The counter to anything terrifying, off-putting, or grim is cuteness. This is done by exaggerating certain features that humans typically find endearing and downplaying the features that humans find alarming, while keeping the visual recognizable. This works with animals.

It works with the undead.

It works with just about anything.

Humans tend to look at a few things to determine cuteness - the main two being proportion and the removal or masking of traits that we find scary or off-putting.

In terms of proportion, we tend to look favorably on things with the proportions of children, babies especially. Babies have much larger heads relative to their bodies, arms, and legs. If the scary thing is proportioned like a baby or child, we are much more likely to look at it favorably rather than with fear. Most examples of something cute based off of something scary use body proportions closer to a child’s body (or the animal equivalent) than an adult’s.

Second, we reduce the “fear” factor by simplifying, downplaying, or removing any elements of body horror or things that make people feel uneasy. This typically means any markers of injury, illness, pain, danger, or just obviously unnatural. Notice the mask on the left has many wrinkles in the skin, the unnatural white eyes, the off-putting shading, the heavy emphasis on the yellow teeth and blood-red gums, and the realistic proportions that intentionally push this mask into the uncanny valley for the unease it causes. Now consider the right mask - everything is simplified, with smooth lines and the only sharp edges being on the smile itself. Bright colors, a stylized happy face, with no features that could be considered off-putting.

Combine the use of proportions with the removal of things that induce unease in the viewer, and you get something cute and less scary. This also works in reverse - take something normally cute, change the proportions, and add in the things that induce unease in the viewer and it becomes scary. Artists take advantage of our inherent mental associations with these things to make things cute or creepy.

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Yes, Gameplay Programmer is a specialization. Gameplay Programmers are the engineers who work directly with designers to make the designs actually work in game. This primarily means writing code to make the systems and rules that the designers come up with work.

Gameplay programmer goals tend to be building systems that allow designers to create new content. This often involves building and supporting tools to allow the designers to create, edit, and tune many different individual instances of a specific kind of content - abilities, spells, items, enemies, quests, etc. Thus, a gameplay programmer might build an item editor that would allow an item designer to create many different items. This can scale up to enormous core gameplay-driving systems, like Shadow of Mordor’s famous Nemesis system, Prince of Persia’s Time Rewind system, or Street Fighter’s combat.

Gameplay programmers are not particularly high priority when it comes to layoffs. Engineers tend to be more expensive and marginally more difficult to hire and vet than other fields like QA or production, but gameplay engineers are absolutely not the kind of unicorns like technical artists, engine programmers, graphics programmers, and the like. There’s always a need for senior gameplay programmers when it comes to standing a game up at all, but you only need as many gameplay engineers support the designers to build the content that production has scoped.

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Sure. If spending on the smaller and experimental projects severely eclipses the spending on the mega franchises, the publishers would take notice and you’d see a lot more of the former. The gaming industry is, unfortunately, very hit-driven. The top 10% of earning games take in ~90% of the total revenue for the entire industry. Work horse franchises like Call of Duty, Pokemon, Grand Theft Auto, Madden, Fortnite, Monster Hunter, etc. generally out-earn the experimental and new games by orders of magnitude, even if the new games hit it big. This is why the big publishers behave the way they do during economic bad times. They want to keep things as safe as possible and weather the storm, so they stick to the safest projects (the workhorses) and cancel development on risky projects (experimental and new stuff).

A huge number of people would need to change their buying habits in a significant way for such an industry shakeup to happen. Players would need to go all out for buying risky and new games, rather than continuing to play old and reliable games. When I say all out, I don’t just mean a little bit - they need to purchase smaller and experimental games at a rate that is exponentially larger than the buy-in for lifestyle games, likely by a factor of at least 3-4x what they collectively spending on lifestyle games. This would be incredibly difficult, because it would essentially be a complete inversion of the way players currently choose to spend their money. Nothing is impossible, but this is improbable due to fighting against the human instinct to stay safe.

