Michael Stowell Game Development Blog

On Monday the 18th February, Lisa Corbet from Aardvark Swift games industry recruitment agency came in to talk to us about various aspects of getting employment within the games industry and to tell us about her company and what they do.

Aardvark Swift are a specialist games industry recruiter with numerous clients, including Sega, EA, Microsoft and Sony, with over 20 years experience and cover recruitment in all aspects of the industry, including technical roles, creative roles, management / production, quality assurance and sales and marketing.

She gave a lot of advice with regards to using agencies in general, not just her one. Such as it is preferred to only use one or two agencies in order to prevent your CV getting spamed everywhere and making you appear to just be “trying your luck” so to speak. In addition to this the agency provides its service completely free to potential employees, they charge the company that is recruiting for any successfully placed candidates.

As a programmer the most important key to getting your foot in the door (an interview) is your CV as it will be initially assessed in seconds, and if the employer doesn’t see what he / she is looking for in that time then it will just be placed with all the other unsuccessful applications. It is important to start with a clear and concise objective summarizing everything in the CV down to just a couple of lines, stating key skills, relevant experience, and why you want to work in the games industry should also be included. Next it is important to put your employment history in a very brief listed type view, stating any relevant jobs industry / non industry based in chronological order. Educational history should come next, it is important to list modules and grades in order to give the potential employer as much information about you as possible. It can also create a good talking point in the interview if you list any interesting hobby’s and activities. Aardvark Swift make a guarantee that they will not send your CV to any companies without first asking you, in order to ensure no-ones time is wasted due to multiple applications etc.

Some usefully advice on the Interview process was covered, It is a good idea to prepare well for the interview by reading up as much as possible about the company, and maybe even renting one of their titles in order to give yourself some talking points in the interview, and also makes you seem interested in the company itself. It is also a good idea to prepare some questions such as what the future plans of the company are, project mile stones and how many candidates are they recruiting. Some companies cover the cost of travel to the interview, but most wont do that until the 2nd interview, if at all. It is a good idea to dress smart / casual. I.e not in a suit, but not t-shirt and shorts. Body language and eye contact play a crucial part of the interview process. Maintaining eye contact, and giving a firm handshake, also while sitting sit upright and alert as it could give a bad impression.

It is also a good idea to bring samples of your own work, maybe an even better idea to make sure it works on multiple machines, or maybe even take a laptop with you to ensure it is demo-able. Although in most cases taking a sample of source code snippets of your best bits should suffice.

All in all I think this talk gave a pretty good insight into the recruitment process, and having worked with Aardvark Swift and a few other industry recruiters I can relate to it first hand. Although I do feel the talk was very biased towards programming students as there where a number of artists and designers there. It also seemed to be very biased towards promoting the agency, e.g. stating that most companies prefer if you use the agency, which I have experienced not to be so true through trawling companies websites and speaking to people already working within the industry, but I guess it was kind of to be expected.

On Monday the 3rd of February, Thomas Hulvershorn Global Quality Assurance manager of I-play mobile phone game developers came to do a talk on the company he works for, the development cycle of a mobile phone game, and in particular quality assurance in mobile phone games.

I-Play founded in 1998 and now owned by Oberon media publish a variety of games for mobile phones, with a number of very popular titles including Jewel Quest, Weakest Link, and Fast & the Furious. And although primarily they are a publisher, they also have a in house development team delivering content from their own IP’s and others.

The development cycle for mobile phone games is much different to that of games destined for the console / PC market, mobile phone games are much quicker to make, with much shorter time frames on projects, allowing for them to have several projects running sequentially without them really affecting each other and without the need for “crunch time”. The development cycle is split up into 8 different parts or “sprints” if you like. With the initial 3 sprints being the time it takes to get the first playable version of the game the next 3 sprints to get it into Alpha stage. And finally into Beta for the final bug sign offs, certification and then when the project is finished signing off and releasing it.

There are a number of disadvantages of mobile phone development. For example, in order for the mobile content providers to allow the distribution of a game, some very specific rules have to be adhered to, the main one being compatibility, issues with different memory / processor limitations on each phone. This means that several versions of the game must be made in order to fit the requirements for each phone / phone category, and every game must be exhaustively tested using emulators and phone hardware for every phone on the requirements list.

There are also a number of advantages of mobile phone development. The main one being that nearly everyone has a mobile phone, and having a game published that is compatible with the majority of phones out on the market there is a potential of over 1.7 billion potential customers, the games can be provided cheaply due to the short development cycle and minimal distribution costs, and is readily available to everyone with just a few clicks on your phone.

There are a number of different testing methodologies involved when it comes to mobile phone game quality assurance that wouldn’t necessarily be present in ‘normal’ game development. Such as what happens when the user receives an incoming call /sms does the game pause and allow the user to receive the call? Or does it handle it badly and cause some kind of undesirable behavior. What happens when the battery dies?. These are all tests known as “black box testing”, an external perspective of the test object to derive test cases. Basically the tester takes a systematical approach to testing the functional aspects of the game, usually following a check list and making sure everything works as it should. The opposite of this is “white box testing”an internal perspective of the system to design test cases based on internal structure. Basically from a code level, the tester must go through and test cases on all paths of the code to determine output and find any potential bugs before its too late.

On Monday the 7th of February, Rich from 3DFramework came in to do a talk on setting up your own business, and all of the related pitfalls and problems likely to occur, the highs and lows associated with it.

3DFramework is a visualisation company specialising in architecture and computer games, they have created a number of their own tools in order to streamline the development of content, and also generate extra revenue by licensing their software to other companies.

When establishing a new company it is important to consider carefully the legal status of it, being a soul trader or in a partnership, is cheap and easy to set up, you have complete control over your accounts, but on the negative side of this you are not legally separate from your company, and any actions you perform as a company you are personally responsible for. Limited liability is a little harder and more expensive to set up, but does come attached with many benefits, such as the shareholder in the company is not personally responsible for any of the companies debts, and also it looks a lot more professional when approaching other companies if you have limited liability. The guys at 3Dframework had a number of issues when it came to registering their company with regards to who’s name goes on the documents, due to having existing non-disclosure agreements from their previous jobs only one could go as the businesses manager which at the time would have left him responsible for everything if the company gets sued, or runs into financial difficulty.

A number of financial options are available to a company, mostly through the banks, but the main point is that it is essential for the company to always have access to a buffer of cash, no matter how much is owed out, and how much is owed to you it is important that there is always cash to pay the bills and other unexpected problems, if a company is slow at paying you don’t feel guilty about being late with paying your outstanding debts, don’t leave the company short on cash at any period in time wherever possible. But with regards to bank funding, there are two main options availible, one of them being a loan, and the other a overdraft, loans are lower interest rate than an overdraft but it means that the amount you request (if successful) is the amount you owe, whereas an overdraft is higher interest, but you only owe the amount you actually use of it, so it is probably better to get a very high limit overdraft and only use what you require, paying back as much as possible wherever you can.

A method of ensuring you receive all payments from your clientèle is using a banks debtor control service which basically exists for the bank to pay the invoice to you almost straight away (minus a percentage) and let them recover the cost of the invoice. While it is probably not the most desirable way to do it, letting the bank take your hard earned money, it is a good way of knowing when money is coming into the account, and definitely a lot easier than taking someone to court over a relatively small amount.