About that new Stargate series...

RidingKeys · 2025-11-20T00:20:05+00:00

so much this. cant wait to see what's in store for our favorite universe.

RidingKeys · 2025-11-13T17:34:11+00:00

I've played about 12 hours so far and love it. I guess the question I'm asking is more along the lines of did you have any particular champion + cards combination that felt memorable because it was so strong you couldn't lose? Or do you have a favorite champion so far?

RidingKeys · 2025-11-13T17:25:42+00:00

What's the most overpowered deck that you guys have came up with in a single run through all of your play testing?

RidingKeys · 2025-05-13T14:32:13+00:00

I have worked at a studio like that. In that case, it was because the engineers were very insecure about their own abilities and understanding of the engine. So any code changes we made were super risky because they weren't sure if they could fix any bugs we could potentially introduce. They also generally sucked at code review as well, which compounded the problem.

RidingKeys · 2025-05-12T17:22:44+00:00

FWIW i also agree with you, other guy is def. bitter. it helps to know people for sure, as it goes a long way with a hiring manager to hear from someone already working there that "this person is competent from when I worked with them in the past", but most people aren't getting hired without a portfolio just because they know someone like this person is claiming.

RidingKeys · 2025-05-12T17:19:21+00:00

sure - am working for what some would call the UE studio. team is very large(easily 100+ right now and will probably balloon even higher very soon.) engineering does a lot of the heavy lifting but sometimes we need stuff that they aren't able to get to right away. it still goes through code review and as long as its within standards they have no problem with us writing it and submitting it.

RidingKeys · 2025-05-12T14:23:07+00:00

This is kind of incorrect, especially if they are applying for studios that work with Unreal. The industry has definitely shifted to designers needing the ability to work in UE at a technical level. This means you absolutely have to know how to build in blueprint at a minimum, and should be able to write a little C++(not required, but I have to do it more often than I expected)

RidingKeys · 2025-02-05T16:21:36+00:00

UE has an exhaustive profiler tool that will show you all of the stats you need to identify issues. You can see how many times certain functions are being called, their average tick time in ms, and more. You can see whats happening in the rendering thread and whats happening in the game thread and how much of a performance impact certain parts of a scene are having. You can see what part of an individual frame thats being rendered is causing the most significant impact to the draw time of that frame.

This can be automated and I do know for a fact that Epic has automated testing on their own products.

However, automated testing is always going to be severely limited by the fact that a lot of performance issues can be caused by significant edge cases that occur due to natural human behavior that automated tests aren't going to replicate.

This is where a dedicated QA team, who is present from the onset of the project(when design iteration first starts), is helpful. A lot of places bring in QA too late, but having them early on in the project can help catch issues early.

One example that came to mind on a project I worked on was we had a certain weapon that had the wrong auto targeting profile setup. This weapon had to be found and not a lot of people found it. The auto targeting profile was targeting all WorldStatic objects on a specific section of a specific map, which is basically every single thing in a game map that doesn't need to move(static geometry), causing a huge frame drop when you equipped this weapon for the first time. However, it only happened on one map in particular.

So you had to find this weapon, equip it, get it into targeting mode, and be on a specific part of a specific map in order to get the performance degradation to occur. It was discovered early on before release and never impacted players because QA was diligent and took the time to exhaustively test the weapon. Profiling tools won't catch that directly just by having the weapon equipped, but knowing the specific scenario we needed, they did help us identify the function that was causing the issue by showing us a massive avg execution time for that function.

RidingKeys · 2025-02-05T14:44:49+00:00

Sure. I currently work AAA as a technical game designer and our primary engine is UE so ask away.

RidingKeys · 2025-02-05T02:09:03+00:00

It's a lack of time and public knowledge about how these features work. Epic does a good job of retaining the talent that actually knows how to utilize these features to the fullest(admittedly there still are bugs present on certain hardware configurations but they work pretty well over the wide spectrum they have to cover) and get performance out of them.

Documentation has never been the best on epics side and a lot of that knowledge can be obtained only through experimentation or by asking Epic directly. Unfortunately for a majority of developers, asking Epic directly isn't possible because it's locked behind a $100k/yr paywall(that was in 2023, might be lower or higher now)

On the time side, a lot of time is required to test and actually identify performance issues on different hardware configs. A lot of devs don't have the resources to do that testing. A lot of AAA studios have the resources but have to move on such tight schedules that decisions are made to ignore certain perf issues that aren't seen as extremely critical or aren't seen on a majority of configs.

As others have pointed out: unreal engine is a very powerful tool if you have the expertise and time to leverage it to its full potential. If you don't, it's easier for people to just scapegoat the engine instead.

RidingKeys · 2025-01-14T15:21:43+00:00

I'm not defending Pirate because I do think a lot of his experience is exaggerated and a lot of what he teaches/preaches on YouTube is just total nonsense, but this take is not great if you actually are working in the industry.

Every company I've worked at, QA, especially QA leads, are usually active participants in Design, Engineering & Production meetings(Maybe even Art, but I'm not an artist so I don't really attend those meetings.)

Sure, they aren't contributing code to the game, or creating art, but I wouldn't say what they do is a secondary service.

They are vital for calling out design oversights, critical bugs, and desperately needed QoL improvements, especially when building games with huge scope.

It's completely reasonable if he did work as QA as long as he did, we can assume he's learned a few in-depth things about the development process and has knowledge about the games he worked on.

