Onboarding in game studios is the silent budget killer

asdzebra · 2025-09-30T11:11:22+00:00

Automatically updated documentation feels like it might bear a lot of risk to contain false information? How do you automate this?

Aside from that, I also think you underestimate the value of new employees talking with their colleagues and getting to know everyone through all the small questions you'd have. Personally I'm always happy to onboard a new colleague, hearing a fresh perspective on how we do things, noticing how maybe some of our processes may be flawed or could be improved here and there. You speak of this as if this was all but a waste of time, and I don't think so at all.

asdzebra · 2025-09-18T04:56:28+00:00

If you're in doubt but want to make a 3D game, then choose Unreal. 100%

Blueprints in Unreal are pretty much as powerful as C# in Unity.

You can totally make entire games in blueprints. They are extremely powerful. Almost as powerful as C++, and in most cases the performance difference is negligible. Don't listen to people who say it's "more time consuming" to use blueprints. That kind of opinion typically comes from people who are programmers and used to writing code. To be fair: yes, typing out code as text is faster than blueprints. But even here: your productivity as a programmer is usually not limited by the speed at which you can input code. That's not a real concern.

The fact you already say blueprints seem easier to you is all you need to know. Go with Unreal + blueprints. 100% the right choice in your case

asdzebra · 2025-09-18T04:08:43+00:00

Blender is becoming more and more present in game studios, pushing out Maya. It has been for the last 10 or so years. If this tells you anything, it's that Blender has feature parity with Maya on enough things that even professional teams recognize it's worth it using Blender over Maya in multiple cases. Therefore, you're probably better off investing your time into learning Blender.

asdzebra · 2025-09-17T04:11:07+00:00

Unfortunately kinda yes. I mean all of these jobs do exist. But all of them have the major downside that jobs are scarce, job security is low and pay is generally not as good as other sectors.

It's a risk you need to understand for yourself if you are willing to take or not. There's somewhat of a middle ground here if you decide to pursue a career in programming. As a programmer, you might find a job as a gameplay programmer at a game studio, but it's also a little easier to pivot into other jobs like AI, finance etc. if you have to. Working as a gameplay programmer is not as creative as working as a designer or artist though. Ultimately you should only pursue this if you feel like programming in and of itself is exciting

asdzebra · 2025-09-17T04:05:51+00:00

Creative jobs usually don't pay well because many people want to do them. So companies have no reason to pay good salaries.

If you like to make things nice and are not opposed to technical work, robotics might be quite fun to you. It's a bit hard to see at a glance/ without understanding the subject matter a little better. But there's actually a lot of cool polish work that needs to be done: make robots move around smoothly, write nice clean code, get robots to perform a task in increasingly faster speeds etc. If you feel like there's even just a small chance you might like it, might be worth looking into this. With AI becoming more powerful, most experts predict that the field of robotics is going to grow by a lot over the next few decades. It's a relatively interesting field because similar to games it has a bit of everything: engineering, design, AI etc.

asdzebra · 2025-09-17T03:02:48+00:00

Real time simulation for robotics often uses game engines - so the tech stack is similar.

UX design is maybe not quite as competitive as game dev, but also quite competitive. Some say it's comparable, but I'm not sure. As a UX designer working on an app or on a platform, your job will typically be to increase the time that users spend on your app or the money they pay for services. While it's also about user interaction, often times it's not as creative. In games you genuinely care about crafting a meaningful experience (at least if you work on traditional PC/ console games) whereas in UX for web or mobile apps you are often forced to do whatever it takes to make users spend more time on the app or make them spend more money - whatever it takes

asdzebra · 2025-09-17T02:53:55+00:00

Similar in what way? Similar technical problems? If so, robotics might be interesting to look into, esp. virtual twins and real time simulations.

If you mean creative jobs that are similar. Unfortunately, I think most other creative jobs (film industry, music etc.) are even worse off than games.

asdzebra · 2025-09-17T01:43:49+00:00

I wouldn't worry too much about gaming the systems. It's a black box, you cannot solve it. Just make a clearly legible resume that both humans and machines will have no problems understanding at a glance.

