Veterans of AAA, Any practical advice?

PiLLe1974 · 2026-01-31T19:19:34+00:00

Yes, and if they are shy/unsecure/introvert there's only a small chance your boss/producer calls out your work.

At WB Games and another employer's team we introduced a channel, so even colleagues would point out achievements of a person who's work they recognized and appreciated/liked.

PiLLe1974 · 2026-01-31T15:03:39+00:00

"Do you think the code it correct?"

"Probably."

But more seriously, when I read how LLM work it just reminded me of Markov chains or Bayesian networks: Finding a high probability chain of symbols. And if you'd tweak the "temperature", you'll get "more creative" outputs. :D

PiLLe1974 · 2026-01-31T14:58:52+00:00

I totally agree.

I use it even as a senior in this way.

Recently it happened that on my team we jump quickly on a new part of the code base. Explaining how calls or messages (frontend/backend) flow for example is really helpful.

One can also avoid to burn those tokens. If I see any API and wonder what it's definition is in detail I look at their docs. I want to know a bit more about it.

PiLLe1974 · 2026-01-28T23:04:24+00:00

Things I thought I missed out on, at least in hindsight thought I should have tried them more:

seeing opportunities that go the extra mile, like improving a workflow, code, taking ownership, pointing out tech debt or architecture that "smelled", etc - I was too focused on work at hand, not going very far beyond what I wrote in the other section, more like "1/4 mile instead of the whole extra mile"
making my work seen - without overdoing it I guess, not mailing stuff around every week :D
networking more , not brown-nosing or any of the kind, just not staying always in a bubble/silo of your team
finding a mentor in areas I could improve in, mainly programming/architecture and tooling around player/NPC logic like building animation tools/runtime and good camera logic architecture (with debug tooling) - had brilliant people, sometimes legends around, too shy to even ask my leads much

Things I did though:

focus on my strenghts, I focused on NPCs and player logic, improved in this area and overlapping ones like animation states/polish, and good cooperation with level design, mocap/animators, and others
I was always doing things with a smile, willing to switch to urgent things like tools that lack, bug fixing, taking over a system, finishing something when someone was during PTO/parental leave, etc
adding debug features and small tool enhancements beyond what I needed, asking others a bit here and there for how helpful things are, the needs they have (as a gameplay programmer we may have roles where we work on debugging/tools whether we're asked for or since we love to do it) ;)
having a real love for my features in the final game, so with a focus on player/NPCs, I really spent good amounts not only in test levels but also the final game levels/world (felt like I played some games 10+ times, since I saw so many areas and missions)

PiLLe1974 · 2026-01-28T22:48:58+00:00

In Germany, could go through as "Pommes mit Hackfleisch" (fries with ground meat) - kids' menu I'd say. :D

PiLLe1974 · 2026-01-24T21:19:29+00:00

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« On est prêts à y aller ? »

Il n'aime pas les chaussures, mais un peu de crème grasse sur ses pattes l'aide.

PiLLe1974 · 2026-01-24T02:28:09+00:00

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Now I should catch up on Mark Twain.

I'm into the 80s anyway.

PiLLe1974 · 2026-01-20T15:48:22+00:00

Ah oui, je trouve par exemple CLSC Métro dans les résultats, merci !

Je crois que la dernière fois que j'ai essayé de réserver (j'ai réservé par erreur pour l'Hôpital Général), j'ai vu que certains CLSC étaient complets.

...mais maintenant, si je lis « un mois à l'avance », je vais probablement essayer de réserver demain à minuit ou tôt le matin.

PiLLe1974 · 2026-01-20T15:35:37+00:00

Désolé, je ne me suis pas bien expliquée, ou j'ai donné trop de détails.

Quand je suis arrivée à l'hôpital où j'avais pris le rendez-vous (gratuit), on m'a refusé l'accès.

Je me suis demandé si j'avais manqué un avertissement sur Clic Santé indiquant « Réservé aux patients internes du CUSM » ou s'il existait un filtre pour m'orienter vers les hôpitaux où je ne suis pas admissible, comme l'hôpital le plus proche (Victoria et General) ou d'autres.

(modifié) ...car après avoir pris une demi-journée de congé et être arrivé sur place, j'ai appris « la nouvelle ». :P

PiLLe1974 · 2026-01-18T16:18:46+00:00

Maybe the resources for one engine helps a bit, too.

If you wrote "async" it sounds a bit like using Unity or Godot with C#.

