Speaking of other forms of internet communication, let’s talk about email.  Specifically, about emails you send to try and get a job.  There are a few things we’ve seen at the office recently that seem like they should be obvious, but apparently need to be repeated.

1.  When sending an email, spell your name correctly in the subject line.  I felt bad for this guy–he did everything else pretty right, but obviously was at the point where he’d typed the same thing so many times it didn’t look like a real word anymore.  He had spelled his name one way in his resume and the body of the email, but it was spelled wrong in the subject.  Typing fatigue for sure.

2.  When sending an email, try to spell things correctly. People in the industry do often have notoriously bad spelling, but when you’re applying you should make it as easy as possible for the person reading your email to understand it.  When we have to puzzle out spellings of words it doesn’t endear you to us.

3.  Don’t send out mass-emails. Yes, you’re applying to a lot of places.  We understand that.  But for the love of corndogs, don’t leave fifty emails in the “to” line on your application.  We can see those. When the “to” field of the email is longer than the email itself, it’s unprofessional.  It also makes us laugh a lot.  Do yourself a favor.  Email all those companies separately, and try to tailor your cover letter to each company.  It will make you look much more professional and appealing.

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In completely different news, I wrote my very first knitting pattern and published it online!  It’s for socks.  For all four of you people who read this and like knitting, here is the pattern.

TwinkleTwinkleLittleSocks

If you do knit it, please let me know!  I’d be excited to see it.

Also, here is some eye candy of yarn I dyed myself.

Purple hand-dyed yarn.

It was a lot of fun to do!

Furthermore, if you’re playing a game and you come across some kind of bug in it, chances are the developers know.  Many, if not most games will ship with some kind of bug.  It might be a simple art bug where a door is slightly offset from the wall.  It might be a collision issue where you get blocked from walking for no actual reason, or, alternately, where you can walk straight through a wall that shouldn’t allow passage.  It might be possible to get permanently stuck in the scenery, or have the audio skip disjointedly, or have the player just straight-up fall out of the world.  The thing is, the developers probably know damn well the game is shipping with bugs.  You really don’t need to tell them that.

Why do games ship with bugs, then?  Well, sometimes schedules get drastically cut, and there just isn’t time.  Sometimes schedules were poorly planned to begin with, and there just isn’t time.  Sometimes the very nature of the game you’re working on gets dramatically changed, requiring a lot of re-working, and there just isn’t time.  Sometimes half the people at a studio get laid off, and there just aren’t enough people to complete the game in time.  (Have you noticed a pattern yet?)  Sometimes a minor bug is known about and it just doesn’t get fixed because it’s not important enough to risk breaking the level for.  Toward the end of development, a game is like a house of cards.  If you have framerate, memory, gameplay and story all working together reasonably well, you do not risk breaking that balance for something as small as a trash plane sticking through a wall or a chair floating slightly above the floor.

My boss often says there are two kinds of games:  Game that are perfect, and games that ship.  It’s much better to work on games that ship.

Now that that is out of the way…

On a previous post, Robert asked:

So, I have a question pertaining to 3-D modeling.  For the purposes of my portfolio, I’m wondering how high-res my pieces should be?  I frequently find myself creating models that are shaped very well, but they have a rather large poly count. So, I guess the underlying question here is whether it is more impressive in a portfolio to see very high poly count models with good texture or to see lower poly count models with textures that just give the appearance of higher resolution?  (Keeping in mind that my painting/drawing skills are rather poor at present so the textures are a definite weakness for me right now)

This is a good question, and the answer is almost always, “It depends.”  As a general guideline, you should never put more geometry into a model than is absolutely necessary to create the shape you want.  If you’re making a cube, that cube only needs to be 6 polygons.  A cube that is 600 polygons is ridiculous, because you really only need 6 in order to make the cube look like a cube.  The more complex the object you’re creating, the more polygons you’ll probably need to make it look right.  If you have a set budget for polygons, use them where you’ll get the most bang for your buck.  People won’t care if a door is made up of six polygons, but they’ll notice if the doorknob is blocky and unrealistic.  Have a look at the wireframe on one of my meshes:

This is a fairly high-poly mesh, but I spent those polys where it would show.  If those curves were choppy and blocky, the mesh would just look bad.  Since I spent the polygons on those important parts, the blocky headboard and footboard can be very simple.

