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: Pasadena, California

Join our team’s mission to create robots that help people reach their full potential!

COVID-19 Hiring Update: We’ve transitioned to a work-from-home model and we’re continuing to interview and hire during this time. This role is expected to begin as a remote position. We understand each person’s circumstances may be unique and will work with you to explore possible interim options.

Embodied, Inc.’s mission is to build socially and emotionally intelligent animate companions with believable personality and empathy to enhance our daily lives. We have developed a new platform, SocialXTM, that provides a way to use natural human interaction to engage with technology. The first iteration of this technology is Moxie, an animate companion for children developed to help promote social, emotional and cognitive learning. Moxie has been called “the robot pal you dreamed of as a kid” (Wired Magazine), “the sophisticated robot for the curious child” (Wallpaper Magazine), and “a technically impressive childhood robot” (TechCrunch). You can learn all about Moxie and see how it works: www.embodied.com 

From the heart of Pasadena in sunny Los Angeles, California, our diverse team of engineers, therapists, and designers is led by experts in robotics, AI and machine learning, entertainment, and consumer electronics. We are financially backed by some of the most prominent corporate and institutional investors including Intel Capital, Toyota AI Ventures, Amazon Alexa Fund, Sony Innovation Fund, JAZZ Venture Partners, Calibrate Ventures, Osage University Partners, Grishin Robotics, and Vulcan Capital.

We are continuing to build an amazing, high-performance team that works hard to innovate, collaborate, and solve complex challenges in order to serve our company mission and goals. We are bold in our vision, relentless in its pursuit, and excited to be discovering new ways to provide positive impact to the families we serve. We are committed to our mission not because it’s easy but out of a shared boundless optimism that together we will put a dent in the universe. 

At Embodied, our Game Designers are champions for overall quality of experience and creators of innovative activities designed for when children (5-10) are playing with Moxie – a little robot on a big mission to understand humans. This role will ensure that our content modules are engaging, fun, and replayable as well as effective tools for Social Emotional Learning (SEL). The Game Designer will work as part of a collaborative team to create modules that also support a larger creative universe that includes physical materials (Moxie Monthly Mission Packs) as well as a connected kids’ portal. Technical or system’s minded individuals with conversational design experience preferred.

General Responsibilities include:

Creating innovative content that captures the imagination of children of all ages and improves their social development by working collaboratively with:

         -Social development experts to integrate therapeutically enhanced content

         -Roboticists to collaborate on content using sensory input

         -Engineers to implement unique, entertaining activities

         -Solve complex challenges in a new field for creative exploration 

         -Have fun & learning while working at a startup with a great team on an incredible mission

Specific Responsibilities include:

• Design engaging learning modules for Moxie that captivate users and enable them to master key Social Emotional Learning points
• Design modules that contribute to the long term vision of the GRL Creative Universe
• Establish effective design templates that can be iterated upon through multiple modules
• Creatively innovate design features that distinguish Embodied’s unique experiences
• Create modules that take full advantage of the capabilities of an Embodied robot (Moxie), or other connected mediums of learning (physical mailings or the connected kids’ portal)
• Design scoring and feedback systems to enhance learning experiences and provide progress feedback to users and administrators
• Accurately scope upcoming projects, document plans, track progress, report and work with production tools to provide appropriate guidance on design activities and progress
• Work with team members and collaborators to identify learning pain points and identify possible solutions
• Work collaboratively in a team of other designers, producers, writers and artists to realize high impact high quality design goals
• Work with subject matter experts to translate their knowledge and expertise into engaging Social Emotional Learning experiences
• Revise designs as necessary based on feedback from users, team members, and stakeholders
• Pitch ideas internally to team members and stakeholders and champion best practices and user experiences
• Actively test and iterate on all content to achieve highest standards of overall team execution and user experience

Minimum Qualifications:

• Game Design Experience on 2 or more published projects
• The desire and ability to create innovative new play patterns using voice, image recognition and/or gesture controls
•  Strong writing skills for creating original content for children (ages 5-10)
• Excellent organization and communication skills
• Work well within a cross-discipline team: engineering, art, audio, therapy, marketing, etc.
• Familiarity with overseeing content from creation to execution
• Ability to manage priorities
• Understanding of game structure and story and how they can integrate effectively
• Ability to adapt design to match a project’s tone, business requirements, and learning goals
• Ability to design, iterate and revise work under tight deadlines
• Comfortable working scripting tools and other technical production tools