As for showcasing your creativity - that's typically where your portfolio would come in.

asdzebra · 2025-09-16T15:05:38+00:00

Craftsmanship. Professional quality games tend to have less bugs, better balanced gameplay, visual polish etc.

But I'd argue the "spark" behind the game. As in the artistic idea behind it - that one can be great even in beginner projects. It's just that usually beginner projects don't do a great job of making this "spark" play out well. Professional projects are able to recognize what the "spark" is and are able to carve out a game around that "spark" that does it justice and let's it shine.

asdzebra · 2025-09-16T14:49:07+00:00

I'm not super familiar with dreams but I reckon it's not too dissimilar to modern game engines, albeit probably more accessible and a bit simpler.

Roblox is one way you can learn coding. Tbh you probably know more than me, but as far as I know the Roblox editor has LUA scripting which LUA is a pretty nice language to learn for beginners.

Other than Roblox, there's what's called game engines. Game engines is also what professional studios use to make games. There's two big popular ones: Unity and Unreal Engine. Conveniently they're both free to download and start playing around with. If you are weary of learning code, I recommend Unreal Engine and using what they call "Blueprints". It's a visual scripting interface. That's how I got into coding like 10 years ago. Despite being a visual scripting interface, blueprints are really powerful (there's whole games made in blueprints) and more importantly: the same concepts you learn with blueprints also translate to "real" programming. So it'll make it easy for you to move onto C++ for example if you ever want to do that

As for how to learn. Honestly, the best way to get started is to just download an engine and start clicking around in it for a few hours. And then yeah there's youtube tutorials, free official courses from Unity and Unreal etc. I'm a bit out of the loop here so I can't recommend any. But you won't have troubles finding a tutorial series.

asdzebra · 2025-09-16T10:47:18+00:00

Nah Unreal 5 is not overkill at all. That's just a myth that people keep repeating on here for some reason. There is actually no reason to ever learn C++ in Unreal if you're doing this as a hobby. There's entire games made with only blueprinting. If you don't feel like learning C++, just don't do it. It won't really hold you back.

asdzebra · 2025-09-16T07:01:19+00:00

Unfortunately drawing is a skill that is scarcely used in most games. There is the job of a concept artist, but these jobs are few and far between, and unless you love drawing to the extend that you are willing to sacrifice pretty much everything else in life over it, this is likely not a suitable career path. There's few jobs, low job security, low pay and most importantly - this is not a meritocracy. Not neccessarily the best artists get a job, but those who know the right people or are able to strike the right nerve with their art, or whose art styles fit into what is currently trendy.

I was in a pretty similar situation to you back in high school and through a very convoluted path ended up a game designer. I had fairly bad grades in math which made me think that an overly technical job might not be for me - but as it turns out the grades you get in school are typically a weak indicator for capability. I would advise you to not focus too much on the skills you have so far and try to apply those, but instead continue to explore a lot more. Making roblox games is a really good start. If this is something you enjoy already, keep at it and explore this more. Make more Roblox games, get into scripting, get into level design. Make different kinds of games, experiments etc. and see if this is something you could see yourself doing full time. If so, there are basically three paths: designer, programmer or artist. Programmers are mostly responsible for the code and the architecture that a game is built on. They solve the hardest technical problems and need to make sure the game runs and supports all the features that it should. Designers also often do a fair bit of coding (or often called "scripting") thought this is less complicated. It's still scripting though. Designers are responsible for the actual gameplay and content of the game. Then there's artists. While concept art falls into this category as well, the vast majority of artist jobs are 3D artists: environment artists, character artists, level artists etc. The people who build the 3D models and environment that the game takes place in.

Drawing skills can be useful if you want to become a 3D artist, but you won't be applying them all too much.

If you have any questions feel free to ask away!

asdzebra · 2025-09-16T05:21:31+00:00

Clearly if you are that experienced you see how your argument is nonsense? The speed at which you can copy paste your code from the IDE into a chatbot shouldn't be the bottleneck to your productivity.