Generally, it’s more impressive to see a lower-poly model that looks good than a ridiculously high-poly model.  Anyone can throw extra polygons at a mesh to make it look smoother, but it’s much harder to serve modeling steak on a hamburger budget and it shows more skill.  Texturing is also really important–if you model really well but you can’t texture for poo, you’ll probably have a very hard time getting hired.  There really aren’t separate modeling and texturing positions in most companies–3-D artists do both, so good skills in both areas are pretty necessary for the job.

Thanks for the question!  I hope this was helpful.

But mostly I’m excited about the new fridge.

Anyway, a few days ago commenter Chandler asked a couple of questions:

how much time would you say is spent testing the games you’re working on compared to actually working on modeling and stuff for them? What kinds of things do you look for specifically as a graphic designer when testing?

I’d also maybe like to hear more about the outsourcing of modeling you mentioned… how severe is it, and how do you feel about it?

How much time I end up testing really depends on how far along in the project we are.  If we’re still in full production, I don’t test really at all because I’m busy creating assets.  In the early stages, there’s not much point in playtesting because there are no completed levels.  The later it gets into production, the more levels there are to test and the more we’ll end up playtesting them.  Since the art tasks tend to be finished before the design tasks, it naturally falls to the art team to pick up more playtesting as the project progresses.

When I playtest, I’m actually not looking for things from an artist’s perspective!  I’m checking to make sure the game works.  We playtest to ensure the levels can be completed and that there are no major bugs that are either reeeaaally noticeable or stop the player from proceeding.  I’ll see a lot of art issues, of course, but that’s not the point of the playtest.  The point of playtesting is to make sure there are no places where the player gets stuck on collision, trapped in a wall or falls out of the world.

Outsourcing can be an issue, but not always.  The thing about outsourcing is that it can be really helpful in dynamically scaling your art team size.  You don’t usually save money on a per-asset basis, but you can essentially hire 30 extra artists for a month to crank out a bunch of stuff for your project, and then not have to find the money to keep those 30 extra artists around for several years.  Outsourcing is really only useful for characters and non-essential props for the most part.  If you try and outsource things like a wall system or a catwalk system you’ll end up wasting loads and loads of time getting the outsourcing team to tweak those assets to your specifications.  It’s much more efficient to keep important assets like that inside the company, where the turnaround time is 15 minutes.  The further outside the company you go, the longer the turnaround time is.  A 12-hour turnaround time for revisions really adds up if an asset needs more than one tweak!

The other thing about outsourcing is it needn’t be outside the country.  There are outsourcing firms in the US.  We sometimes work with a Seattle outsourcing company.  Outsourcing companies can be a great way for artists to get experience, too!  You might not get a job with a game studio, but working as a 3-d artist at an outsourcing company will get you into the industry.  I personally don’t feel threatened by outsourcing, because a studio is always going to need some in-house artists to ensure quality and quick turn-around.

Thanks for the questions, Chandler!

I’m taking the day off from blogging.  I just shipped a game.  I’m totally allowed.

Saw will ship.  People will buy it, and play it, and hopefully like it.

This is my first shipped title.  It’s not the first title I’ve worked on, but the previous title didn’t ship.  (That happens surprisingly often.)  I’ve done everything on this from concept art to 3-d modeling to asset management to organizational duties to playtesting it until I wanted to cry.  This title went from having a new, inexperienced publisher that was viewed as completely incompetent, to having no publisher at all for several months when said incompetent publisher went bankrupt, to being published by Konami.  This title survived layoffs, rehires, and a shortened dev cycle.  We worked on it through the coldest, snowiest winter Seattle has seen in years and the hottest summer Seattle has seen in years.  We worked on it through crunch time and through the goddamn Swine Flu.

Tomorrow, it’s going to be real.  It’s going to be in stores.  I will have shipped a title, a title that has been demonized and ragged on since it was first announced.  People are going to buy it.  Reviewers will review it.  There’s even a strategy guide!  A real, official one!

Me, though?  I’m not going to believe it until I see it for myself.  I keep thinking all the copies are going to spontaneously combust or something, and all my work will be for naught.  Pretty sure that won’t happen, though.

Pretty sure…

That doesn’t really happen, right?

Right?

