge Bernier explains how he
was able to reproduce the photographic “bokeh” effect with the
PlayStation 3’s SPU.
By Serge Bernier
d E Pa R T m E N T S
2
4
game plan
By Brandon Sheffield
Rest Assured
[editorial]
[news]
heads up display
Game concepts from fridge magnets, and a look at WaterMelon’s
Magical Game Factory pay-to-play crowdfunding system
35 tool box
By Patrick Miller
[review]
The coolest tools and middleware on the GDC 2012 show floor
39 pixel pusher
By Steve Theodore
See the Light
42 design of the times
By Soren Johnson
More Than Zero
45 the business
By Kim Pallister
Me of Little Faith
46 the inner product
By Jelle van der Beek
13 Ways to be a Better Lead Programmer
[art]
[design]
[business]
[programming]
[career]
49 good job
By Brandon Sheffield
Q&A with Ben Sherman, who went where, and new studios
51 aural fixation
By Damian Kastbauer
Knowing a Thing or Two
52 gdc news
By Staff
Independent Games Festival and Game Developers
Choice Award Winners
53 educated play
By Tom Curtis
n
itronic
r
ush
56 arrested development
By Matthew Wasteland
Quarterly Report
[sound]
[news]
[educ ation]
[humor]
www.gdmag.com
1
GAME PLAN
//
BRANDON SHEFFIELD
game developer
magazine
w w w. g d m a g . c o m
REST ASSURED
LET'S TaLk abOuT wHy Qa SuckS
Maybe you’re an artist. Maybe
you’re a coder. Maybe you’re a
designer, or a producer. Maybe
you’re all of these. But chances
are, if you fit into one of those
categories, you have a career path
of some kind set before you. You can
become an effects lead–you can
move laterally and become a tech
artist. Learn some behaviors and
become an Ai-oriented designer.
Your QA team doesn’t have
a career path though. Quality
assurance is one of the most
important aspects of game
development, and all we encourage
our QA staff to do is move “up and
out” of the QA slog, if we inspire
them to move up at all. Many QA
professionals talk about “getting
out” and moving to the production
or design path. Don’t you want
good QA folks to keep doing QA?
Shouldn’t they enjoy and want
to start in their jobs? isn’t there
something wrong with this picture?
Most QA is hired from a pool of
fresh-faced kids who just want to
get into the industry any way they
can. They are passionate about
games, but aren’t sure how to
break in, so they take the QA route.
Maybe they’ve heard about game
designers who started as testers.
What they don’t want to do is stay
in QA forever. And why would they?
The hours are long, and the pay is
the lowest in the game industry, at
under $48,000 average across all
years of experience, almost $30k
under the next lowest discipline.
Many are hired on contract, at
low wages, then get let go when
a project is complete. Does this
sound like a job you’d want to
stay in? Or a job where you’d be
incentivized to think creatively? is
this job with a career path? if the
biggest incentive you’re given is
to become a lead and then move
to another department, how much
can you really care about working
in QA?
how many times have i heard
“the dev team” and “QA” spoken
of as though they’re different
things? in many companies there’s
a physical wall between “the
developers” and QA, if not an entire
building. QA is part of the dev team.
Why is there this mental space
between the two?
it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. if
you think the QA kids are scrubs,
stop hiring scrubs. if you want
people other than scrubs to apply,
there needs to be a fundamentally
different way of thinking about
the entire department. if QA is
thought of as a viable career
path, and a truly important part
of game development, it won’t be
considered lower-tier, and your
games will get better, because
creative people will be thinking
about how to improve your games
and processes. At Valve, for
instance, everyone has specialties,
but everyone is a developer.
everyone plays the game all the
time, and thus everyone is QA.
That’s not so bad, is it? how can we
reach this level of integration in our
own companies?
UBM LLC.
303 Second Street, Suite 900, South Tower
San Francisco, CA 94107
t:
415.947.6000
f:
415.947.6090
SUBSCRIPTION SERVICES
FOR INFORMATION, ORDER QUESTIONS, AND
ADDRESS CHANGES
t:
800.250.2429
f:
847.763.9606
e:
gamedeveloper@halldata.com
www.gdmag.com/contactus
EDITORIAL
PUBLISHER
QUALITY TIME
»
The first thing to do is to change
the company culture and mind
space surrounding QA. invite QA
leads to important meetings.
Creative meetings! Make sure you,
or your leads, speak of QA with the
same respect you’d have for any
other discipline. Make sure your
entire team is speaking to everyone
else on the team, and regularly.
