[ELLioT]

ELLioT

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THAT is the question...

[X-0ut]

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Give me a month or two to finish grav3d and I'll be up for it!

[Shoot-em-upper]

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• =||=||=||=||=||=||=||=||=||=||=||=||=||=||=||=||=

I agree, we've had enough of a break since the last one.  I'll start a thread for suggestions, if nobody minds.

[berilium]

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I agree, we've had enough of a break since the last one.  I'll start a thread for suggestions, if nobody minds.

Please go ahead 

[jakman4242]

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• Pfffft, that's not a hand grenade! *boom*

We're almost half way through the year, when's 2k8?

[Shoot-em-upper]

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We're almost half way through the year, when's 2k8?

In about a month.  Maybe.  I wonder if even Motorherp knows.

[motorherp]

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• shmupet

We're almost half way through the year, when's 2k8?

In about a month.  Maybe.  I wonder if even Motorherp knows.

Yeah I know, unfortunately my situation hasn't changed since making the "bad news" sticky.  There's discussions going on behind the scenes at the moment about distributing out the work to run another competition since I simply cant do it all myself this time around.  You'll just have to hold tight and hope for the best at the moment since I cant promise anything.

[Pixel_Outlaw]

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• Bullet Hell

This has already been discussed between the admins. We are all very tied up right now. We are going to wait until a better time for all of us. All of us hold jobs with long hours. If some members want to get together to start a new comp that would be fine. I'm working on my Associates degree right now so I'm really tied up. 

[Shoot-em-upper]

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All of us hold jobs with long hours.

You could quit your jobs. 

[motorherp]

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All of us hold jobs with long hours.

You could quit your jobs. 

Unfortunately stuff like that is pretty standard in the industry, they'll just keep giving you minimum raise most of the time until you complain.  Usualy you end up having to swap companies to get a pay rise you think you're worth, it really is amazing how much other companies values you over the one you're already at sometimes.  If you dont want to move though the trick is to write and manage some key code or make yourself the sole expert in one area of game development that they lack in in order to make yourself indispensible.  Either that or time it just right when they really need all the staff they can get.  Then before you say anything to your current company you start speaking to other companies first to get someone interested in taking you on.  That's when you tell your managers that your quitting because such and such company has made you a great offer and you cant turn down the money.  They might let you sweat for a while, and if you're not a key player you might end up having to bite the bullet and move, but most then time they'll convince you to stay with a nice raise.

[jakman4242]

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• Pfffft, that's not a hand grenade! *boom*

The idea of a user comp is ridiculous. I mean, I'd love to try it out myself. But what draws people in is prizes and publicity. Mass publicity is hard, and so are getting want-able prizes. And it's not like we can dish out a wad of cash for the winners. Most of us users are teens with little to no money.(Personally, I have money. But I really need it at the moment.)

[the2bears]

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The idea of a user comp is ridiculous. I mean, I'd love to try it out myself. But what draws people in is prizes and publicity. Mass publicity is hard, and so are getting want-able prizes. And it's not like we can dish out a wad of cash for the winners. Most of us users are teens with little to no money.(Personally, I have money. But I really need it at the moment.)

I really don't think people enter the contests here for the prizes.  I'll grant you the case for publicity, though I think of it more as gaining the esteem of fellow shmup enthusiasts.  A contest here will generate buzz regardless of prizes, and since most of us make games for free what we really want is lots of people to play our games... and hopefully to like them.

Bill

[brog]

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Do you want to draw people in or do you want to make a game?

It doesn't matter how many other people enter if it provides you with the motivation to complete a game.

[Sar]

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If you dont want to move though the trick is to write and manage some key code or make yourself the sole expert in one area of game development that they lack in in order to make yourself indispensible.

Oh, man, please don't encourage that. It's only a short step from "I should be the sole expert at X so they need me" to "I should write X in brain-damaged gibberish-code with meaningless single-letter variable names, every method called nearly the same thing and fifteen layers of unnecessary abstraction so that I'm the only person who can ever understand it and it would be cheaper for them to pay me more than pay someone else to make sense of it or re-write it".