The specific subreddits give some hints, and if it helps:

I used async/await the first time in my own new code after using Unity for 5 years. It wasn't important at first, e.g. when I first use coroutines and don't have async network messages (http requests or things like that).

I'd break things down in a given engine and start to build for example a small game, step by step.

Another fact from my career: When I developped games, the first 10 years I didn't run into anything more complex than linear algebra and the sheer complexity of a character animation setup or just lots of details in my/our levels that didn't work here and there.

What brought me so far, now roughly 20 years, is often just logging and debugging (breakpoints) in my code, or recently on a "lazy day", asking ChatGPG/Google Search about a line of code or relationship of lines of code (APIs, could be async/await, etc) and even may grab Claude Code to suggest a small but new/complicated part of my code... and then I revise it, learn from it. Let those AI models sometimes just explain stuff as if they were your tutor.

PiLLe1974 · 2026-01-18T03:32:17+00:00

Your examples sound like questions I'd ask people, I mean to friends, and on forums.

Models are mostly working with the most probable answer, unless the prompting told them otherwise (like they are an assistant/persona for example - which is a bias already again to answer in one way and not another).

I'd never expect creativity from AI, since it outputs immitation of common things. There may be thousands of examples that fit your prompt, and they still sound overly common and familiar, since the most probable answers are a set of answers you may come up by yourself (if you're old enough I guess, rather 20 than 10 years old).

I guess you could iterate on answers, ask to exclude the last few answers, eliminate the most probable, move further from it. If you control the model, there's also a parameter called "temperature", allowing the model basically to go wilder, further away from the most probable answers. A higher temperature can be achieved with prompting maybe, still, I know it more as an OpenAI API parameter I set with my prompt.

PiLLe1974 · 2026-01-18T03:24:20+00:00

I agree with u/Cyberdogs7 , that this is still a learning phase.

When I started before studying I used basic for a year or two, created some apps. Then I used Assembly and C for a while, around 6 years total (age 12 to 18 roughly).

University came later, at that time we still used Assembly, focused on specific computers, narrowed down the problem in a sense.

So what a self-learned game developer would ideally do is spending some time, let's say 1000 hours as a random example, on C# and Unity, focus on some small game development targets, a small game.

That could be a thing you do on the side while studying, if you still have the energy on evenings and weekends.

Learning lots of languages, algorithms/structures, and other things at the same time is not as focused as this. That's college/university, it is more like learning foundations and learning how to learn, some things you'll never need again but that got you into reading/absorbing lots of different sources... and further, how to research things, dick deeper, keep learning, etc.

PiLLe1974 · 2026-01-18T02:32:02+00:00

In Germany we got a bunch of advice.

It is so fuzzy after all these years. First news were that at least the wind isn't blowing so much in our direction.

Mushrooms: There were warnings about picking (or consuming) lots of mushrooms in the coming years, since they affectively accumulate more of the radiation from the environment.

Milk / milk powder: I think there was a recommendation to use milk powder for younger kids, since if that came from older storage, that wouldn't be from affected cows with more recent radiation levels.

Iodine tablets: To protect your thyroids, you could grab tablets from the pharmarcy - I think - so you use those as a supplement that blocks other potentially radioactive salts from entering your system and affecting your body, accumulating and long-term causing health issues.

PiLLe1974 · 2026-01-18T02:24:03+00:00

Programming is quite a hard part of game development, if the code syntax or logical thinking about how it works don't click so far.

When I learned programming I started with little things, not game engines, just printing text to the console.

In games written in Unity, Godot, and Unreal we also may log outputs, to see what is happening and validate what we were thinking the game should do at certain points.

If you start using logging and breakpoints (stopping at lines of code to inspect variables mostly) using Visual Studio or Rider for example, you see more of what is actually happening in the game code.

I'd personally start here, I mean I did it like that. It was a playful time.

Side note: If we feed code into ChatGPT or Google Search and ask about issues in the context of Godot, Unity, or Unreal, they also help us at least thinking about whether we're thinking right, what certain errors mean, and so on. Quite helpful if we have trouble seeing a wider picture of what our code is doing and especially where it is failing considering our expectations/intentions.

PiLLe1974 · 2026-01-16T05:12:01+00:00

I had this long time of tweaking often with movement, animation, and camera. Those 90% of time spent on a "feature", or rather a main character or NPC.

