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: Renton, WA

At Wizards of the Coast, we connect people around the world through play and imagination. From our genre defining games like Magic: The Gathering® and Dungeons & Dragons® to our growing multiverse, we continue to innovate and build new ways to foster friendship and connection. That’s where you come in!

Are you a veteran software designer with experience developing and supporting a live game service?

The Magic: The Gathering Arena team is looking for an experienced engineer to help manage and direct the engineering team who builds and maintains our game client in Unity. In close collaboration with designers, artists, and other engineers, you’ll be one of the main drivers of designs and decisions within the team.

What you’ll do

• Directly manage, guide and supervise a team of software developers while contributing to the entire project
• Design and implement solutions for Magic: The Gathering Arena in alignment with architectural designs and program needs
• Provide consultation on sophisticated projects as a top level contributor/specialist
• Communicate and iterate on technical designs and decisions with the team and help troubleshoot and resolve technical problems as they arise on production environments
• Use your experience to grasp issues quickly and make critical judgments in the absence of complete information
• Work with a variety of other departments to build technical requirements

What you bring

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or 5 years of experience in professional software development.
• 6 years of total job experience
• Experience leading and mentoring effective teams.
• Experience with front-end software development.
• Proven understanding and experience working on client/server architectures.
• Strong coding, debugging and problem-solving skills and the ability to write readable, maintainable code.
• Strong communication and teamwork with diverse groups of people in various roles.
• Software development experience with multiple platforms (Windows, iOS, Android, etc.)
• Sound knowledge of software engineering, software engineering methodologies, and the impact of early decisions on later development stages of software projects.

We are an equal opportunity / affirmative action employer

The above is intended to describe the general content of and the requirements for satisfactory performance in this position. It is not to be construed as an exhaustive statement of the duties, responsibilities, or requirements of the position.

We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment.

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.

---

The Rapid Prototyping Game

I am a teacher.  I make a living helping others.  So when I began to adjunct at my local university, it was only natural that I, like any of you, would want the students to succeed in their scholarly endeavors.  My task as an employee in the School of Digital Animation and Game Design was to take my passion, game-based learning and game design, and instruct first year students in the basics of game development.  

No problem, right? 

Well…it turns out that knowing game design and teaching game design are two very different skills and I am humble enough to admit that I had a lot to learn in that first year when it came to both.  

Luckily another instructor, and a friend of mine, Andrew Peterson was willing to spend the time answering my many questions and I felt that each iteration of the class was continuing to improve.  While I knew the content and delivery was getting better, I still had this nagging feeling in my stomach.

You see, the students were still struggling.  They were afraid of failing. They were unoriginal.  They made games like Chutes and Ladders or Monopoly.  They didn’t see any value in board games and they told me quite honestly that they really only wanted to make video games.

As you can see, this was going to be quite the challenge. Each student came to class with a diverse gaming background. Some had taken a programming or game design class in high school, others had families who valued game night, a few took the course because it sounded better than a humanities credit, and many loved to play video games and wanted to make a career of it. 

If I was going to teach game design well, I needed to create a plan that would take account of all of these factors.  

What I really needed to do was create a way to increase the students exposure to game mechanics and also teach them how the elements of game design exist within a game.  I thought of it like training a chef. What they really needed was time in the kitchen–to understand major flavor profiles and to recognize that adding certain combinations worked well. They needed experience and they needed it crammed into one semester. 

It was at this time I remember mentioning to Andrew that it would be amazing to have a repository of game mechanics that that students could access. A resource where they could go to see the mechanic, have it explained, see it in a game, a dictionary of sorts for them to reference–aside from an online database. Call me old school, but I find value in holding a physical book in my hands and lovingly turning the dog-eared pages looking for untold answers.

Not long after our conversation, we attended Gencon and found out that, like many good ideas, someone had accomplished it.  We immediately purchased Geoffrey Engelstein and Isaac Shalev‘s book Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design: An Encyclopedia of Mechanisms  and instantly fell in love with it.  It was exactly what we needed as a reference book for our students.  

Armed with this book, it was time to take the next step.  As an instructional designer, I knew that I had the content that I needed for the course, now it was time to work on the delivery method.  Playing games is tactile, it’s community, it’s strategy and critical thinking.  The delivery method had to mimic those qualities. This had to be done as group work. The students had to manipulate a game board, work with the pieces, and think about how the elements worked together. Most importantly, they needed to understand the iterative process of game design. 

