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.

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.

This seems like a pretty innocuous statement.  I mean, it’s just a job.  It’s a fairly cool job (more on that later) but people have a lot of misconceptions about the industry and it tends to manifest in inaccurate statements.  The two I hear most often?

1.  “Oh, awesome!  I wish I got paid to play video games all day!”

You know what?  So do I!  Because I don’t get to!  Because that’s not my job!  I make video games, I don’t play them all the time.  When I do get to play a game at work, it’s the one I’m currently working on.  And it’s broken.  And I’ve played it approximately a hojillion times already, so all the playing runs together into one huge memory and I can’t tell today from yesterday and even the parts of the game I liked at one point make me want to stab myself in the face just so I don’t have to play this goddamn game anymore oh gods why won’t it stop someone make it stop!

Ahem.  The other thing I hear about 50% of the time is this:

2.  Oh, so you’re a programmer?

No.  NO I AM NOT.  I am a 3-D artist, damn it.  I am not a programmer.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have anything against programmers.  I like the programmers at work.  They’re all fairly nice and they don’t condescend to me when I have questions (like why the hell this particular texture has decided to render all blurry when all the others are fine) and they have an important job.  They make the game go.  Without programmers we would have no games, just movies.  It just drives me batty that to so many people, programmers are apparently the only people involved in making games.  Where do they think the pretty pictures come from?  Programmers are important but so are the artists and the level designers.  Without artists everyone would be playing The Adventures of Rhombus and Sphere in the Land of Cubes.  Without level designers we’d just have extremely pretty 2-D games with no exploration.  (And without producers, everyone would be probably be at lunch permanently.)

My name is Aimee.  I am a 3-D artist.  I am not a programmer, and I don’t get paid to play games.  (Most of the time.)

Welcome to my blog.