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For those who do not understand this change, in the EU any in-game purchase that can be made for paid/premium currency must display the actual cost in local currency to players. Here is my MS Paint mockup of how such a thing would look as required.

The new regulation also requires the conversion rate of premium currency to real money at the baseline exchange rate (e.g. buying the smallest pack of premium currency).

This would have some obvious first-order/immediate results - players would now be able to see how much it would cost them to buy an item outright. This would provide additional friction in direct purchases to players, making them incrementally less likely to purchase items directly.

This would also have some less obvious second-order/derivative results. This also has the side effect of making the more efficient currency bundles look better in comparison, because players can get the premium currency at a discount if they buy those instead of the baseline. It would likely increase engagement by showing that players are earning “value” when they finish quests and obtain premium currency through playing the game by reinforcing that they are obtaining things worth money. I think that the in-game stores will use this to direct players toward better value bundles and packs to buy.

I also think that this would only be the beginning - game designers are clever folks, and we can find many ways to adjust things given a set of constraints. Remember, one of the secondary effects of requiring all gacha games to show the actual percentages was the creation of “pity rates” where continued failed pulls actually incrementally increase the success chances in future pulls. These kind of incentivization changes will continue, including thinking up ways to leverage the “real price” display to make the purchase more appealing. I like to think of it in this way - “just because I can’t imagine it myself doesn’t mean such a thing can’t exist, only that it doesn’t exist… yet.” If there’s a possibility, somebody will probably figure it out.

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The main element here is that it kills short games and short form game experiences, because players can play the game through and refund it before the refund window closes. Any short form game experience like that has pretty severe pressure to increase the runtime to avoid getting refunded. Other than that, it doesn’t have a huge effect on things. Games have a huge incentive to hook players within the first few minutes, let alone hours, because we must. Generally speaking, the amount of effort a player is willing to put into a game is directly proportional to the cost for that player to obtain that game. When games are hard to obtain, we value them more. When games are easy to obtain, we value them less. Since games have become so easy to obtain, there is a commensurate increase in need to hook players faster.

When I was a child, new games were incredibly rare and difficult to obtain for me. Since I could only purchase a handful of games a year as a child, I spent a lot of effort determining which I would choose and I would spend a lot of time playing them because I wanted to ensure that effort and choice were worthwhile. I spent so much time playing and replaying those games because I wanted to squeeze every last bit of enjoyment I could out of them - even the bad ones. I would be willing to give any new game I got significantly more time before I gave up on it because I lacked other options.

Today there are huge numbers of games available for extremely cheap or free. Steam sales, Epic Game Store giveaways, Game Pass, Playstation Plus, EA Play, bundles, freemium games, and so on are all available. Most are available within minutes or even seconds. This means that there is almost zero cost associated with them to the player - the majority of the cost is the time it takes to install the game and try to play it. Since there is no cost, there is no inherent buy-in or effort the player is willing to put into the game. This means that any game that fails to hook the player within the first few minutes will probably lose the player’s interest and the player will move on to the next thing. There is no reason for the player to bother spending the effort to get to the good part.

This is one of the saddest things to me as a dev, because every single game that gets discarded almost immediately for not having a hook within the first few minutes was built by a team who did their best to build a fun and compelling experience, and it means that players can easily miss a game this way that could be really fun and engaging for them. Unfortunately, this is the way the incentives line up and, thus, the expected outcome.

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In such a situation, you have a little bit of leeway (e.g. you can ask and tell your boss that you don’t want to change projects) but we’re ultimately expected to follow orders. If we don’t like our assignment, we are free to find a different job elsewhere. This does include the possibility of lateral transfer within the organization, e.g. somebody at Infinity Ward could apply to transfer to another COD studio if they did not want to move internally from COD to Project Wombat.

In the last time I was faced with such a decision, the majority of the sub-studio was assigned to the new experimental project off of the old mainstay. My time switching over was not so much a question of “if” but “when”. I noted this with my boss during a one-on-one and made sure that it was noted in my record, but there was very little I could do other than tender resignation or apply for a transfer.