Preferred Qualifications:

• 5 years of progressively responsible experience in the area of Game Design
• Technical and/or background in complex systems design
• Non-linear scripting experience
• Conversational design experience
• Understanding of educational pedagogy and learning theory for kids (5-10)
• Experience working in an agile environment
• Experience of designing games for kids (5-10)
• Experience in the Unity Engine

At Embodied, we support diversity and we are an equal opportunity workplace. We offer a competitive benefits package that includes compensation, health benefits, employee stock options, 401(k) match, flexible PTO, and flexible schedules. We are a dynamic and diverse team that likes to push the status quo. Our work environment is collaborative, flexible, and very supportive of work-life balance. 

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 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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AI and Games is a crowdfunded YouTube series that explores research and applications of artificial intelligence in video games.  You can support this work by visiting my Patreon page.

In collaboration with Ubisoft and Massive Entertainment, I present three blogs exploring the AI behind Tom Clancy’s The Division 2, including excerpts from my interview with the Lead AI Programmer of the franchise, Philip Dunstan.

Part 1 of this series, where we discuss enemy AI design can be found here.

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Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 introduces players to a war torn Washington D.C. A battleground not just in the streets, but the hearts and minds of its civilians as they fight to regain a semblance of order that is true to the values this city – and its country – are built upon.

It’s been seven months since the Dollar Flu destroyed New York City and humanity is clawing back piece by piece, presenting a new game design challenge for developers Massive Entertainment: building an open world game that is dynamic, emergent and immersive.  Keeping players on their toes and giving a sense of life to the world.  

This leads to enemy factions wandering the open world looking for trouble, friendly survivors patrolling near their captured settlements, supply convoys that either need to be defended from enemies or raided for extra goodies, or supply caches air dropping into DC, resulting in all sorts of trouble.

Continuing my discussion with Division 2’s Lead AI programmer Philip Dunstan, we discussed the process of building a system that allows for all these dynamic events to occur, the problems that arise when balancing these elements of systemic game design and the challenges faced as the established tools and systems migrated from the bitter cold of New York City, to the sunny streets of Washington DC.

Philip Dunstan: “In New York you could stand on a street corner for a long period of time because there was very little movement through the open world.  But in Washington if you stand a street corner for any length of time, you’re going to be engaged in combat.”

In the first Division New York City is designated a quarantine zone.  It’s become a tomb, a monument to the devastating chemical attack just weeks prior and hence the number of non-player characters (NPCs) is relatively minimal, with pockets of scavenging friendlies and gangs of enemies found throughout the open world.  But as the franchise moves from the chilling winter winds of the Hudson to the warmer summer breeze of the Potumac, the team at Massive wanted to increase the impact and spread of both friendly and enemy non-player characters in the game map. 

Philip Dunstan: “As part of the immersion we wanted to give the NPCs a lot of purpose for being in the world.  And some of this came through our design, it’s six or nine months after the outbreak.  Washington has gone through the phase that everything is madness and chaotic and now the civilians are starting to group together into settlements and the settlements have structure and different factions all their own strongholds.  We wanted to make that apparent not just through the story but through the players experience of seeing the NPCs interact and move through the open world.”

To achieve this, the development team put together a Living World Activity system into the Division 2, giving specific roles to NPCs as they enter the world and ensuring that they perform a given task or duty.  So let’s walk through how it all works and then some of the weird and interesting problems that emerged as the existing AI systems were being adapted to work within the Washington DC map.

Philip Dunstan: “We wanted Washington to feel much more alive, we wanted it to feel like there was always something happening that you could easily find a group of civilians or a group of Hyenas and so it meant having a system that let NPCs move through the world.”

The Activity system within the division two allows for a variety of different sequences to be executed each with their own objective.  Throughout the execution of the sequence a NPC will assumes a role or duty within the world and as assigned to a post within a set space or space to operate within.  What that means when you see a groups of NPCs travelling through the open, be it as a patrol team near a stronghold, a convoy moving between outposts or as a unit gathering resrources from an area with food or water, each NPC has a defined purpose within the activity to complete.

