Category: News

The Gamasutra Job Board is the most diverse, active and established board of its kind for the video game industry!

Here is just one of the many, many positions being advertised right now.

Location: Los Angeles, Vancouver, or Montreal

ROLE
Working with the real-time team, the Unreal Technical Director is responsible for developing content for film, VR, and virtual production. They support on-set virtual production in Unreal to create immerse real-time experiences for film production. 

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

• Creates content for immersive experiences for real-time applications and virtual film production
• Creates tools using C++, Blueprints, and Python Explore technologies in Virtual Production such as motion trackers, LED screens and robotics
• Debugs shaders and optimizes workflows to achieve real-time performance
• Develops workflows to seamlessly transfer content from DCC software to Unreal
• Uses particle systems to create stunning FX
• Helps the art team optimize assets for Unreal
• Leverages current technology research and development trends to innovate and advance Scanline’s technologies
• Designs, implements, and releases state-of-the-art components and applications for mission-critical, high performance, and globally distributed systems
• Gathers requirements across large collaboration efforts that span multiple departments and/or disciplines
• Writes technical briefs and user documentation
• Partners with Software Development leadership to identify and schedule tasks

QUALIFICATIONS & EXPERIENCE

• Minimum five (5) years of Unreal experience building, debugging, and supporting complex setups in Unreal
• Minimum five (5) years of experience in scripted tools development
• Creative ability and artistic talent, demonstrated by previous work
• Exceptional technical skills, the ability to learn new software quickly, and a keenness to stay on the leading edge
• Strong willingness to grow, learn new methods and share knowledge with others
• Ability to work and solve technical issues independently
• Ability to take direction positively, work well within a team and thrives under the pressure of tight deadlines
• Excellent communication skills and an open mind
• Team player able to work in a collaborative and fast-paced environment

Interested? Apply now.

Whether you’re just starting out, looking for something new, or just seeing what’s out there, the Gamasutra Job Board is the place where game developers move ahead in their careers.

Gamasutra’s Job Board is the most diverse, most active, and most established board of its kind in the video game industry, serving companies of all sizes, from indie to triple-A.

Looking for a new job? Get started here. Are you a recruiter looking for talent? Post jobs here.

The original Diablo went gold on the day after Christmas in 1996, after a grueling four-month crunch period. We hadn’t put any thought into what game to do next, but as most developers can probably relate to, we were pretty certain we weren’t ready to return to the Diablo world after such a long development cycle. The only thing we were certain of was that we wanted to avoid another crunch like we had just experienced. Diablo II went gold on June 15, 2000, after a grueling 12-month crunch period.

After Diablo shipped, we spent about three months recovering and kicking around game ideas for our next project, but nothing really stuck. The idea of returning to Diablo began to creep into the discussions, and after a couple of months of recuperation, we suddenly realized we weren’t burned out on Diablo anymore. We dusted off the reams of wish-list items we had remaining from the original, compiled criticisms from reviews and customers, and began brainstorming how we could make Diablo II bigger and better in every way.

Diablo II never had an official, complete design document. Of course, we had a rough plan, but for the most part we just started off making up new stuff: four towns instead of the original game’s one; five character classes, all different from the previous three; and many new dungeons, vast wilderness tile-sets, and greatly expanded lists of items, magic, and skills. We wanted to improve upon every aspect of the original. Where Diablo had three different armor “looks” for each character, Diablo II would use a component system to generate hundreds of variations. Where Diablo had “unique” boss monsters with special abilities, Diablo II would have a system for randomly generating thousands of them. We would improve the graphics with true transparency, colored light sources, and a quasi-3D perspective mode. Level loads would be a thing of the past. The story would be factored in from the beginning and actually have some bearing on the quests. We knew creating this opus would be a big job. Because we had the gameplay basics already polished, we figured we would hire some new employees, create some good tools, and essentially make four times the original game doing only two times the work. We estimated a two-year development schedule.

While the player characters are only seen in the game as 75 pixels tall, all were modeled and rendered in high resolution for use on the character selection screen and in promotional materials. Here, the Paladin stands tall.

The Diablo II team comprised three main groups: programming, character art (everything that moves), and background art (everything that doesn’t move), with roughly a dozen members each. Design was a largely open process, with members of all teams contributing. Blizzard Irvine helped out with network code and Battle.net support. The Blizzard film department (also in Irvine) contributed the cinematic sequences that bracket each of Diablo‘s acts, and collaborated on the story line.

Almost all of Diablo II‘s in-game and cinematic art was constructed and rendered in 3D Studio Max, while textures and 2D interface elements were created primarily with Photoshop. The programmers wrote in C and some C++, using Visual Studio and SourceSafe for version control.

Creating detailed sketches of settings, such as this hut in the Act III dock town of Kurast, preceded the actual modeling of background art.