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Some specializations are safer than others due to the rarity of the specialization, but the amount of control you have over your job safety is absolutely dwarfed by the number of factors outside your control.

Imagine a hypothetical scenario - maybe technical artist Neelo is much harder to replace than QA tester Desmal, so among all of the devs on Project Wombat at Infinity Ward, Neelo ranks pretty high up there. However, consider now that Project Wombat is the new secret experimental project that’s being developed by one of the core Call of Duty studios. Between cutting from the Call of Duty team or from Project Wombat’s team, Microsoft would probably cut from Project Wombat team first, right? Rather than cut the teams down evenly, they would probably decide (quietly) to cancel Project Wombat and lay everybody off in order to save people on the Call of Duty team since Call of Duty is their biggest earner and Project Wombat is still unannounced. This means the fact that Neelo has a higher priority job gets absolutely swallowed by the fact that Project Wombat is a lower priority project when compared to the biggest earning franchise at the studio.

This is because layoffs are often not evenly applied across the board, but strategically. If a big company is cutting 10% of workforce, an underperforming studio with a string of consecutive failures might get shuttered completely, while a consistent earner and high performer like Madden may go untouched or only affected minimally. A studio that has a high performer will likely cut more from the lower performer than the higher performer. A project scheduled to launch in three years might get cancelled outright to save a project that launches in one year. These are all enormous decisions that mostly ignore how individually valuable those of us in the trenches are, because our individual value is absolutely dwarfed by the financial size of these larger decisions.

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I can really only speak to the industry here in North America. When layoffs happen, the people deciding who goes and who stays usually triage the employees - divide them by importance/necessity. This can include which project they are working on, how much tribal knowledge they have, how difficult they would be to replace or outsource, and so on. Some workers are deemed mission-critical and are safe. Some workers are deemed high priority and are in the least danger. Most are put in general buckets of lower and lower priorities, with the layoffs starting from the lowest priority and working their way upward until sufficient costs have been cut.

The rule of thumb is that a worker that is easier to replace and/or working on a less important project has a lower priority to retain. If the tasks of one’s team can be outsourced to an external contractor, that increases the chances of laying off the entire team and outsourcing to an external team. If the worker doesn’t have a good relationship with her manager, that can decrease her chances at being kept. This applies in broad strokes, from artists to consultants. It is best to use this kind of heuristic to evaluate one’s layoff potential.

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The best advice I got in tough times was “broaden your search”. The second-best advice I got was “use your network if you can”. There are jobs to be had that are gaming-adjacent and gaming-related that I found I could do. I, like many, ended up working outside of traditional video game development for a brief period of time. That might be casino games, mobile games, simulation, training work, user experience design, or something else entirely.

I worked with former game devs doing work very similar to game dev at the time. I got this job because one of my D&D players had also been let go from his former employer a few months before me, found work at a new company, and then told me to apply at his company since they were hiring. That turned into an offer, which resulted in my employment there for a time while I looked for work back in proper video games. I ended up working with more than one of the developers I worked with at that company at other studios later on in my career.

You are never tied to any one employer and you can always leave. There’s nothing wrong with finding work in the interim to pay the bills, especially if you can grow/maintain your industry network, level up your relevant skills, and then take new opportunities when they present themselves. It might not be your favorite job ever, but paying the bills and leveling the skills are absolutely a fair trade - especially during a recession.

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This is a very good question. Unfortunately, there isn’t really a good answer for this because those of us on the ground aren’t privy to the meetings or decision-making process where such things are decided. I have no super accurate formula for you, because we’re almost always operating on incomplete data. The best I can offer is a general approach that I’ve internalized over time that has served me well.

First and foremost, it costs you very little to update your resume if you’re feeling a little nervous. You don’t have to go so far as to apply to new jobs, but having an updated resume while you’re still fresh on what you’ve been doing is a good thing - especially when you don’t have any additional or external pressure on you. It only takes a little time and it’s a healthy reassurance that you’re ready to start looking if the need arises.