As mentioned each NPC has a given role or duty to complete for their assigned objective.  These are split into two types: the special role which is given to one or more NPCs at the beginning of the action being executed, or the unscripted role which is assigned in an adhoc fashion depending on what’s happening in the world at that time.  A special role may be the NPCs that are gathering the resources, or carrying the boxes of supplies in a convoy.  While the unscripted roles are the guards providing overwatch, either standing in a fixed position, wandering a patrol path or taking control of a mounted weapon.

But in order for NPCs to have a role, they need to know not just what roles are available in a particular activity, but where they should be doing it.  Hence every activity has a set of posts attached to it.  Each post is set by designers to identify what duties can be executed at that post, the locations they should execute the duty from and the minimum number of NPCs that are required to satisfy it, given you might need two or three NPCs to maintain overwatch or patrol a region.  These are different types of locations that can be attached to a post: volumes for when they’re gathering resources or guarding a region of the map, waypoint paths that are for patrol duties and fixed points such as a mounted weapon.  

Whenever the active objective changes, the server attempts to assign NPCs that already have an active duty to a new one in context of the current task.  But also priotises what posts should be assigned, so mandatory posts that really help sell what these characters are doing are filled first, with other unfulfilled posts being populated depending on the makeup of the remaining NPCs.

This all does a great job of reinforcing the performance theatre of the game: characters know where in the world they should be standing and what their job is at that point in time.  But what happens when an opposing factions appear – or the player in fact – and things start to kick off?  Well each NPC post does actually dictate whether or not it should be maintained in combat and if so they’ll continue to operate the behaviour once the fighting starts.  After all, there’s no point standing around on that mounted machine gun if you’re not going to use it.  Plus in the event an AI decides to execute a specific behaviour, the behaviour can dictate whether or not to release itself from a given post and get into the fight and provides a nice continuity between passive and active activity.

So with this fairly extensive overhaul of the systems to facilitate the introduction of more dynamic and systemic AI throughout the open world.  There were still issues the team had to address, and much of that comes largely from the change of scenery:

Philip Dunstan: “The openness of Washington was one of the biggest challenges coming from New York.  It’s not just the fact that the streets in New York are so narrow and also high skyscrapers on either sides of the street, hyper tall buildings, it’s also the amount of traffic you expect to see with broken-down cars and buses in New York meant that we had a lot of control over very long sight lines.  So the combat tended to be you know quite short range or mid range combat even in the open world.   

And you get to Washington and one of the things we wanted to show was a diversity of environment that wasn’t necessarily there in New York.  We wanted wide boulevards, tree-lined boulevards, we wanted big grassy open spaces, we wanted sort of you know more sort of university-type, queenstown-type locations and that put a pressure not just on the performance as you mentioned but it actually put quite a bit of pressure on our NPC behaviours and our NPC systems.  We hadn’t really you know, when we’d created the NPCs for the Division we had designed them around a short-to-medium distance combat and now something we had to deal with you know a lot longer sight range.  And what happens if you engage with a Rusher at 60 metres are they just going to run towards you for 15 seconds.

We didn’t really want to increase our budgets for the numbers of NPCs that we had in the game because we thought the number of NPCs was working quite well in the Division 1.  We wanted to maintain the budgets at around the same level which meant that we had a problem then of what happens we you need to bring reinforcements into a fight.  Because if you wait until you’ve almost killed all of a group of NPCs, then by the time the reinforcements spawn and come in the players been idle for several seconds.  But spawning is a problem because you know its difficult to find a space that’s out of line of sight, of the players if the player is in a big open area.  So it put quite a bit of pressure on both our NPC design as well as performance.”

This resulted in a number of changes to how existing behaviours within the Division AI is executed.  The first major change was that behaviours for archetypes were retooled such that they were more competent when fighting the player at range, with archetypes having additional tweaks to their behaviour to compensate for the increased range.  This leads to some novel cases such as the Black Tusks Rusher which has an assault drone, so if the player is too far away it won’t expose itself and instead rely on the drone to attack you.  The second major change to the systems was the NPCs would actively move around the open world.  In the original game, NPCs could only move in very small groups and even this was kept within fairly tight ranges.  Now convoys and control point attack units are moving through at a larger scale but they also had a direction and goal to complete.  This helps contextualise their position in the world and either results in you sneaking up on them and catching them off guard, or accidentally bumping into them in the open world and creating a chaotic combat sequence.

