Week Fifteen - Some Resemblance To A Small Army

Okay first things first, I’m noticing that I’m writing about pretty much the same things in most of my blogs, which is for me becoming increasingly boring and I’m sure it’s becoming more increasingly boring to read. And although I’m trying to stop it, every time I read a new task I get the same flood of thoughts, partly I think it’s because I feely strongly about these points but non the less I apologise and will try find out some more interesting issues to write about. There we go, no on to the task in hand.

Right so just to be a hypocrite I’m going to start with something I’ve wrote in a lot of blogs, which is games cost too damn much to make these days and because of this only the big guns can make the top end games, leaving the small soldiers with less and less hope. In the future I hope this changes as it’s always the little people with the best idea’s, I stress that point idea. So why the change.

Well long have the days gone where 2 or 3 friends can get together and make a game to appeal to the masses, now you need a shed load of money, and good marketing point, more money, and some resemblance to a small army behind you. Let me start with the army.

I’ve read around and it seems if you break a games development company into pieces you end up with;

Game Designers,
Game Artists,
Game Programmers,
Sound Designers,
Testers,
and Producers.

Now to me that’s a lot of roles, but each of these can be broke down into even smaller roles,

directors;
assistant directors,
lead [e.g. artists],
specialists,
and work monkeys as Chris might say.

So that’s a lot of people that end up working in games now, most of which are specialist who have studies or developed to that section of work.

For example just doing Game Art is a big area, you could end up a concept artist, you could be modelling;
characters,
levels/landscapes,
vehicles, general assets,
and even be just a modeller or texture artist, possible just in those areas.

It obviously depends on the size of the of the company to how many a development team has, but still it’s getting more and more the way that specialist are required, and even to cut down time/costs companies out source some of the work they get.

Now the games industry in growing at the moment at a speedy rate to a point that by the time I graduate this break down of jobs may be obsolete, although I don’t think it can break down into smaller roles really, just more and more jobs in one company, which also means that companies don’t really want the average person to work on their games, they want the best of the best, and they can easily do that because compared to the amount of jobs available to the amount of people that want jobs that is an obvious difference. Which is really the driving force to make your self better and better so you can break into the world that everyone hates and is corrupt, but all at the same time they all love and enjoy, ohh the scrambling of the brain.

http://uk.games.ign.com/articles/672/672661p2.html - a link to an article on IGN about the roles in games companies, I particularly liked the part about testers as I knew it was an important role, but it made me realise how much has to actually go into that, without them games would be seriously messed up.