Life at a AAA studio
Hey MGSA,
Some of you may remember me, I used to be active here like 10 years ago, nowadays I just lurk. Anyway, about 2 years ago I posted about how I got to interview at Lionhead and Rare. Unfortunately, I didnt manage to get into either of them at the time. 2 years on and Im now 8 months in to a contract at Rare :) This was literally a dream come true opportunity for me, and I thought I would share some things about working at a AAA studio that some people may wonder about.
Some quick things about myself. I've been coding and making games from around 12 years old (15 years ago). I have no formal education, but started working as a web developer in Durban in 2011. I kept learning, got a job at Derivco (a gambling company based in Durban), learned a butt-ton there, and moved to the UK. While in the UK I switched over from permanent work to contract work (more risky but better pay), and kept picking up services based roles. After a year of contract work, I got to interview with Rare for a second time, and this time I got in.
The beginning. The interview at Rare was pretty straightforward. It starts with a telephone call and they ask some technical questions. Fairly basic programming questions and a bit around design patterns. If you're successful, they send you a home test. This was not too bad, but I imagine it could be confusing or done incorrectly if you didnt know about some popular techniques developers use nowadays. I kinda have to be vague here because I had to sign this NDA thing. The final phase was me coming in to Rare, sitting down in front of a giant TV screen with laptop plugged in to it, and writing code in front of a group of developers. They asked me to explain why I was doing things in certain ways and proposed other ways of doing what I had just done, asking which was better and why. This was about 3 hours long. After all of that, I waited a week and they made me an offer.
Having been here for around 9 months now, I think I have a good understanding of the pros and cons, and here are my opinions(note, these are MY opinions):
CONS:
* The games industry does not pay well, I took a 20% pay cut to work here
* There is very little you can actually talk about because of all the NDA stuff
* You have set deadlines sometime that CANNOT be missed (EA, Christmas period etc). Fortunately, we have great management here, but hearing stories from the guys who come from other studios, things can get intense.
* As a Microsoft company, they have strict rules on how many permanent developers they are allowed to have, and they fill the rest up with contractors. This is cool because I still get to work here and stff, but its really hard to become a permanent developer.
* The offices are on a farm in the middle of nowhere. This is OK for now, but I fear the snow that is on its way :/
PROS
* Surrounded by like-minded people who are almost definitely gamer's
* Very relaxed offices
* Weekly playtests
* Access to super intelligent people. We have a couple of guys here who worked for CryTek, EA, Blizzard etc. These guys are smart, and usually pretty open to questions
* Games library. Because we're an Xbox studio its mostly Xbox games, but as a XB1 user Im happy :)
* Football(soccer) pitch. Summer was awesome with weekly games.
Its been awesome. Its cool seeing how a game is taken from concept to completion and how all the different teams work together. Personally, I dont think I would enjoy being a game play developer on a large game and love doing the services. Shoot any questions and Ill try answer them :)
Some of you may remember me, I used to be active here like 10 years ago, nowadays I just lurk. Anyway, about 2 years ago I posted about how I got to interview at Lionhead and Rare. Unfortunately, I didnt manage to get into either of them at the time. 2 years on and Im now 8 months in to a contract at Rare :) This was literally a dream come true opportunity for me, and I thought I would share some things about working at a AAA studio that some people may wonder about.
Some quick things about myself. I've been coding and making games from around 12 years old (15 years ago). I have no formal education, but started working as a web developer in Durban in 2011. I kept learning, got a job at Derivco (a gambling company based in Durban), learned a butt-ton there, and moved to the UK. While in the UK I switched over from permanent work to contract work (more risky but better pay), and kept picking up services based roles. After a year of contract work, I got to interview with Rare for a second time, and this time I got in.
The beginning. The interview at Rare was pretty straightforward. It starts with a telephone call and they ask some technical questions. Fairly basic programming questions and a bit around design patterns. If you're successful, they send you a home test. This was not too bad, but I imagine it could be confusing or done incorrectly if you didnt know about some popular techniques developers use nowadays. I kinda have to be vague here because I had to sign this NDA thing. The final phase was me coming in to Rare, sitting down in front of a giant TV screen with laptop plugged in to it, and writing code in front of a group of developers. They asked me to explain why I was doing things in certain ways and proposed other ways of doing what I had just done, asking which was better and why. This was about 3 hours long. After all of that, I waited a week and they made me an offer.
Having been here for around 9 months now, I think I have a good understanding of the pros and cons, and here are my opinions(note, these are MY opinions):
CONS:
* The games industry does not pay well, I took a 20% pay cut to work here
* There is very little you can actually talk about because of all the NDA stuff
* You have set deadlines sometime that CANNOT be missed (EA, Christmas period etc). Fortunately, we have great management here, but hearing stories from the guys who come from other studios, things can get intense.
* As a Microsoft company, they have strict rules on how many permanent developers they are allowed to have, and they fill the rest up with contractors. This is cool because I still get to work here and stff, but its really hard to become a permanent developer.
* The offices are on a farm in the middle of nowhere. This is OK for now, but I fear the snow that is on its way :/
PROS
* Surrounded by like-minded people who are almost definitely gamer's
* Very relaxed offices
* Weekly playtests
* Access to super intelligent people. We have a couple of guys here who worked for CryTek, EA, Blizzard etc. These guys are smart, and usually pretty open to questions
* Games library. Because we're an Xbox studio its mostly Xbox games, but as a XB1 user Im happy :)
* Football(soccer) pitch. Summer was awesome with weekly games.
Its been awesome. Its cool seeing how a game is taken from concept to completion and how all the different teams work together. Personally, I dont think I would enjoy being a game play developer on a large game and love doing the services. Shoot any questions and Ill try answer them :)
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Comments
And what is it that you do there?
I'm mostly just questioning the idea that the game industry overall doesn't pay well (especially the "normal" AAA job), because so many of the acquaintences I have in AAA here in the US who are past 30 years old have a partner and kids and are the sole working people in their families. I don't know about you, but if you can pay for an American middle/upper middle class lifestyle for 4+ mouths, I think you're paid pretty well...? In which case what are we comparing it to? Or are US and UK game dev salaries that different?
Regardless of the pay cut conversation, it's really great to see the South African developers hit it big :)
On another note, I do want to point out that some people think I implied Derivco was a big reason I got in to games (not here, but other places on the internet). Well, even though thats not what I was implying, it is pretty true. The "games" I was exposed to at Derivco had very little to do with me getting into games. Instead, it was the exposure to working in an environment where what we were working on would be used by tens of thousands of users, and even if you had a bug that only happened 1% of the time, could mean it could affect a few thousand users. Things like enforcing code reviews and testing and stuff that I didnt have to do at smaller companies, as well as the training I received or things I learned 3rd hand from super smart guys. Those are undeniably huge factors that helped me get hired here (and a lot of other places too).
There were other misconceptions mentioned that I think are unfair to Dervico, stating things like I disappeared from the online dev scene. This is true, but it has nothing to do with Derivco. It was purely my own decision as I wanted to focus on my career. That and I had just got married, so free time became scarce :P
I guess, the tl;dr of my original post is pretty much: You can get into the game dev industry without having years and years of game dev experience, and there are more roles than just "guy who makes game features".
Game dev is insanely complex - any experience you get that can be applied to game development is a good thing! I know some people are salty about gambling companies - but if it puts someone on the path of gaining experience its certainly not a bad thing.
Lots of roads lead to Rome. :)