This all has a knock-on effect on managing the AI behaviour server-side given – as mentioned back in my blogs on the first Division game – AI decision making happens server side and the client visualises these decisions on your PC or console.  This resulted in the game’s servers running low level simulations of where groups of NPCs are in the world and their objectives.  Spawning them into the game when necessary and de-spawning them should they complete a given task.  But not only is the number of active NPCs increasing and the tasks their being assigned more complex, there’s also the issue of having them spread across a larger map.  Division 2’s map is pretty much a one-to-one reproduction of downtown Washington D.C., stretching from Roosevelt Island and Georgetown in the west with the National Mall leading up to the Capitol Building in the east.  Totalling at around 4 square miles of map, it’s an area that is around 30% larger than the original map of the Division, which was of course a scaled reproduction of midtown manhattan.  This resulted in a more aggressive level of detailing or LOD system compared to the first game.  The LOD ensures that AI behaviour processing server-side is minimised if players are not near them, as well as client-side rendering and animation operating at lower levels of fidelity if they’re clearly farther away.

So this addresses the issues of map size and increasing the density of AI activity in the map, but this didn’t resolve all the problems that emerged during development.  There were still legacy problems emerging from working on the first Division.  Namely that Manhattan has rather strict rules on how verticality is introduced to gameplay:

Philip Dunstan: “Washington introduced challenges that were more than just the sightlines, we have a lot more uneven terrain.  New York for instance was surprisingly flat.  Not surprising if you’ve been there.  Manhattan is a very flat area.  But Washington is definitely not flat.  So that again pushed the NPCs into a whole new set of problems we hadn’t had to handle in Division 1.  To be able to handle NPCs fighting on slopes and taking cover on slopes and climbing on top of trucks while the truck is one a slope.  And then in addition Washington is just so much more colourful than New York was, so we had to do a lot of work with our NPC design so that they were going to be visible in the different sort of environments.”

But with all these improvements, it led to another issue.  The increased sight lines meant that AI could more readily engage the player as they walk down an open boulevards, but this leaves it open to a potential flaw, in that enemy AI factions are much more likely to spot each other.

Philip Dunstan: “It an added an extra level of difficulty we hadn’t initially expected.  The NPCs because of the long open spaces can see quite a long distance.  We need to tweak how they saw the player, but we ran into a problem that they would very easily see each other going through the world.  So we had all the different factions mixed in together moving through the world, heading to control points and heading to resources.  At one stage during development, this would all just break down as they would spot each other from you know 100 meters away and get into a fight and kill each other.  The player would either get there and there’d be fighting going on or the player would get there and there was only person left alive or something.  We eventually had to dial down what we call the detection system like the line of sight and how quickly NPCs go into combat.  Those systems we had to dial those down when it was faction-vs-faction when it was interacting in the open world, because we needed more control over that simulation.”

Building open world environments in games that feel lived in, that feel dynamic is an increasingly demanding challenge as the scope of games being built continues to grow.  The complexity of these characters and their ability to handle emergent gameplay as it happens in-game has no clear solution.  But here we’re seeing a natural iteration of the tools and systems from Tom Clancy’s The Division, alongside many of the interesting challenges that they’ve faced along the way.  

But there is still more to talk about on the AI of Tom Clancy’s The Division 2, I’m going to take a look at one of the most powerful applications of AI within the game that players never get a chance to see: the testing bots whose job it is to play the Division during development that identify bugs or faults within the game.  And I’ll be telling you all about that next time.

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Special thanks to Ubisoft for the opportunity to work with them on this project.  And of course to my patrons who crowdfund the AI and Games series.

Though a launch date has yet to be announced, Rocket League is making its way toward its free-to-play debut. As part of that transition, developer Psyonix has now announced that, once the free-to-play switch is flipped, Rocket League won’t require paid memberships for online play on PlayStation 4 or Nintendo Switch.

Typically, subscriptions to a platform’s service of choice–PlayStation Plus for PS4, Xbox Live Gold for Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch Online for Nintendo Switch–are a requirement for online play, though there have been exceptions to those rules in the past. 