Now… the main reason layoffs come generally depends on one major factor - whether you’re at a company that’s privately or publicly owned. Privately-owned companies operate at the whim of their controlling stakeholder - e.g. Tim Sweeney has a controlling stake of Epic Games, Mark Zuckerberg controls 60% of the voting shares at Meta, etc. The owners are the ones who decide whether to cut staff. In these situations, as long as the overall company is still doing well enough financially, a favored project that stumbles (again) still gets a lot more leeway - they’ll often let it slide even if there are setbacks. Even project cancellations may not result in layoffs so much as workers getting moved around to other projects instead. The key is the “doing well enough financially” part - if the company financials become unhealthy, the knives come out. At such employers, watch out for funding deals with other companies or investors falling through - that’s a really bad sign and you should consider updating your resume and starting a job search if you see or hear about that happening.

If you’re at a publicly traded company, you’re really at the whim of the quarterly investor report. Investors buy into a given company in order to get a return on investment, so they need to see why they shouldn’t take their money and invest it elsewhere, especially if those other places can offer a better return. The general case for a better financial future is the company “cutting costs”, which is to say our jobs. In this situation, the cuts typically come from cancelling underperforming or troubled projects, cutting the lower performing products, and cancelling longer-term projects. The safest projects to be on at these companies are the workhorses - the long term sustaining franchises that pay the bills. The most dangerous projects at these companies are the experimental/new things - the untested cool new ideas. At such an employer, I would pay close attention to the quarterly investor reports at your company and see whether the company is hitting its targets, especially if I am on a project that is new and/or struggling. Whenever I see one bad quarterly report, I update my resume. If I see two bad quarterly reports in a row, I start checking my recruiter emails.

This isn’t to say that this is all there is - there’s a lot we aren’t privy to. But these general rules have served me well over the years. Having gone through as many layoffs as I have, I developed a more subconscious sense of these things - bad team morale is often also a major indicator of layoffs in the near future. It’s hard to explain, sometimes things just don’t feel right. Pay attention to what the leadership says during the all hands meetings and try to read between the lines. The words they share will always be portrayed positively, but the proof is almost always in the pudding - the financials are what matter.

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We’re usually pretty clear about what we’re looking for when we’re hiring. Between the title, qualifications, and desirable skill list, a candidate should be able to get a good idea of what the job’s roles and responsibilities are.

Some job descriptions are more detailed than others, but those in the field should be able to pick out the relevant skills and things. For example, this current opening listed at EA’s website for a [mid-level designer on the Sims franchise] is very specific about what they are looking for. They use proprietary tools to build content. They are a live service game. They need systems-driven gameplay. They want technically-minded applicants to work in a mature environment making content for a live service.

Some are a little less detailed, like this [entry level Technical Designer position at Zenimax Online Studios]. However, you can still get a lot of information from what’s written here - scripting skills, making gameplay and content, working with a team, experience with industry tools, breadth of skills like combat, narrative, and level design. This is likely a scripter who can help be the glue that gets prototype and placeholder gameplay elements up and running.

If you look at enough of these, you start seeing the similarities in what they are looking for. As you start picking them out, you can tailor your resume to show the hiring manager that you can do the things they’re looking for. For the first job, you want to show that you can work within a solid framework on a tight schedule and within known limitations. For the second job, you want to show you’ve been able to stand up lots of different kinds of gameplay in an off-the-shelf engine like Unreal or Unity.

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What matters the most to hiring managers is the kind of experience a candidate has. Hiring managers have a specific set of tasks they’re looking to hire someone to do for them. At an indie studio, they are probably looking for a broad set of experience, someone able to field many different types of tasks. At the typical AAA studio, they’re probably hiring for expertise in a specific field - somebody who’s an expert at AI, or procedural content generation, or in-game economies. Whatever skillset they’re looking for in a candidate is what they’re hoping to see in the applications.