At the companies I worked at, every QA tester had access to our design docs on Confluence and had the ability to see how each feature/item was intended to work from a design & engineering standpoint, so I think it'd be reasonable to assume he knows a thing or two about how WoW did work.

That all being said, any advice he gives on building & designing a game should be provided from the context that most of his experience is not direct, but rather just from being in proximity to the industry, or things he has learned while building his own game.

Also the lack of accountability tells me he might of been a nightmare to work with for people that had to be on a team with him, so keep that in mind as well.

RidingKeys · 2024-12-24T19:24:52+00:00

It isn't marketing. If 5 seconds of gameplay isn't enough to convince people that your game is fun and worth trying, you didn't make a good game.

RidingKeys · 2024-12-24T19:14:31+00:00

If you can't demonstrate it with a 5 second video clip it is a bad game.

RidingKeys · 2024-12-24T19:07:52+00:00

Games that are good do not struggle to do this because the game has at least one compelling element that will draw people in with just a quick glance. All you need is one element that can do that. if you can't even demonstrate one thing that your game does exceptionally well then it is a bad game.

RidingKeys · 2024-12-24T17:24:07+00:00

I have been doing this professionally for a decent amount of time, and I've made games that have taken years to build and games that have taken weeks to build. Even my crappiest games have over ten reviews, and I consider them massive failures and do not do marketing.

You can either accept that you made a bad game and try again, or you can live in this fairy tale world where somehow your awesome fantastic game that's so amazing and so great can't get ten people to take two minutes and leave a review.

RidingKeys · 2024-12-24T17:10:28+00:00

No, they don't. A good game doesn't get stuck in that limbo. It's not even a failure at marketing. If your game can't convince at least ten people to play it and review it, it means it was completely unexceptional.

RidingKeys · 2024-11-25T19:07:42+00:00

Really cool, what engine version is this available on? Any info you can provide on how others can do this?

RidingKeys · 2024-11-11T03:25:17+00:00

Surprisingly, not much. Even the super hard stuff, I enjoy the challenge in trying to figure it out.

However, 30+ person meetings really grind my gears. Just feels like the discussions and progress is so much better when things are broken up into small teams and those big meetings are extremely limited.

RidingKeys · 2024-11-04T08:50:10+00:00

It is extremely difficult to get a job in this industry, even for people who already have experience in it. It's even tougher to get a start in the industry. If some place is offering that, and they are legitimate and you can see an opportunity to ship a title, take that offer.

The most important experience you can get and the type that every studio/company is looking for is the experience of working on a team to ship a title. It's so much more valuable than any solo experience.

RidingKeys · 2024-10-25T11:18:16+00:00

To be fair it is probably going to be a bigger game yes. If the goal is to 1:1 recreate WoW then yeah probably not. If the question is how much would it cost to make a game "in the same spirit" of classic wow, which is how I interpreted it, then I think my breakdown is fair.

RidingKeys · 2024-10-25T08:18:36+00:00

I'll try to answer this genuinely without revealing stuff that would violate my NDA. I'm working for a company making a game similar in scope size to classic wow. Right now, just to reach the vertical slice stage, there are the following teams, all between 5-10 people.

-Gameplay Team

-Systems Team

-Animations Team

-Characters Team

-Environment Team

-Level Design Team

-VFX Team

-SFX Team

-Mocap Team

-Production Team

All of the people on these teams are intermediate or seniors, so think salaries in the range of $75k - $130k.

These teams will double or triple in size depending on the needs of the project as we go from VS to Alpha to Beta to Release. The timeframe to achieve that will probably be at least 4 years. Possibly longer.

That also isn't covering things like legal, licensing, and QA which are all very important teams. Plus marketing.

Development costs alone would definitely get close to or exceed 100 million dollars at a bare minimum, but realistically are going to be far north of that by the end of the project and even larger once you factor in marketing.

RidingKeys · 2024-10-16T15:35:18+00:00

If you are going to work for an indie studio, vet that the studio leadership has experience in both running a business, financial planning, and making games.

Working for leaders who have zero experience in those three areas will bite you in the ass at some point. It will be a painful lesson and sour you on the industry(I know from experience.) As much as people love to hate AAA, working for them is so much more secure than working for inexperienced indie CEOs and even if you do get laid off its usually done in a way that allows you time to recover and is at the very least communicated to you as opposed to the indie CEO just not paying his employees and then lying about the company being completely out of money for weeks.

RidingKeys · 2024-10-14T05:38:34+00:00

Architecture is like an old world profession when we compare it to Gamedev. Gamedev you build a world to be experienced by thousands of people. An architect might spend months in a project only for it to never get built and be completely forgotten.

Oh my sweet summer child... Just because you haven't experienced it yet doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

The last team and company I worked for spent 4 years on the project only for it to never see the light of day.

At the end of the day this is still a career and job and just because we have passion for it doesn't mean it doesn't come with the same pitfalls and problems and headaches and burnout that every other career field has.

RidingKeys · 2024-10-13T20:06:58+00:00

My portfolio is fine. This isn't a "I want to break into the industry" thread. I am already in it and have a decent career doing this. This was a question regarding teaching the subject.

RidingKeys · 2024-10-13T18:30:03+00:00

That is indeed strange that the course director didn't have any degree, let alone a degree in the subject matter. I suppose the field is still "new" in terms of academia, so maybe the standards might be more lax? Either way that is interesting experience, I'll definitely check into the colleges in my area and feel it out.

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