And then some poor sod has to spend a week trying to track down an odd error when your code loads some perfectly-compliant-with-the-schema-and-sole-existing-yet-still-misleading-document XML config file, and he hates you forever.

Yeah... no prizes for guessing what I was doing a couple of weeks back. ;-)

what draws people in is prizes and publicity
Most of us users are teens with little to no money

To be honest, I'm not entirely convinced that either of these things is totally true.

I mean - plenty of people develop for challenges or competitions with no prizes: some friends and I recently took part in a game-in-a-month challenge which several other teams entered, for example; The TIGSource forums recently finished a 'Random Videogame Name Generator' competition which was just for laughs, that had plenty of entries.

And really, I could be wrong but I got the impression that most of the active members here were already out there with full-time jobs, some of them in the games industry; not just the admins...

[motorherp]

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Haha yeh I know what you mean Sar.  Code obsfucation is the really nasty way of trying to make yourself indispensible and isn't really what I was on about.  More that you should specialise and write good essential code.  In my case I specialise in physics and maths heavy programming and write and maintain the physics engines.  I end up being a key player not only because I'm the only one who really knows his way around a large and complex piece of the code but also because no-one else really understands the theories involved in order to manage and expand that code even if they learnt the code inside out.  The same could be true for graphics or AI or even hardware optimisation.

[jakman4242]

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Haha yeh I know what you mean Sar.  Code obsfucation is the really nasty way of trying to make yourself indispensible and isn't really what I was on about.  More that you should specialise and write good essential code.  In my case I specialise in physics and maths heavy programming and write and maintain the physics engines.  I end up being a key player not only because I'm the only one who really knows his way around a large and complex piece of the code but also because no-one else really understands the theories involved in order to manage and expand that code even if they learnt the code inside out.  The same could be true for graphics or AI or even hardware optimisation.

What company do you work for?
And what do you mean heavy programming? Just curious, since most things in games seem to be lots of simple aspects of programming meshed into each other.

[motorherp]

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Haha yeh I know what you mean Sar.  Code obsfucation is the really nasty way of trying to make yourself indispensible and isn't really what I was on about.  More that you should specialise and write good essential code.  In my case I specialise in physics and maths heavy programming and write and maintain the physics engines.  I end up being a key player not only because I'm the only one who really knows his way around a large and complex piece of the code but also because no-one else really understands the theories involved in order to manage and expand that code even if they learnt the code inside out.  The same could be true for graphics or AI or even hardware optimisation.

What company do you work for?
And what do you mean heavy programming? Just curious, since most things in games seem to be lots of simple aspects of programming meshed into each other.

I'm never quite sure about the level of secrecy needed for these things since you dont want to be quoted out of place and for your own personal opinions to reflect upon the company you work for.  I think I've been quite neutral here though so I dont really see the harm in it.  I work for Sony studio Liverpool (former Psygnosis - we make the wipEout and Formula One games) although currently I'm helping out at Evolution with the creation of MotorStorm: Pacific Rift.  What I was meaning is that I special in physics and maths heavy programming.  That is stuff like rigidbody manipulation, collision detection, vehicle and tyre dynamics, finite element analysis, numerical solving and stability, etc etc.  Stuff like that tends to go beyond just simple programming tasks and requires more advanced knowledge in physics and mathematics.  Indeed I consider myself a physicist first and programmer second, especially considering I come from a physics education and taught myself the programming later.  The same could be said for other specialist areas of game coding but for different fields other than physics.

PS:  I should probably mention given what I was saying above that Sony tends to be pretty fair with pay raises from my experience, they're a good company to work for.  I used to work underpayed at other companies though as have many people I talk to in the industry.

[the2bears]

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I've split the off-topic discussion, new topic here.

Bill