Rocket League now looks to be one of those exceptions, at least on two of its three console platforms. There’s notably no change mentioned in Psyonix’s blog post for Xbox Live Gold, meaning players hoping to play Rocket League online via their Xbox will still need to pay Microsoft for the privilege of online play.

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: Seattle, Washington

As Senior Services Engineer at System Era, you are responsible for our online services technology stack. The team will rely on your understanding of the backend service needs of modern live-service online multiplayer games and the performance, cost, and security concerns that go along with them to shape our services strategy. In addition to building technology from scratch, you will be able to confidently navigate the current landscape of available services middleware and the tradeoffs involved in using it. You enjoy building a partnership with the client game team to ensure that our services strategy not only meets security and scale requirements, but also unlocks novel game features and creates opportunities for players to engage in collaborative connected experiences. This strong collaborative relationship allows you to develop service APIs that are easy to use and evangelize their power across the team. When the need arises, you’re comfortable jumping into client code to integrate new services features yourself. You value strong teamwork and use your excellent written and verbal communication skills to be a force multiplier for the team. 

Due to COVID-19, the System Era team is currently working remotely. This position will begin with remote work, with the expectation of co-location with the team in Seattle as soon as it is safe and reasonable to do so. Compensation includes salary, benefits with full medical and dental coverage, 401k with company match, and may include relocation assistance. We look for candidates who value joining a team with a diverse set of backgrounds, experiences, interests, and viewpoints. 

Responsibilities 

• Maintain the existing online services stack for ASTRONEER. 

• Design, implement, and maintain reliable, secure, and scalable backend services technology to support new features. 
• Collaborate with the tools and infrastructure team to design, implement, and maintain the technology needed to test and deploy backend services. 
• Collaborate with the rest of the engineering team to design and implement services integration with the game client. 
• Develop, implement, and teach best practices for service development and integration. 
• Evaluate feature sets and cost for services middleware. 

Qualifications 

• 6+ years of professional experience as an engineer in the games industry 
• 4+ years of professional experience designing, building, shipping, and maintaining online services at scale 
• At least one shipped title with a significant online multiplayer component  
• Extensive knowledge of common technology stacks for live-service online multiplayer games 

• Experience writing C/C++ services integration code in a game client 
• Strong programming and debugging skills with at least one of C/C++, C#, JavaScript, Java, Go, Rust, and/or Python 
• Experience working with at least one major public cloud provider (Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, AWS, etc.) 
• Experience working with RESTful services 
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills 

Nice to Have 

• Experience working with Unreal Engine 4  
• Experience working with Microsoft PlayFab  
• Experience writing database queries 
• Experience building microservices and working with containerization technologies such as Docker 
• Management experience 

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.

Quality assurance is an often underappreciated and misunderstood part of the game development process. Depending on the studio, team sizes can vary from a single person to a whole team of individuals, responsible for testing, tracking, and communicating any bugs they may find.

Because of this, the workflow can sometimes be markedly different between studios, with teams preferring certain software or processes over others. 

Lesleyann White is the principal QA specialist at Failbetter Games, a studio specializing in interactive fiction games like Sunless Sea and Sunless Skies. Before that, she worked on Runescape at Jagex where she worked alongside a QA department of roughly 30 people. But at Failbetter she is the only person responsible for quality assurance.

“The hierarchy is so different,” explains White. “I remember before I arrived, Failbetter didn’t have a QA department, so it is kind of an all-encompassing role, working across all the projects, doing all of the work, all of the planning, whereas in a larger company – for example, when I worked at Jagex…we had junior testers who would be able to be promoted up to a tester, a senior, a lead. Then we had the QA manager who was responsible for the whole of the QA department, all the personnel side as well, such as people management

Failbetter Games’ Sunless Skies

Team17 is a Wakefield-based developer and publisher. The QA department is responsible for polishing their own games, such as Worms W.M.D., but also helping out smaller teams QA test their own projects as well, including hit games like Overcooked and Overcooked 2. The QA department at the publisher is currently 43 people strong, with a range of roles within that team. 

