StarCraft engineers talk about game development in the United States

I haven't been wandering on the Internet for a while. It's a coincidence that I 've read this article here.

 

Question: Starcraft engineers talk about game development in the United States (original)

Copyright: Crazy Dance Original submission time: 11: 00: 40 August

In June 9, our company welcomed a guest named Gage galinger.
You can refer to his resume: Starcraft (Blizzard Entertainment): primary responsibility was the in game multiplayer code. also worked on chat rooms, game flow, save and load, and a little path finding and AI. http://www.blizzard.com/starcraftbc/ battle realms (liquid entertainment): worked on pretty much everything to with a 3D RTS: Networking, graphics, animation systems, tools, etc. managed the programming tasks and coordinated deliverables with the art and design staff. http://battlerealms.ubi.com/age of mythology (Ensemble studios, Microsoft): primary responsibilities attached creating new animation and visual effect systems, re-architecture of performance critical systems, general programming, and localization. http://www.ageofmythology.com

With his friendship with his boss, he will be visiting our company for one week. In addition to helping us solve some technical problems, he also gave a speech on game development. Part of his lecture is as follows:
In the United States, the game industry is divided into publishers and developers. The usual practice is that publishers lend money (not exactly the same as investment) to developers. After the product is completed, developers can get 20 to 30 points of profit. If they are top developers, you can get 60 percent of the profit, but this is only a few cases. Most developers cannot make any money (we later understood that what they call "do not earn money" is relative to the issuer's income). Developers must complete the game production as expected, then the publisher will propose conditions, such as occupying the developer's shares or reducing the developer's share ratio.
Generally, a game development project consists of 1-3 Producers, 5-12 engineers, 5-20 artists, 4-8 planners, 1-2 sound effects, and 4-12 qa. However, with the development of the project, there are also many examples of continuous expansion of personnel. It is particularly emphasized that a producer must have a business and QA background. The main functions of producers are negotiation, Management Progress, and quality control ...... .
There are three types of engineers:
1. Managers: 50% of their energy will be spent on Group Progress Management
2. System Engineers: everything related to the game system will be subdivided into battles and interfaces based on projects ......
3. Tool engineers: create functional modules and development tools based on game functions.
There are four types of Fine Arts:
1. Main beauty: only responsible for draft lines and other high-end designs, usually only pen and paper. They must grasp the main style of art.
2. Modeling
3. Material
4. Animation
There are two types of planning:
1. Game designer: Numeric adjustment, world view definition, rule customization. This kind of excellent primary planning is a rare animal in the world, and some well-known planning even have their own agents. They usually only need pen and paper to do their work (just exaggerated ).
2. Content designer: Make level, write dialog, scripts.

His answers to some questions are as follows:

Q: Your products will be postponed frequently. From the market perspective, how can you allow such a thing to happen continuously?
A: during the development process, we often find that the original design is too conservative, and our design is less advantageous than similar games on the current market, but we can do better with our technology, so we will decide to postpone it. For example: Starcraft, we initially designed the transparent effect of smoke to display a background pixel every 3 foreground pixels, but we found that the effect was not ideal, so we adjusted the interval to 1 pixel. For example, when we designed a character in warcraft3, the arm would not change, but later we decided to let the arm change with the movements of the arm. I am talking about the simplest examples, and more complicated adjustments, all of which require time-consuming implementation.

Q: The delay seems like a tradition of blizzard (Laugh)
A: Yes, but it's not my fault (Laugh)

Q: In the United States, is a project team program or planning? (I spoke about the situation in China)
A: In the past, programmers were dominant in the United States. However, with the increasingly obvious commercialization and fierce competition, planning has become the center of a project. Of course, I am talking about game designer.

Q: from your experience, should you be more proactive in planning or technology during the initial design of a game project? Will this guarantee the project progress?
A: Yes, but this development company must first have sufficient technical strength. In fact, if developers do not want to build an AAA-level product (high-risk, high-return, and high-quality), they do not have to be ahead of the technology because it is highly risky to develop sophisticated products, as Microsoft developed, three technologies are purchased from third-party developers. All the technical modules of Blizzard are developed independently. companies such as Blizzard are a minority, so every time they launch a game, they are very careful, at least the technical advantages should be maintained for a long time.

Q: How do you decide a game like Starcraft and warcraft? How do you know that this kind of game will succeed?
A: Oh! That's just the success you saw. In fact, many of our projects are abandoned after a period of development because we feel that this game will not succeed, unfortunately, you must have the courage to do one thing. (This is a normal thing that many successful game producers in Europe, America, and Japan have experienced .)

Q: What about the plan of this abortion project? Is it also fired?
A: Well ~ This is inevitable.

Q: How do you perform the QA process?
A: QA is divided into three types: 1. system testing, which only tests game processes and functions. 2. Balance Testing: comprehensive testing of the difficulty, balance, and interest of the game. 3. program testing is usually conducted by dedicated program QA personnel.

Q: The last two QA personnel are hard to find. How do you solve them?
A: For the second type of balance tester, we will hold a match for the same type of game first. The players who win the first few will be invited to perform the balance test. As for program testing, you know that no programmer is willing to do this kind of work, but this step is becoming more and more important, so the company will set more attractive conditions in terms of compensation and so on.

Q: The flow of game developers is very high. How do you face the impact of the flow of people on project development?
A: There is no better way. Talents like the main program, because we don't know when he will leave the team, so we cherish his time in this team, A lot of concrete and trivial work won't let him do it. His main job is to develop tools that can be handed over to planners for game production. In this way, we can minimize the connection problem that the main process leaves for the project.

Q: Are your development processes also messy?
A: Yes (Laugh). You don't have to look at the regulations I have written here. In fact, they are all chaotic and every step is being done.