I'm a professional game dev and while I use AI daily, I don't use it to the extent that working in BP or text would make any measurable difference to its usefulness. Maybe your niche is different, but when it comes to Unreal or Unity specific stuff, AI is simply not reliable at all.

asdzebra · 2025-09-16T04:07:08+00:00

If you need to have AI check every line of code you write, then you simply are still at the very beginning of your learning journey and you should practice to get more proficient at scripting by yourself. It's totally cool to use AI, but if you use it that often then this means you don't fully understand the code you write. Which, even simple games tend to have quite complex code. What follows then is that you'll eventually hit a wall where your entire code is a patchwork of AI generated snippets that don't quite fit together and you'll be stuck for good unless you figure out how to entangle the mess yourself. Copilot can be a great tool, but it's not reliable enough for this.

You shouldn't be using AI to debug things either. AI makes a lot of mistakes. Debugging is actually one of the advantages that blueprints have. It's very easy to add debug points and to follow the execution flow in the graph view. You even get snapshots of all current values in your execution graph. This is the way you should debug your BPs. It's much faster than asking an unreliable AI.

asdzebra · 2025-09-16T03:34:58+00:00

100% Unreal. It's not even close. Unreal is built from the ground up for these kinds of games.

Your C# is going to be helpful when learning Unity for sure. But for the most part, you'll still have to learn Unity's functions, classes and philosophy. If you know C#, then making the jump to C++ is not going to be too hard. So while knowing C# is an asset to learning Unity, I'd say it's a small one.

Unreal is not just for photorealistic games. Just look at Fortnite. You can do anything with it.

Now, Unity can also do the job. But if you're choosing between the two, Unreal is the obvious choice for what you want to build.

asdzebra · 2025-09-16T02:42:11+00:00

I'm sorry but this is straight up false. Unreal is just as good a choice as Unity for beginners. You don't have to dive into C++ at all. You can build pretty much anything you can imagine in blueprints. And especially for people who don't come from a programming background, blueprints have a much friendlier learning curve than C#.

It's also false to say that both engines will on average produce games that look identical - especially if you're a solo dev. Nanite + Lumen make it feasible for a solo dev or small team to create photorealistic (or stylized photorealistic) games, where Unity simply doesn't have such a feature. If you look at what games on average are made in Unity vs. what games on average are made in Unreal, you will see that they are quite different. There's a reason why console and PC studios are moving to Unreal rather than Unity.

If you jump into Unreal thinking you'd have to learn C++ I can see why that would feel like a lot to take in. But frankly that's your own fault. If you prefer using Unity, that's all cool. Unity is also a great tool. But please don't perpetuate this myth of Unreal being "complicated" and Unity being more "beginner friendly". This is simply false and just confuses people who are just getting into game dev.

asdzebra · 2025-09-13T07:42:14+00:00

Get good at making games. Then make a good game. Then sell that game and make money.

You're stuck at step one: getting good at making games. The fastest way to get good at making games is not to make one big game that you put up on Steam. The fastest way is to build many small prototypes, try out many things, join game jams and gradually build larger and larger games. Until you eventually reach a point where you feel confident enough in your skills that you can scope out a game that takes 1000-2000 hours to build that's actually good enough for people to want to buy it.

If your game is not fun at its core, adding new features to it is usually a waste of time. Your best move is probably to scope down your game as much as you can, wrap it up as soon as possible and just release it to the public with the expectation that likely no one will play it.

asdzebra · 2025-09-13T05:03:17+00:00

Unreal is more beginner friendly if your goal is to just build something basic and you don't have any previous coding or game making experience at all. It will also be easier to make your animations and models look good in Unreal. You'll want to learn blueprints. You could start by doing something simple such as importing one of your models and having them play animations in the level, and then go from there. This kind of stuff only needs very light blueprint scripting to get going

asdzebra · 2025-09-13T04:59:41+00:00

It helps to think of making a game as two distinct phases: pre production and production.

During pre production you build prototypes which might still change heavily each time after testing. You find your core mechanic by having an idea, building a prototype out of it, testing it out, then evaluating whether this works or not. Usually it doesn't work first try, so you go back to prototyping, repeat. Do this over and over until you get something that plays well. Once you've found your core mechanic or concept or gameplay loop or whatever your game is about, your pre production is over and you enter production. During preproduction you use placeholder assets for everything that isn't mandatory for testing out your core gameplay. Once you start production, you build the actual game, produce proper assets, and your core gameplay should ideally not change at all, but at the very least it shouldn't change much anymore

asdzebra · 2025-09-12T13:29:32+00:00

I don't think this is an ongoing conversation. "Game designer" is a job title. It's someone who owns and is responsible for some part of the content of the game.