Chloe Crookes is a senior QA analyst at the studio. During a recent talk at Yorkshire Games Festival, she explained her role as follows: “The difference between standard QA and senior, in my experience, is generally senior QA have their own team of testers and will oversee their work as well as completing their own. You might also complete test plans and organize test cases.” Crookes’ current project is Moving Out, a new co-operative game developed by Devm Games and SMG Studio, and published by Team17.

SMG Studio and Devm Games’ Moving Out

Cambridge-based studio Frontier Developments is another larger development studio, which primarily develops simulation games such as Jurassic World Evolution and Planet Zoo.

Much like Team17, they also have a range of different roles within their QA department. Colin Davis, the head of QA at the studio, explains the advantage of this: “Our size allows us to offer a large variety of testing. We have a number of specialized teams working alongside the more typical functionality test approach. Our Functionality testers are responsible for testing all gameplay and features that form the game they are assigned to, while our specialized teams are focused on whichever game requires their particular type of testing at that given time.”

As well as different roles, there are also a number of different tools available to those in QA and these can differ depending on the studio and their own internal workflow.

“We pretty much perform all types of testing at Failbetter,” White explains. “System, integration, smoke, regression, performance, compatibility, compliance, etc. It’s easier to say what types of testing we don’t do at Failbetter: localization and unit testing.” White explains that the former is due to the large word count within Failbetter’s games that would make the process costly and inefficient, while the latter is something that she would like to introduce in the future. 

For both bug reporting and project management, White uses Jira as her preferred tool, or has done for the last year or so. As a system administrator, she enjoys how configurable it can be and how flexible it is for both smaller and larger projects — an opinion that’s supported by Frontier also adopting the same issue tracking software at times for their own needs. 

As for other tools, White uses software such as Unity for testing and bug fixing and various other bespoke testing tools, including macros like AutoHotkey and Failbetter’s in-house CMS: Storynexus. That’s in addition to Confluence or Google Docs for writing technical documents. Given the small size of the studio the team like to keep things simple and cost-effective to avoid creating more issues for themselves or overcomplicating their workflow.

Team17, meanwhile uses Excel for test plans and Redmine as their database system of choice. Redmine allows them to give a summary of each issue they encounter, a description of that issue, and enter custom fields to elaborate on which format or platform they encountered the problem. They can also add any relevant screenshots or videos to give developers more information to go on. 

“Generally, we’ll always attempt to reproduce issues as many times as we can to get a solid reproduction for it before we give it to the developers to fix,” Crookes elaborates in our interview following her talk. “More often than not if a bug is happening, it will be obvious why it is happening so usually that’s just a very easy thing to do…But sometimes you have edge case issues where you’re like I’m not quite sure why this is happening…In times like that, we just have to provide the developers with as much as we can give them and then kind of see if we encounter it again.” 

Frontier Developments’ Planet Zoo

According to Davis, Frontier has gone a step further to create their own bespoke tool that can interface with several bug databases. This way Frontier developers can template much of their bug writing, making everything more efficient and compatible overall. On projects, they apply a variety of testing based on the requirements of a particular game. This includes everything from certification to compatibility to localization, user experience, destructive, and automation.

Davis explains, “Automation is an important part of what we do, as it allows us to automate some of the more repetitive work like placing every single asset down in a game like Planet Coaster and have the machine check that they can be placed in the game. This frees us up to look a little more closely at what the game experience is like.

“In addition to this, we will also use automated testing to create a range of tests to help us with each game we work on. These tests can range from simple things like ensuring you can start the game on any given platform on a newly compiled build, to more advanced things like flying a ship around in Elite, landing at various stations and then working out what the best trade route might be from the information presented. This type of automation is closer to what a player might be doing in the game and can aid in catching issues towards the more experiential side.”

Both White and Crookes also elaborated on the importance of ‘regression testing’ or ‘halo testing’ as it is sometimes called. That is, looking around a fix to make sure a change hasn’t impacted the build elsewhere. 

“What we would do is directly test the issue at hand and then, for example, if they’ve changed the way an achievement unlocks you would then shift your focus to a broader look at that achievement,” Crookes states. “So, for example, if you need to complete a certain level to unlock it, maybe you test failing the level and make sure that doesn’t unlock it. So, it is kind of blind testing around it, but you also have to pull things from past experience, so if you know something similar has happened in another game you can test around that.”