If I get a resume that has the relevant experience and skills doing the kind of tasks I’m looking to hire for, I’m interested in that candidate - especially if some company has paid the candidate to do those tasks before. I generally don’t care whether that person was paid by an indie or AAA studio to do it, I really only care if they did so at in a professional capacity. Even amateur experience is worth considering, if it’s in the correct field of expertise!

This makes the act of tailoring your resume incredibly important, because that’s what we’re reading to determine whether you get a callback. If you’re taking on the dragon type trainer in the elite four, you want a team that can resist dragon type attacks and deal super effective damage to dragon types. When you’re working on your resume, you want it to be as super-effective as you can. This means changing the descriptions of your past experience to better fit what the job description is looking for. If you can manage that, you’ll increase your chances of getting past that step of the hiring process.

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I honestly don’t know. There are very few people who have stuck with a single employer for their entire career and compensation still isn’t super comfortable water cooler conversation. I can tell you that I have gotten the biggest bumps in both compensation and title by changing jobs - the amount I gained in salary from my last job to my current job would have taken nine years of raises to match.

I will point out that the most relevant factor to salary and compensation in our industry appears to be what studio you work for. I can tell you that my starting salary at my current studio was $180k. While I was searching last, one studio told me their maximum was $140k, another studio offered $172k, a third studio offered $175k, and I was even told by one recruiter that their starting pay for my experience and field was $225k.

Obviously the situation changes significantly over time - nowadays it is probably lower due to the increased number of devs looking for work and the relative rarity of job openings allows hiring managers to be more selective. That said, overall compensation is one of those things that really depends on the specific employer and how their pay structure works. Big studios and big publishers tend to pay better because they can. Smaller studios, of course, have smaller budgets and pay less.

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I can’t answer the exact number of studios I’ve worked for because I don’t want to give any specifics that may identify me, but it is definitely more than five.

Compared to others I’ve met who have worked for similar amounts of time in the industry, the number of studios I’ve worked for is significantly higher. This is, in part, due to a feedback cycle - I got really good at rescuing and shipping features and systems that were in danger of being cut, so I would get hired to do that. But most games that have features and systems in trouble often have the entire project in trouble, which would often mean layoffs.

This has also led to me having a longer list of shipped titles than most and a much broader set of genres. I know some devs who have been in the industry almost as long as I have who’ve remained at the same studio for their entire careers. I can count on one hand the number of devs I’ve worked with who have worked at more studios than I have.

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In order to understand how something is “hard coded”, you need to understand what we do to the code in order to make it run on your device. Code is written in a human-readable format, but there is a lot of optimization and changes that get done to the code before the device can run it. This process is called compiling and linking. The result of compiling and linking code is an executable file that the device can understand, but humans cannot. The executable that has been compiled and linked is a snapshot of the code at the time that was compiled and linked. Any changes to the code require compiling and linking again in order for the executable to reflect it.

The program often needs to make choices based on internal values while the game is running. Most of the time these values are data-driven, meaning they are read from files outside of the code (e.g. read in the information from this config file and store it as whether to run the game in windowed mode). When the game needs to decide whether to run in windowed mode, it checks the file, grabs the relevant data, and uses that to decide. Because it’s pulling this information from that config file, the same executable can handle both windowed and non-windowed mode. We don’t need to compile and link the executable again.

If running windowed mode were hard coded, somewhere in the code itself there would be a variable like “Windowed = true”. Then, after compiling and linking the executable, that executable would always run in windowed mode and never be able to run in full-screen mode. The only way to change this would be to change the code, then compile and link the executable again. Hard coding is fast and easy to do as a first pass of things, it’s a quick way to test stuff locally if you can compile and link the executable yourself.

We can’t give out the code because it’s copyrighted and our intellectual property. We can only give out the executables after compiling and linking because they can’t be read by humans. This means that any changes made to code are fairly difficult to distribute - this is what patches are. Hard coded values can only be changed when we distribute a new executable, while data-driven values like settings in a config file are much easier to change because they don’t require compiling and linking, they only require somebody to modify the file being read and not the executable itself.

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