Understanding these teaching strategies, I began to categorize the game mechanics for the students. My goal was to create a user-friendly delivery system which grouped the elements into manageable categories which would allow the students to isolate specific components. In doing so they would be able to analyze how adding, subtracting or combining these elements would create dynamic changes in a game.  What I found was that many times students would focus on the entertainment when they were play testing–without ever thinking analytically about why they were having fun.  This new system, which I called The Rapid Prototyping Game, taught them how to make meaningful choices as they learned the iterative process through game play.  

The first rendition of the RPG game consisted of dice, index cards, and tool box stocked with gaming pieces, markers, pens, and other tools of a game designer.

Loaded down with my prototype, I unleashed my creation on the students in five phases. I described that they were going to build a game, but many of the elements would be decided for them. There job as game designers was to “make it work”.  There were many open variables that they could include in the game design, but I did warn them not to fall in love with their initial design because it was assuredly going to change.

The first phase was to divide the students into teams and then have them roll a dice to determine the first of what I called the “core elements” of their game. 

Dice Categories

• Game Medium (board game, card game, etc.)
• Game Format (competitive, cooperative, etc.)
• Game Objective (exploration, building, etc.)

After a short period of group discussion, I then had them begin to pull from the card decks I had created. 

Element Decks

• Mechanics Deck (nine categories)
• Theme Deck
• Victory Condition Deck
• Turn Order Deck

The students took this information and ran with it. They absolutely loved the challenge of designing a game under these parameters and I watched as teams sketched, discussed, referenced the Tabletop book and used their phones and whatever resources they could to craft their game.  Numbers were exchanged and I had found in our meeting the next week that many teams met on their own and spent many hours working on their first game. They had went down the rabbit hole on their own. 

Reflection

Good teaching comes from reflection and effective educators value the time they can allow their students to engage in what I call “directed reflection”. This is where a moderator, usually the teacher, can help the students transform into self-directed critical thinkers through group talk.  Reflection is a key component in improvement, which is why I knew I had to include this element in the Rapid Prototyping Game. So the students came back to class with another deck waiting for them, the Reflection deck. It asked them pointed questions about the game design process. Questions like: Do players care when other players are taking their turn?  A simple question that started a conversation about player agency and player choices.  

Iteration

After the reflection, it was time to remind the students that there were more challenges ahead. This was a bit of a game, right? They made their way to the front and pulled from the Iteration deck. This was where their best laid plans were thwarted by the other teams.  They drew cards from the deck that forced them to make changes to their game–getting a new mechanic, an additional victory condition, or changing the way they took their turns.  While initially this was incredibly frustrating, it changed the atmosphere of the room. Students were talking about how a new theme completely changed the way a mechanic worked.  

It was the best time to be a teacher.  You see, we revel in light bulb moments and you could see the fog of uncertainty lifting as students began to “get it”.  The students began to understand that board games do have something to them that creates a feeling.  How you introduce these elements does matter. They found out that game design wasn’t an intimidating experience and most importantly they began to see themselves as game designers.   

Well, as luck would have it, when I reached out to Geoffrey Engelstein and the folks at Taylor and Francis publishing company, they loved the idea as much as we did and they agreed to publish the game.  What that meant was Andrew and I had to put some polish on my tattered prototype and put together something educators, game designers, and hobbyists could use.  Along with our graphic artist friend, Mel Danes, we created and agreed to terms with the publishing company for our official Rapid Prototyping Game.  I hope to update any of you with the release date information which we anticipate happening in the Fall. 

I am ridiculously excited by the prospect that this game might inspire a reader in some way or help a student.  If any of you would be interested in another excerpt concerning the curriculum I use, or strategies for implementing the game, I would be more than happy to create another post. In fact, if you have specific questions I can be reached at [email protected] 

Halo’s single-player level design has long been shaped to better serve new weapons, enemies, and AI behavior. The developers created flowing canyons, rifts, and cityscapes that subtly guide players on a quest to save the galaxy.

In the past, gameplay has typically been about working your way up a hierarchy of enemies in each encounter. Playing by yourself or maybe with a couple friends, you prioritize small Grunts and fearsome Elites based on their weaponry and how it can be used in small to medium-sized spaces. Large spaces were usually reserved for vehicle levels or sniper shootouts.