Blizzard North started out as Condor Games in September 1993. The first contracts we landed were ports of Acclaim’s Quarterback Club football games for handheld systems and, more significantly, a Sega Genesis version of Justice League Task Force for Sunsoft. Silicon and Synapse, a developer that would later change its name to Blizzard Entertainment, was developing a Super Nintendo version of Justice League Task Force. Condor ended up pitching the idea for Diablo to Blizzard, and halfway through the resulting development process Blizzard’s parent company acquired Condor, renaming us Blizzard North. Throughout a tangled history of corporate juggling and ownership changes, Blizzard North has remained a very independent group. Our staff has grown steadily from about 12 at the start of Diablo to 24 at the start of Diablo II, and finally to our current group of more than 40. We concentrate 100 percent of our efforts on game development. To help keep this focus, Blizzard’s headquarters in Irvine manages other functions, such as quality assurance, marketing, public relations, technical and customer support, as well as the operation of the Battle.net servers. Our parent company, Havas Interactive, deals with business functions such as sales, manufacturing, and accounting.

Much time was spent perfecting Act I since it would likely be used in a beta test or demo. The Amazon was the first character to be completed.

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

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[Hi, I’m Simon Carless, and you’re reading the Game Discoverability Now! newsletter, a regular look at how people find – and buy – your video games. Or don’t.]

Well, back again, and the amount of news in the discoverability space doesn’t really ever get smaller. (Even if the window for me to parse everything seems to be getting every shorter, for various reasons!) So let’s get on with it, shall we?

Video Game Summer Showcases, Eh?

Well, COVID-19 & the cancellation of E3 2020 has left a big hole in the summer game announcement schedule. Or more accurately, expanded the timeframe of the virtual/streaming showcases that used to happen around E3 anyhow – and allowed extra third-parties to get involved too.

I mention this because the first of these showcases, Wholesome Direct, just took place yesterday, showcasing “over 50 cute and cozy indie games” in a 37 minute showcase:

There was some slight Twitter drama about ‘cute/cozy’ as a descriptor, which we’ll skip past for now. But in general – people will tune in or pay attention for these showcases, if they show new and interesting games. And if you’re an indie, this may play in your favor.

But which of the billion showcases should you watch and/or be in? (You probably know if you’re in them already, in MOST cases.) Here’s a quick rundown of the most indie/triple-I (sorry) showcases I’ve spotted coming up for the rest of the summer:

The most obviously indie-centric showcase is Guerrilla Collective, which is running across three days (June 6th-8th, starting at the same time each day) & has a whole heap of notable participants.

These span Coffee Stain through Raw Fury to Humble Games, Good Shepherd, Fellow Traveller, 11 Bit Studios, New Blood, Modern Wolf… you get the idea. It’s co-ordinated by The MIX & Kinda Funny Games and I’ll certainly be tuning in.

Summer Game Fest, which is Geoff Keighley’s series of announces and streams, has a Day Of The Devs team-up for two showcase streams – June 22nd and July 20th.

The iam8bit & Double Fine-organized showcase already has confirmed participation from indies like Panic, Annapurna, Thatgamecompany & more. (And deadline to submit is Thu May 28th.)

It skews a little more ‘core PC/mini-AAA’, but the PC Gaming Show from Future on June 6th is also likely to have a bunch of Steam/Epic Store announcements of note. Previous years have had announcements from Rebellion & a number of other notable independents.

There are also a host of other E3 timing-adjacent showcases, some single publisher or developer-centric, which this Fanbyte guide has done a useful job of rounding up. There’s more confirmations to come, of course. (I’m waiting very eagerly for Devolver Direct, for example.)

And folks like Nintendo and Xbox and Sony are running virtual showcases a lot more regularly than they used to, and will probably include smaller games in them for ‘flavor’ over the summer. Hurray!

Overall – any organizer can do a game showcase year-round, and people MAY pay attention. But for now, it makes more sense to situate them around the ‘obvious time hole’. And if you can time your trailer reveal to an inclusion in a showcase that lots of people watch – of course I think it can help discoverability.

Switch demos – empirical proof (?) of goodness!

You may recall in the last Game Discoverabilityland newsletter that I was singing the praises – potentially – of making a demo for your Nintendo Switch game.

Well, the nice crew at SMG Studio (Death Squared, Moving Out!) kindly pointed me to a sales charts for Switch they posted last year, showing a ‘fatter tail’ after releasing a Switch demo for Death Squared:

Here’s our first years stats and you can see that when the demo released the tail got fatter. We shared this on @rNintendoSwitch https://t.co/QTf16xndKq pic.twitter.com/YGkIDlH1r5

— SMG: Moving Out! Out now! 📦 (@smgstudio) July 4, 2019

So I won’t say that’s conclusive, and clearly things have changed since July of last year, but… I do see a measurable difference there. (And on a note more related to the last newsletter – also note how much discounts spike sales on Switch. These were the days when 25% discounts got more notice.)

Lots more neat info…

Just rounding up the other stuff that’s arrived in solely the last week or so – there’s a lot of stuff happening, right?

• Looks like Steam’s top game releases for April 2020 are now displayed for all to gawk at, “were developed in 14 different countries [and] saw nine development teams finding success with their first-ever Steam launches.” It’s wide-open for global success out there, folks.