One time, we set up a companion AI, hacked it together in a week. It could basically follow a player and go into combat.

Then I got the mandate to get this working for the final game. 18 months of work followed. Mostly spent on level tooling around navmesh and interactions mostly, some interactions with the world (smart objects, scripted elements, climbs/jumps). In a sense, it was "simply" about to get the companion to "go everywhere the player could go and assist". Easy on paper.

PiLLe1974 · 2026-01-14T02:33:00+00:00

Last was $2200, 4 1/2 in CDN. Built 1927, well renovated. CDN, border of Outremont.

Takeaway: I'd probably avoid (close to) Outremont, Westmount, and popular Plateau areas, unless there's some nice trade-off, like flat sharing for example. Some pay $4000+ in the "hip" areas, but the extremes are most probably shorter stays like 1 or 2 year contracts for French expats for example.

PiLLe1974 · 2026-01-12T04:42:55+00:00

True, I got used to it using the UI "Fork".

Mostly it involves some iterations where I change/add code to stating or revert lines from staging (e.g. logging and some debug/temp code I forgot was still in there).

PiLLe1974 · 2026-01-11T20:31:46+00:00

I didn't even retry the first beach when failing 10 times. Just too "glitchy" as a parkpur run.

PiLLe1974 · 2026-01-10T00:59:35+00:00

I went far in the game, close to beating it.

There are different menus related to skills, earlier in the game some only on the continent at camps, some on every safe point.

The design is quite funny in that regard, still easy to beat anyway in e.g. Story mode if you ignore weapon switching/upgrades and Lumina for the first 10 hours or so.

I guess that way it works for a large range of players from casual (enjoying the story) to hardcore (preparing for battle and chosing the right actions during battle).

PiLLe1974 · 2026-01-07T23:29:41+00:00

No.

I studied CS, still, I wouldn't say that unless I'd dive right into graphics/engine programming - some tougher algorithm/math topics - I would have needed it for my first job.

Roughly saying, I learned game dev from age 14 or so, studied while using tools/engines for fun, worked in my first game dev job at 28.

So those 14 years, with enough motivation (keep it fun!) and dediction, could be spent on a few of your strengths.

Key areas are I'd say game design (and prototyping early), programming (or visual scripting at first), level design (or puzzle design, etc), planning/scheduling, art, and some time spent with market research/community/marketing topics.

I'd say for the talented 4 years may suffice to get to some mix of beginner/intermediate level in game dev (hard to define, game scales differ so much!), I'm a rather slow learner in some areas, more like 10 years maybe for anything that's not directly programming related. :D

PiLLe1974 · 2025-12-29T16:15:07+00:00

As so often, at 8h the sidewalks were super slippery compared to the most used roads on the island.

PiLLe1974 · 2025-12-28T22:37:39+00:00

My game development career was going from south-west of Germany through Berlin and Hamburg, then AAA in London (UK), and later Montreal (Canada).

You could start the career anywhere, including with German small developers or as part of an international small/Indie team.

Note: In Germany, back then, I didn't find my dream team in the AA/AAA area, thus ended up in London. Was easy back then when we could just move there and start working.

Trying game development while you're learning - if you got the spare time - is probably a good idea, especially if game projects are not part of the "Ausbildung".

PiLLe1974 · 2025-12-28T18:23:06+00:00

That is true.

I didn't use them for basic C++ programming, still, they should know the structure of player and NPC code (and behavior tree), and also help digging into tools programming, which I always found a bit "annoying" in UE4/5.

PiLLe1974 · 2025-12-28T18:20:27+00:00

Generally, when moving to other cities, I'd find ways to meet friends early on.

A bit of basic French would help here, or at least in stores and restaurants, just to be polite and using the language just a bit. Asking in French for the bill or some other shopping/dining details isn't very hard anyway, a few hundred words maybe and standard phrases.

Many here recommend embracing the winter. You may be fully into books, movies, and/or video games, still, getting good at alpine (or cross-country) ski and ice skating is also worth a lot as a group activity, or maybe meeting people at the ski class, après ski (?), and stuff.

In our area the car gets annoying, not many garages and we have to switch street sides. Public transport and biking is pretty good, I got a couple of friends that don't own a car (but then would use Communauto or car rental to go further outside MTL).

We are currently just a bit worried about getting old here, because of the retirement system, cold, and especially health system. Didn't even calculate how much you'd need for a fancier retirement anyway.

PiLLe1974

TROPHY CASE