One thing the teams all attest to is the value of putting a game in front of a players. This is especially true in relation to the issues of accessibility and balancing.

White explains, “With regards to accessibility testing, it’s important for QA teams to perform it, but I feel there’s no substitute for putting the product in front of the target audience. Having specific test groups evaluate a feature often raises aspects about the design’s accessibility that you hadn’t considered. It’s one of the reasons we put our games in Early Access. It allows us to get the game in front of players with a wide range of accessibility concerns and gather their feedback.”

Recently, for instance, Failbetter ran a new beta for an interactive map (embedded below) for Fallen London. As part of this process, they reached out to those within their community who use a screen reader to hear their input about this new addition.  

Team17 meanwhile perform regular usability tests, where they invite members of the public to get hands-on with their games and test how they are balanced. This allows them to get feedback from individuals unfamiliar with the game being played, which has proven an invaluable asset.

“We get people from the general public to come and test the games and provide feedback,” says Crookes. “I think it’s really useful for us, because the QA teams can be on projects for like sixteen months and sometimes because we’re like so good at the game sometimes we can make it a bit difficult as well. And it’s hard for us to take a step back and go ‘Right, this doesn’t actually play very well.’”

For those thinking of getting into QA, I asked what steps people can take to make themselves stand out and what studios are looking for in terms of a desirable applicant for a QA position. This is what they had to say:

“When it comes to starting out, try not to treat QA as a foot in the door for the games industry,” argues Davis. “Quality Assurance is an integral part of the development process, it’s a great career choice for anyone who’s interested in games and wants to make a difference.” He gives some examples of how to develop your skills. “If you’ve ever tried speed running a game, try enhancing these skills without relying on information you find online. The skills and abilities you pick up from doing this can be extremely useful in QA!”

“The best thing is to sell the fact you want to be in the industry, not the fact that you want to play games,” answers Crookes. “People will apply thinking it’s just playing games all day and they won’t last very long, because it is quite a tough job when you have submissions coming up and deadlines. I think being able to prove that you want to be there because you have a passion for the industry is probably the main thing. If you’ve made games at home, show them, and say, ‘Hey, look at all this effort I’ve been putting in. This is where I want to be. This is what I want to do’. I think you just really need to be able to sell it.”

Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment parent company AT&T is reportedly no longer looking to sell off the video game development and publishing division. According to sources speaking to Bloomberg, one factor in the change of heart is the decision that WBIE might be considered too valuable to sell off.

After all, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment represents a sizable collection of studios with a number of notable releases over the years like Batman: Arkham dev Rocksteady, Mortal Kombat dev Netherrealm, WB Games Montreal, Middle-earth: Shadow of War dev Monolith Productions, and Scribblenauts dev 5th Cell. 

Many of those studios recently announced or detailed next gen projects as well, including Traveller’s Tales’ Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, WB Games Montreal’s Gotham Knights, and Rocksteady’s Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. 

Earlier whispers of a potential sale had reportedly managed to catch the eye of potential buyers like Microsoft, Take-Two Interactive, Electronic Arts, and Activision Blizzard, with some reports saying the acquisition could be priced at as much as $4 billion. 

Bloomberg’s report says that the decision to abandon the sale could be subject to change down the line, but notes that its sources say WBIE was deemed too valuable to offload currently as part of a debt reduction effort.

Electronic Arts’ subscription service EA Play has officially launched on Steam, bringing the program to its first non-EA-owned storefront on PC.

EA Play, previously known as either EA Access or Origin Access depending on the platform, is EA’s own take a the subscription game library that also grants early access or discounts to some EA-published games as well.
 
The recently rebranded service has been on PC for a while through EA’s own Origin platform, but agreements between Valve and EA only recently have helped move both the service and a slew of EA games previously missing from Steam to Valve’s digital game storefront.

Players can subscribe to EA Play from right within Steam, either annually or monthly, through the same process they’d normally go through to buy any game or digital product on the platform. An active subscription grants them on-demand access to whatever EA games are featured in the EA Play library, 10 percent off of EA purchases through Steam, and some in-game content.

This marks EA Play’s fourth home following its earlier Origin, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One launches, but it’s worth calling out that the service itself is platform specific and as such a separate subscription is needed for each of those individual platforms.