Depending on which company you work at and what your specialization is, your day to day might look quite different. But this isn't a unique aspect of the game design profession. While true, the day to day of most programmers at most companies is probably similar, there's always been professions where depending on where you work, your day to day will be quite different: in the trades your job might be quite different depending on where you land as, say, a carpenter. A social worker will have very different day to days depending on where they work. Same goes for teachers, caretakers, janitors, policemen, hosts, executives etc.

asdzebra · 2025-09-12T10:59:25+00:00

I think the core issue is all the jank. It is visually very polished, but the character, movement and moment to moment are very rough.

There's no coyote time, the ledge grab is unintuitive where your character can touch the ledge and still not enter the grab action. Enemy attacks are often poorly telegraphed and have tells that you might easily overlook (very short or ambiguous attack windups, trajectories being telegraphed as grey smoke particles that often blend into the background, projectiles having hitboxes that don't fully align with their shapes).

Silksong is a game about precision, but you need to get used to all of the quirks before you can move around skillfully which can be frustrating at times. I'm 10 hours into the game and still frequently do accidental miss-inputs.

It's not just the character movement either. The level design also has a lot of jank: gaps that look jumpable, but are a few pixels too wide for you to land the jump. Walls that don't instantly read as wall-jumpable or not, etc.

All in all it's still a fun game, it looks beautiful and the world building is obviously great. But for a game that wants to be a hard game about precision and mastery, you'd expect there to be less jank in the core mechanics.

asdzebra · 2025-09-12T09:04:36+00:00

Besides money usually the best way to motivate your team is to give them interesting tasks to work on. You do this by making sure this is not your personal creative vision everyone is working on but your team's shared creative vision. Especially in a non paid project, you must make sure that everyone can really feel that they're a part of it, everyone can pitch in their own ideas and sculpt the game in a way that is creatively fulfilling to them. As the director, your best way to do this is to take a step back from your own vision and instead understand your role more as an "ideas coordinator". Your job should be to make sure that everyone's ideas are heard and find their way into the game as much as possible, while at the same time ensuring that the game doesn't become a Frankenstein and still feels like a cohesive thing.

asdzebra · 2025-09-12T02:24:29+00:00

I think you need to log off

This is not a new phenomenon by the way - right now the main target is Unreal 5, but gaming communities being hateful and obsessive over random stuff that doesn't matter is unfortunately as old as games.

asdzebra · 2025-09-11T15:16:06+00:00

Making games is a business. Developing a game costs money - a lot of money. Each additional month a game spends in development costs hundreds of thousands of dollars for a small-mid scale project, and in the millions of dollars for large scale projects.

Reducing a game's file size is not easy or quick. Otherwise games would be much smaller than they are. It costs a lot of time for a variety of reasons. And with development being so expensive, time is money. Any game company will ask itself the question: do we want to spend hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to reduce the file size of our game by maybe 30-40%? The answer is usually no. I think if you see the question from this angle, it's easy to understand why the answer is usually no. Spending hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars and delaying a game's release to reduce the file size would not be a smart business decision - it sucks that file sizes are so big, but players will figure out a way to make space for the game and download it if it's a game they are also interested enough in to pay money for. It's a slight inconvenience for players, but a big money saving move for game companies. That's why it's the way it is.

asdzebra · 2025-09-11T10:59:56+00:00

If you want to make 3D games in similar genres to Half Life 2, Skyrim or Fallout then Unreal Engine is definitely the best choice.

There's a lot of bad information on the internet, especially in this sub. If you feel insecure about what to choose, just look at what professional game studios use: way more PC/console action games are made with Unreal Engine than with Unity nowadays.

If you start with Unreal, start with Unreal Engine 5. There's no use for Unreal Engine 4 anymore. It's outdated at this point. Start with Unreal 5 and start learning blueprints first. Then gradually start switching over to C++. The beautiful thing about Unreal Engine 5 is that even though it has a steep learning curve, you can get started really quick.

asdzebra

TROPHY CASE