Next, offer an appealing career
path within QA. Certainly there
will be generalists that check
everything, and some general
leads. At the same time, QA
professionals that are interested in
music should essentially be part of
the sound team, working to develop
an audio map to test against, with
the power to implement changes.
Those with a tech bent should be
speaking regularly with the leads
in that area to monitor frame rates,
and suggest areas for reducing
load. And so on and so forth.
Finally, don’t lay them off when a
project completes! if you want loyal
employees, your company should be
hiring for the long term. You should
be recruiting QA professionals with
a variety of skills that can be applied
across the project, like you would in
any other discipline. Unless your team
is gigantic, you likely don’t hire an
artist who is only good at rigging. it’s a
specialty, sure, and you rely on them
for that. But when it’s time to do a bit
of modeling, or mocap cleanup, they
can be counted on. So too should it
be for your QA staff. if you really need
to ramp up and down our QA, use
external QA groups managed by your
permanent internal QA team. if you
think of any members of your team as
an expendable resource, they will not
do their best work for you.
This is only the start of the
discussion. QA is an incredibly
important pillar of game development,
and the industry as a whole does not
treat it accordingly. if you want to see
your next bonus, maybe it’s time to
change all that.
—Brandon
Sheffield
twitter: @necrosofty
Simon Carless
e:
scarless@gdmag.com
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
EDITOR
Brandon Sheffield
e:
bsheffield@gdmag.com
Patrick Miller
e:
pmiller@gdmag.com
MANAGER, PRODUCTION
Dan Mallory
e:
dmallory@gdmag.com
ART DIRECTOR
DESIGNER
Joseph Mitch
e:
jmitch@gdmag.com
Cliff Scorso
e:
cliff.scorso@ubm.com
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
Tom Curtis
Serge Bernier
Keith O'Conor
Mike Fridley
Jelle van der Beek
Steve Theodore
Soren Johnson
Damian Kastbauer
Kim Pallister
Matthew Wasteland
ADVISORY BOARD
GET BONUS
»
Your QA staff is your front line
of defense against bad reviews.
Obsidian creative director Chris
Avellone recently mentioned that
the company didn’t get a bonus
for
F
allout
N
ew
V
egas
because the
game missed its Metacritic target of
85% by one percentage point. They
had to reduce staff as a result.
Game reviewers play a lot like
testers sometimes. They push
against boundaries, and find those
things you’re pretty sure nobody
will ever bother to do. They complete
quests in the wrong order. They jump
over a wall and trigger a cutscene
that wasn’t meant to happen for
hours. in short, they break your
game, then call it buggy. What does
that do to your Metacritic score?
Not all bugs can be prevented,
but with creative testing and enough
time (that’s the kicker!) you can get
most of the showstoppers. everyone
knows QA is important, but let’s
really think about that. is your QA
team inspired to think creatively,
and go that extra mile? Are they
treated like important members
of the team?
2
Mick West
Independent
Brad Bulkley
Microsoft
Clinton Keith
Independent
Brenda Brathwaite
Loot Drop
Bijan Forutanpour
Sony Online Entertainment
Mark DeLoura
THQ
Carey Chico
Globex Studios
Mike Acton
Insomniac
ADVERTISING SALES
GLOBAL SALES DIRECTOR
Aaron Murawski
e:
amurawski@ubm.com
t:
415.947.6227
MEDIA ACCOUNT MANAGER
Jennifer Sulik
e:
jennifer.sulik@ubm.com
t:
415.947.6227
GLOBAL ACCOUNT MANAGER, RECRUITMENT
Gina Gross
e:
ggross@ubm.com
t:
415.947.6241
GLOBAL ACCOUNT MANAGER, EDUCATION
Rafael Vallin
e:
rvallin@ubm.com
t:
415.947.6223
ADVERTISING PRODUCTION
PRODUCTION MANAGER
Pete C. Scibilia
e:
peter.scibilia@ubm.com
t:
516-562-5134
REPRINTS
WRiGhT'S MeDiA
Jason Pampell
e:
jpampell@wrightsmedia.com
t:
877-652-5295
AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT
AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT MANAGER
Nancy Grant
e:
nancy.grant@ubm.com
LIST RENTAL
Peter Candito
Specialist Marketing Services
t: 631-787-3008 x 3020
e:
petercan@SMS-Inc.com
ubm.sms-inc.com
game developer | april 2012
WWW.UBM.COM

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