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: Agoura Hills, California

At Visual Concepts, we believe great games are made by diverse and empowered teams with a shared passion for play. As one of the world’s top game development studios, we have shipped over 100 multi-sku titles to critical acclaim and commercial success. Our teams are independent and entrepreneurial. Our studios in Agoura Hills, Novato, Orange County, Budapest, Shanghai, and Seoul are committed to artistry and technical innovation, offering top candidates the opportunity to learn and grow with some of the smartest and most creative minds in the industry.  

Are you fascinated by the function and literacy of virtual cameras? Do you admire the flawless logic of a 3rd-person camera, or the seamless blending of gameplay and narrative? Do you have a passion for cinematic design, and its impact on the gameplay experience? Can you explain the virtues of a great shot, and write a spec that translates your aesthetic into a set of tools and game logic? If so, we are looking for you.  

Our Agoura Hills studio is looking for a Camera Designer to design and implement game cameras that make players feel like they are part of the action.  As a Camera Designer you will interface with the design and programming teams to ensure you have the tools necessary to deliver state-of-the-art cinematic and gameplay experiences where every shot is framed perfectly for maximum dramatic effect.

What You Will Do:

• Own the design of the in-game camera system, features, and creation tools
• Author cameras that support core gameplay and highlight special moments
• Work with a team of designers, producers, and engineers to ensure that camera authoring tools are simple and intuitive, and  can be used to implement changes quickly
• Use systems you design to deliver great camerawork across multiple game modes, from in-ring fighting, to cutscenes, to narrative sequences
• Be an advocate for the end user by pushing for systems which are easy to understand and use
• Be a go-to resource for team members when questions regarding the camera system arise

Requirements:

• One to four years’ experience as a camera or system designer
• Ability to design and utilize systems that replicate real-world broadcast and film cameras, incorporating hand-held vs. mounted, viewing angle, depth of field, aperture, etc.
• Ability to design logic for camera behavior which considers a variety of constraints, including multiple characters, spacing, varied height and occluding objects
• Ability to tell story using camera literacy in broadcast and narrative, including composition and framing, zoom usage, multi-camera live setup, cutaways and group and table dialog
• Ability to design and utilize systems to replicate director and cameraman behavior and choreography, including movement (i.e. cameraman holding a camera), zoom, anticipation, rack focus, tracking, etc.
• Attention to detail and completeness, ability to see around corners, anticipate issues
• Organized, excellent communication skills, passion for games, collaborative demeanor

Preferred Qualifications:

• Scripting experience – C#, LUA, Blueprint, etc.
• General experience with development software – Jira, perforce, bug tracking software, etc.
• Experience with 3D editors – Unity, Unreal, etc.

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.

Ubisoft once again came under fire over the weekend, this time for using real-world imagery and situations as a backdrop for a new mobile game in a way that aligned the Black Lives Matter movement and protests with the game’s fictional terrorist group Umbra.

The intro video for Tom Clancy’s Elite Squad that made the rounds over the weekend tells the story of its fictitious shadow organization Umbra while visually showing images of protests and using the raised fist symbol historically tied to the Black Power movement as Umbra’s own logo.

By Ubisoft’s own admission, its an insensitive and harmful comparison to make. The game steals a symbol with historical significance, but also one that is widely used by and in support of the Black community as protests against police violence toward Black people continue across the United States. 

Ubisoft itself donated money and made a public pledge in support of the Black Lives Matter movement when George Floyd was killed by police only months ago. In a statement now at odds with its own actions, Ubisoft at the time said that it “[stands] in solidarity with Black team members, players, and the Black community.”

An update regarding Tom Clancy’s Elite Squad: pic.twitter.com/G6Hb1SO7Gx

— Ubisoft (@Ubisoft) August 29, 2020

The company has now apologized, at least internally according to a Bloomberg report, and publicly said that the raised black fist imagery will be removed from the game as soon as possible.

Through an internal message obtained by Bloomberg, Elite Squad creative director and Ubisoft Owlient general manager Charlie Guillemot said that the team would remove the game’s entire intro sequence and noted that the segment in particular was produced in 2018 despite its parallels to current events. 

“In the future, we will more rigorously review content produced and about to be released in order to help us avoid similar mistakes,” reads a portion of the message shared by Bloomberg.