It depends on the kind of designer position you're aiming for. We want to see key words for common tasks that those kind of designers have done. Here are some examples: Common Experience, craft, create, live, season, update, content, schedule, create, design, team, player, UX. Level Design Layout, place, trigger, volume, spawn, point, reward, treasure, quest, lighting, light, dark, texture, object, obstacle, blocking, whitebox, direct, draw, through, inviting, space, place, multiplayer, competitive, cooperative, co-op, deathmatch, capture the flag, ctf, domination, asymmetric, symmetric. Ques ..read more

There is a difference between having a degree and not having one in a relevant field, but it isn't as important as one might think. The kind of degree you hold really only matters for the initial application round, where the recruiters sift through all of the applications and decide who gets callbacks and who gets dropped. This is because, realistically, we can't call every applicant back for each open position. Large studios like Blizzard or Riot often have literal hundreds of applications for open positions, and calling everyone back would take an army of recruiters. This means that recruit ..read more

It happens on occasion, but not super often. Usually, you want a subject matter expert to handle issues with the subject - an engine programmer to work on the engine, a rendering programmer to work on the renderer, and so on. The reason for this should be obvious - you want an expert to do the work so that the best work gets done and you get your money's worth from paying that expert to be an expert. However, that expert may not always be available - maybe she's out on parental leave, maybe he has too many other fires to fight, maybe she's gone home for the day and it's 2am and we need to fix ..read more

Nah. Trying to do this basically results in hopelessness because there's no end to it where you need to design a couple hundred new and different cards every year. It's such a combinatoric explosion and there are so many potential interactions that it quickly becomes an unsustainable mess. It's generally better to look at how things work and adjust as you go, since there's just too much complexity for any single designer (or even design team) to know about. You do your best and you adjust as you go. That's the best you can really hope for. Let's also be clear - Wizards of the Coast didn't ba ..read more

The weirdest coding hack I’ve ever seen myself was in a very popular first person shooter series whose engine my studio was using for a different game. At one point, the animation system pulled a very specific hard-coded string from the string table (the repository used to hold all of the pieces of text in the game for translating and such) and cast it to animation data (i.e. it declared “Whatever it was, we don’t care. It’s animation data now” and treated it as such), then applied that animation data to the character in the game. The animation programmer didn’t understand it either. We could ..read more

This might surprise you, but more often than not… yes.  My most recent executive producer started off as a customer service agent at the studio, and worked his way through QA and production. The CEO of that company was a producer who worked on Everquest for seven years. Another executive producer I worked for started as a customer service agent for Dark Age of Camelot, became a writer, then producer on Warhammer Online, and now he’s doing something else.  Even EA’s CEO Andrew Wilson was senior producer, then executive producer on the FIFA franchise from 2006 to 2011 before he was p ..read more

Amusingly, this was often because the original gold master build was no longer viable and they had to make a wholly new build to distribute. Sometimes this was due to situations like the cert rules changing between the original launch and the second print run, others because our certified build was lost or corrupted. If we have to make a whole new build for cert submission anyway, we might as well fix some of the bugs/balance issues that have been bothering us while we're in there. The main reason it was such a rarity is because the certification process was (and still is) damn expensive. My ..read more

I think that it is true that initial launches are indeed more bug ridden today than they were before day 1 patches were possible, but the reason for this is much less nefarious than most are imagining. I was already working in games before that big change happened and I saw what happened from the inside. Before we could patch, producers would cut content and features much more mercilessly because we lacked the time to finish that content properly and still pass certification. We couldn't ever modify or add stuff to the disc or cartridge, so we had to make sure that what went out was the most ..read more

I haven't ever seen it used. Game dev still primarily runs on C++ to do the heavy lifting. We often build internal tools with C#, Python, or Perl. Some games will run interpreted scripting languages like Lua for designers to script out encounters and such. RPG Maker utilizes Ruby or Javascript for its scripting language, depending on the version. To my knowledge, nobody uses Rust, Swift, or Go in game development. [Join us on Discord] and/or [Support us on Patreon] Got a burning question you want answered? Short questions: Ask a Game Dev on Twitter Short questions: Ask a Game Dev on BlueSky ..read more

We haven't done everything possible, but it isn't really necessary to do everything for the sake of exploring that space. When we're creating character abilities for a game, they follow these principles: Be simple to understand Show that something has happened (almost) immediately Have some cost or tradeoff to using the move Many character abilities that end up on the cutting room floor are cut for violating one of these principles. Throwing a fireball in Street Fighter, for example, follows all three principles. The move creates a damaging projectile that moves across the screen at a stead ..read more