But in Halo 5: Guardians, something’s very different: Enemies come in large and unfamiliar groupings. There are sniping perches that rise higher and higher over the battlefield. At certain points, the game literally asks you to wander around and listen to civilian chatter.

To figure out what drove these significant changes, we spoke to the campaign design team and did some digging ourselves to observe how this rethink makes the new levels feel different.

These are Spartans

Nicole Makila, lead producer on 343’s campaign team, says that in designing Halo 5’s new kinds of levels, various departments were constantly in meetings with each other.

“We’d ask ourselves what are the goals of the level, and how do we translate that into environment art?”

Rather than letting the level design team set out the path and have art and character teams react to that vision, the teams reacted to each other’s projects and tried to balance and flow off of each other’s work.

“We’d ask ourselves what are the goals of the level, and how do we translate that into environment art?” she says. “If there’s a new character, how does the space showcase that character’s behaviors? And if the sandbox team is developing Spartan abilities, what do we need to do with verticality to showcase those?”

To analyze Halo 5’s design, she says to start looking at where those new mechanics and rules push  against the familiar Halo space.

Take the increased number of playable Spartans. While Halo games have always had co-op modes to accommodate up to four players, Halo 5 is the first to assume that four characters will be playing at all times. Master Chief and Spartan Locke will each be joined by a crew of three Spartans controlled by AI or other human beings. 

Makila and her colleagues had to make sure that these four-Spartan squad always have something unique to be doing in a given space.

Lead campaign designer Chris Haluke calls these new spaces “bowls,” and explains that the goal in their design is to create multiple paths through that accommodate different shooter playstyles.

(Pictured above: seen from behind, one of the game’s strongest “bowls,” with a sniper perch on the right, a bottleneck down the middle, and an ammo cache on the left)

“You enter an area, and you have three to four tactical areas all around you and players can interact with a big variety of verticalities and heights,” he says. “From there, we can populate each path with slightly different encounters, which can vary ​even more depending on if all four players charge down one path, or if they split up.”

“So it is based on playstyle, but some of the spaces we’ve talked about are so large that we have the need to just have more enemies to fill them up.”

Enemy of mine enemy

Halo 5 doesn’t add substantially new kinds of enemies, but the ones defined in Halo 4–mixes of Covenant and Promethean enemy types–do get new roles.

“We had a specialized group of developers that took care of encounters from a higher [complexity] level,” says Haluke, “and we stuck to the principles of the previous Halo games to make things familiar for players.” 

“If you’re used to seeing an Elite, three Grunts, and some Jackals in that classic combination, we’re going to do the same arrangement, but we augment it with more clusters of enemies to get our number count up.” 

One striking example of this enemy augmentation is that Promethean Crawlers, the doglike enemies introduced in Halo 4, can be populated in bigger numbers than Halo 4. Before, they would supplement squads of Knight-type enemies the same way Grunts have stood by Elites, but now they can form hordes of their own and force the player to be watching their feet at short to medium range engagements. This shows how the increased space and increased number of players can lead to opportunities to tweak enemy arrangements and AI behaviors.

(Pictured above, crawlers moving to flank three Spartans engaging a Knight.)

Boosting and ground-pounding

The last big shift for Halo 5’s level design comes from the Spartan abilities. In the past, Spartan abilities were pickups that could be swapped around like firearms, leaving no guarantee a player would have a specific ability unless the game forced it on them. In Halo 5, Spartans have the same abilities all the time, including 3 new ones that significantly alter their physical speed and placement–the boost, the charge, and the ground pound. 

While each of these moves has utility in the game’s combat, lead environment artist Justin Dinges says that they also shaped his work in building out the geography and terrain of the different levels.

“One of them, the Spartan Charge, lets us do old school secret wall kind of stuff,” he says. “We got to build out this visual language the player would respond to, so they could identify suspicious walls and crack it to reveal weapon stashes or other secrets. That let us get into the exploratory adventure mode.”

“Secrets” don’t just include power rewards though. Walls can also conceal flanking paths and audio logs can be found by boosting over gaps. Constantly rewarding players by using these things to explore doesn’t just mean creating hidden power nodes–it also winds up shaping how they think about movement in newer, bigger spaces. (Above: The Spartan on the right boosts in the air in the game’s arena mode.)

Halo 5’s successes will ultimately need reach beyond its level design into an ambitious story and an eSports-focused multiplayer mode to find the level of success that Microsoft is hoping for. But as the first all-new Halo game on the Xbox One, its increased player count, tweaked enemy organization, and use of fixed player abilities tightly show how core gameplay decisions can influence the size, geography, and sense of presence in the craft of level design.