When this happens, hobbies are what will save your sanity.  I really recommend having a couple of hobbies outside of work that are as far removed from video games as possible.  If you make video games all day, and then come home and play video games all night, that’s a lot of time with a console or computer.  There’s nothing wrong with that if you enjoy it, but for me personally, sometimes the last thing I want to do after a day of playtesting is play another game, even one that isn’t broken.  There are also some serious health problems that can result from a sedentary lifestyle, as well as the repetitive stress injuries that come hand-in-hand with a lot of computer use.  (Ask me how I know.  Tennis elbow.  FROM MOUSING.)

Personally, the two hobbies outside of work that keep me sane are knitting and yoga.  Knitting because it’s a creative endeavor that at the same time requires none of the tools I use at work, and yoga because it is about as far from sitting in front of a screen as it is possible to be.

The things that I like about knitting are somewhat telling.  It’s creative and lets me use my art skills when it comes to designing a garment or settling on a color scheme.  It’s also something that I can control completely from start to finish.  Nothing randomly glitches and crashes when you’re knitting.  It’s impossible to have a corrupted save file with knitting.  It’s portable, so I can do it on the bus, at home, or at a tea shop.  I don’t have to play super-close attention to it, so I can do it while I’m watching TV or holding a conversation.  I don’t have to make a special time for knitting the way I have to for drawing.  I can pick up knitting and start right where I left off without wandering all over the map trying to figure out what the hell I was supposed to do.  (Final Fantasy III on the DS, I’m looking at you.)  And when I’m done knitting something, I have a finished product that doesn’t need to be submitted to any companies or be approved by any publishers.  It’s mine, and I made it the way I wanted.

Yoga, on the other hand, requires me to actually pay attention to my body and nothing else for an hour.  It makes me move in hundreds of ways that I don’t at work.  There are poses and exercises that stretch the Perpetual Mouse Muscle Knot that lives in my right shoulder blade.  I do yoga because I know that what I do for a living can be extremely damaging to my body in a lot of ways, and yoga is a way to counteract that.  Also, it has brought me a lot closer to being able to touch my toes when I bend over, and that’s a serious accomplishment for someone with hamstrings like mine!

Whatever you do in the industry, remember to have a life outside of it.  It’s much healthier for everyone.

2.  The second floor (also known as the Mezzanine) is really small because it was added after the studio bought the building.  It was previously two floors, with the bottom floor rather resembling a warehouse.

3.  I was the first female artist to work at the company in several years.  For about a year, I was the only female artist working at the company.

4.  This meant that the guys slightly resented me when I first showed up, because it meant they couldn’t use both downstairs bathrooms anymore.  (They got over it.)

5.  Because the building is old, the heating and cooling system leaves something to be desired.  I, for example, am always cold.  (The fact that I am the tiniest person in the office might have something to do with this.)  The people who sit near the windows are always warm.  The guy who is somehow magically protected from all the vents is a comfortable temperature.  I don’t bother complaining about it anymore.  I have a sweater that lives at work solely because it’s always so goddamn cold there.

6.  In the kitchens, we have microwaves, toaster ovens and a pannini press.  Probably once a week, people will apparently attempt to light things on fire in the toaster oven.  I suspect this is why we do not also have a hot plate.

7.  Also in the kitchens, we have water coolers.  It seems like I am always the one to change the jugs when they run empty.  These jugs weigh almost half as much as I do.  I think it is bitterly unfair that I end up changing them, but I also don’t want to be the inconsiderate bastard who leaves them there empty.  This is a source of internal struggle.

8.  There are no forks.  I have no idea where they have all gone.  Perhaps they are with my art pencils?  We used to have forks, I know, because I saw them.  I think that one of two things is occurring, here.  Either someone is hoarding all the forks and has a giant, jingly drawer full of them in his desk that we will discover only when he quits, or the forks are turning themselves into spoons overnight.  I suspect the latter, because we really have more spoons than is sane.

9.  If I turn around and crane my neck, I can kinda see a window.  This lack of windows means that I can get to work while it is sunny and leave to discover hail, with no freaking idea when the transition was.

10.  Being located in Downtown Seattle is really awesome because there are tons of delicious lunch options nearby.  It also means I can live in Seattle, which I love, without having a hellish commute across any kind of bridge.  I appreciate this about my studio very much.