• A clever new tool from Andre ‘aRestless’ Becker, Steamreviews.app works as follows: “Not all Steam reviews are relevant for everybody. Use this page to aggregate Steam reviews based on the total hours played by the reviewers, explore historic data, and more.” Fun for looking up the ‘negative reviews after hundreds of hours’ crew.

• If you didn’t spot, Steam’s Spring Cleaning event is live until tomorrow (28th) – “it recommends a selection of games from your library, and by launching seven of them you’ll get a new badge and a bit of Steam XP.” Great idea to encourage going back to overlooked games, & incredibly rare to see a store do a promotion that isn’t ‘buy this’. So I dig it.

• Kitfox Games’ Victoria Tran is doing some hilarious TikToks (!) about game dev & community management – check out this one, xposted on Twitter, for example. (BONUS: here’s her great Twitter thread on why devs can’t tell you the release date for their game right now.)

• Neversong game dev (and very popular game dev-ish YouTuber/generally charismatic person) Thomas Brush did an interesting Gamasutra blog that twins self-help with stats and some borrderline humblebragging. But I think he has the right approach – lots of income diversification, & sounds like an Apple Arcade deal was the cherry on top. Congrats to him for a (relatively) stress-free launch.

• It’s rough out there, mentally, thanks to COVID-19 – even if there was a revenue spike for some game devs which is now gradually normalizing. Which is why I appreciate nonprofit Take This’ approach to mental health & games/game dev.

• Most recently, Take This did a ‘Mental Health In Games’ Twitch stream on May 26th – here’s a Twitch archive. Before that, the IGDA and Take This collab-ed on a Game Development Crisis Conference stream – videos for that are up on the IGDA’s YouTube page. Check ‘em.

• Finally, a small correction on my last newsletter. For some reason, I said that Switch was the only ‘major platform’ that allows you to set discounts at any time you want (with cool-off periods). Obviously, I meant ‘major console platform’ – Steam does allow this! Thanks to those who wrote in to point that out.

The Gamasutra Job Board is the most diverse, active and established board of its kind for the video game industry!

Here is just one of the many, many positions being advertised right now.

Location: Remote

Moon Studios – award-winning creators of Ori and the Blind Forest and Ori and the Will of the Wisps – are looking for Senior Character TD’s. After redefining the Metroidvania genre with the Ori series, our next goal is to revolutionize the ARPG genre. 

Join our family, help us create some of the best games the industry has ever seen and work with some of the most talented individuals in the world!

Please note that Moon Studios is a distributed development studio: Everyone at Moon works remotely and we accept job applications from participants all over the world!

We’re looking for:

Reach out to us if you…

• Are a top notch Character TD who has production experience in creating character rigs and developing tools, pipelines, etc.

• Are extremely experienced with rigging in Maya and developing tools with Python.
• Have a solid understanding of animation principles and processes, know what animators need and can help create friendly and intuitive rigs and tools.
• Have at least a basic knowledge of game production, game engines and real-time limitations.
• Are knowledgeable in more than just rigging. We want as many multi-talented creative geniuses as possible in our studio!

Interested? Apply now.

Whether you’re just starting out, looking for something new, or just seeing what’s out there, the Gamasutra Job Board is the place where game developers move ahead in their careers.

Gamasutra’s Job Board is the most diverse, most active, and most established board of its kind in the video game industry, serving companies of all sizes, from indie to triple-A.

Looking for a new job? Get started here. Are you a recruiter looking for talent? Post jobs here.

After a healthy amount of deliberation and caution, Blizzard has ultimately decided to call off BlizzCon 2020. The annual fan expo was originally planned as a sizable event in Anaheim, California this November, but has now, like many others, been canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The full cancellation comes weeks after Blizzard first told its community it was actively keeping an eye on COVID-19 developments, noting it was hoping “things would look better later in the year” and allow it to hold the fall event as planned.

“During this time, we’ve had many discussions about what holding a convention could look like in light of all the health and safety considerations we’d want to make,” reads today’s post from BlizzCon executive producer Saralyn Smith.

“We’ve also talked about different paths we could take, and how each one could be complicated by fluctuations in national and local health guidelines in the months ahead. Ultimately, after considering our options, we’ve come to the very difficult decision to not have BlizzCon this year.”

While BlizzCon itself won’t be taking place as previously planned, Smith notes that the team is looking at ways it can roll some of those usual festivities–both fan and esports competition focused–into an online event of some sort. Given the complexity of that pivot, however, Smith notes that any online substitution would likely take place in the beginning of 2021 at the earliest. 

Cloud based game services provider Gamestream has secured € 3.5 million, roughly $3.8 million, in additional funding to bolster the ranks of its B2B focused game streaming offerings.

While many cloud based game platforms aim to land directly in players homes, Gamestream instead partners with businesses like hotels and cruise ships to provide a readily-deployable streaming game platform then offered to those businesses’ customers as an amenity.

According to PocketGamer, that additional bit of funding now aims to help Gamestream is staff up its internal teams and accelerate plans to expand the offerings in its game library, a library that currently includes around 150 titles from the likes of Square Enix, Capcom, and more.