In this GDC 2018 session EA Dice’s Ryan Duffin reveals how the Battlefield 1 animation team built upon content and gameplay systems post-launch in ways that liberated animators and designers’ creativity.

Duffin used two specific examples, a rigid weapons system and a mounted soldier, to showcase how the Battlefield 1 team successfully built out the game in new directions post-launch and removed obstacles to let content creators achieve new heights.

It was an intriguing talk that offered some rare insight into the post-launch support process for a game like Battlefield 1, and now you can watch it for free via the official GDC YouTube channel!

In addition to this presentation, the GDC Vault and its accompanying YouTube channel offers numerous other free videos, audio recordings, and slides from many of the recent Game Developers Conference events, and the service offers even more members-only content for GDC Vault subscribers.

Those who purchased All Access passes to recent events like GDC or VRDC already have full access to GDC Vault, and interested parties can apply for the individual subscription via a GDC Vault subscription page. Group subscriptions are also available: game-related schools and development studios who sign up for GDC Vault Studio Subscriptions can receive access for their entire office or company by contacting staff via the GDC Vault group subscription page. 

After yesterday’s Xbox Games Showcase, developer Dontnod took an unusual step in publishing an FAQ with spoilers for its narrative adventure Tell Me Why.

(This is a spoiler warning for the rest of the article, as well as a trigger warning for discussions of transphobia to follow.)

The spoilers discussed in the FAQ do not directly discuss plot points. Rather they lay groundwork for how the game depicts one of its central characters, Tyler, who is transgender, and the depiction of Tlingit characters and culture (the Tlingit tribe resides in Alaska, where the game is set). The document also appears to act as a content warning to help players gauge if Tell Me Why will be triggering for any players who’ve experienced trauma around the game’s themes.

From an external point of view, the FAQ also reveals the thorny issues around telling stories featuring Trans and Indigenous characters when no one on the development team appears to be a member of either group. 

Both transgender and Indigenous creators have spoken about the complex emotions of watching their stories be told by creatives who have not lived through their respective realities. 

Dontnod’s document does appear to be a good-faith effort to inform players about the emotional intensity of the game’s plot, trading an “unspoiled experience” for transparency about how the developers aim to depict a story that mimics real-life traumatic pain.

Trailers for Tell Me Why have shown that the Ronan Twins experienced some kind of violence at the hands of their mother before the game starts. Since transgender people often experience familial violence, there was some speculation that the game’s plot is spurred by a troubling depiction of transphobia.

Dontnod’s FAQ states that this is not the company’s intent. Apparently the game’s writers have attempted to paint the Ronan twins’ mother as a character undergoing some other (possibly supernatural) crisis, who was supportive of her transgender son and trying to learn more about his identity. The game also does not use Tyler’s assigned birth name (commonly referred to by transgender folks as a ‘deadname’), though it does contain discussions and brief depictions of transphobia and homophobia.

The studio explictly states in the FAQ that it does not want to follow in the footsteps of other mainstream stories like the film Dallas Buyer’s Club (our reference, not theirs) that rely on the experience of transitioning and the pain of transphobia as central story points. “Because so many mainstream narratives about trans people are rooted in pain or trauma, it was important to our team to tell a different, more multi-dimensional story with Tyler,” the FAQ says.

Elsewhere, the FAQ attempts to address the inclusion of Tlingit characters, explaining that Tlingit artists were comissioned to create in-game assets that represent the tribe’s culture. Dontnod also states that it partnered with the Huna Heritage Foundation to consult on how it depicts the game’s Indigenous characters and culture. The FAQ does not state if Tell Me Why’s two Tlingit characters are voiced by Indigenous actors.

If that all seems like a complex document for a developer to put out, it’s because these are complex issues made worthy of scrutiny by Dontnod’s seeming lack of trans & Indigenous creative leads, and the historical exploitation of both groups in commercial media. 

This FAQ can represent a good-faith effort by Dontnod to let players know about how it’s approached these sensitive themes, yet players (and fellow developers) may still have reason to be wary about the game’s direction. After all, developers from both groups have spent the last few decades telling their own stories in different ways, sometimes to explore their trauma, other times to celebrate their own existence.

How successfully Dontnod has told Tell Me Why’s story will become clear when it debuts on August 27th, 2020.