If you manage to get an interview and they mention that 12-hour-days are mandatory, run. You do not want to work for a company that will throw you into extended crunch time right from the beginning.  This is a sign of a company that does not care about its employees and they will throw you to the wolves (or the unemployment line) if it becomes more profitable for them to do that then keep you employed.  Many people think that 12-hour-days are just a part of the industry and it’s to be expected.  They think that if they don’t work 12-hour-days they won’t get hired, or be able to do what they love.  This attitude is what allows companies to get away with this kind of bullshit.  If everyone at a studio stood up and said, “We are not working these inhumane hours any longer,” the studio would have to budge.  Yes, there are people waiting in the wings who would take those jobs in an instant, but then the studio would lose tons of time and money trying to get the entirely new team up to speed.  That’s not profitable.

Work should not be abusive or take advantage of the employee.  There are studios that care about their employees and try to keep them from having to crunch on projects.  Sometimes long hours are inevitable–something went wrong with this build and it needs to go out tomorrow, so people are going to stay late to make sure that gets done.  Expecting to work long hours every once in a while is completely different from being forced to work long hours every day, for weeks and months and years.  That is the kind of working environment that causes people to burn out after a short time in the industry, people who might have been able to make great contributions if their hours hadn’t nearly killed them.

Remember, you want a job that you’ll like.  Just because it’s in the industry doesn’t make it a good job.  You can’t afford to be picky about things like art style or the game you’re working on, but you can’t afford not to be picky about things that are going to seriously effect your mental and physical health.  Work should not be an abusive relationship.

Where should I go to school if I want to make video games?

In the US, there are pretty much two schools specifically for game design that are worth the money.  Digipen in Seattle, and the Guild Hall in Dallas.  If you graduate from one of these schools, you are pretty much guarateed a job.  Most of Digipen’s students are hired before they even graduate.  (The Portal team?  Poached wholesale by Valve from Digipen.)  That is, of course…  IF you graduate.  Both schools have a pretty hardcore schedule and will work you hard, harder than you will probably end up working in the industry.  Digipen has many students drop out in the first six months because they just can’t handle it.

What if you don’t live in Dallas or Seattle, though?  (Well, move.  You’re going to have to move to Dallas, Seattle or Southern California to get a job in the industry anyway, so keep that in mind.)  Maybe you have some kind of school near you that offers a game design course, of you’re looking at the Art Institute of Whatever City You Live In.  The first thing you want to look at is price. Many game design courses are expensive and you need to know if they’re worth the money beforehand.  Ask about how many graduates of the course have been hired, and where.  Post on a place like CGChat and see if anyone has heard of the program or attended it and what they thought.  These programs can be useful in teaching you new skills, or a total waste of money.

If you’re looking to be an artist, consider getting a traditional fine-arts degree and learning 3-d in your spare time or in continuing education classes.  A strong background in fine arts and 2-d work will translate to a stronger portfolio and better 3-d work.  One of the major benefits of this approach is you can go to school where ever is close, even start out at a community college, and spend a lot less money in the long run.

Want to be a programmer?  Find a college with a decent computer science program and take that.  You don’t need to learn game-specific programming, C++ will do.  Get your hands on the Unreal Editor or something similar and learn to work with it and modify it in your spare time.  If you have solid programming skills, a studio is likely to work with you to get you familiar with the engine they use and any specialized coding required.  Everyone has to start somewhere.

If you want to be a game designer?  Well, that one’s tricky.  There aren’t that many classes out there that teach you how to really design systems.  There’s a lot more to design than just having an awesome idea.  That idea needs to work properly, it needs to work with other ideas and it needs to have rules governing how it works.  There aren’t classes for that kind of thing, it’s something learned as you go.  The best advice I’ve heard on this one?  Design your own board game. Make a board, invent the rules, and then get your friends to play it and tell you what they think.  Get lots of people to play it.  Ask them if it’s fun, and specifically what makes it fun.  Ask them what problems they had with it.  After you get all their feedback, take it into consideration and change the game to make it better.  That’s what designers do.  They come up with ideas and then design systems to make the ideas work correctly.  Schools, sadly, lack good programs that teach these things, so if you want to learn them, you have to teach yourself.

Good luck, and where ever you end up going to school, remember to do your homework!