Paul Holden

Lots of interesting info in this survey for people in the industry at every level. How does your pay compare? Which areas are struggling/thriving? Do take a look, there's some useful insights in there :)

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Horrible news today with Rocksteady Studios Ltd being hit with a round of layoffs. According to Eurogamer, a number of employees have been laid off over the past month, with its QA department more than halved (from 33 staff to 15). Additionally, non-QA job were also affected. What is even more horrible is that the report also cites one employee who mentioned on social media that they had been informed they were being made redundant despite being in the middle of paternity leave. 😞 According to the source, the job losses are directly linked to the release of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, with its poor sales specifically mentioned as a reason for what it describes as “restructuring”. Those of you who are affected by this, please make use of my resources below: 🥇First, reach out to us at People Can Fly Studio, we have many roles open right now in Canada, the UK, Ireland and Europe, please check them out here: https://lnkd.in/eWpV5PbA 🥈Next, Discipline Games Jobs Resources: Over the past months I have created 9 (at time of writing) Games Jobs Resources to find jobs in a wide range of disciplines, and I would urge you to check them out, if anything just to see what would be available to you: https://lnkd.in/e2qSeKk6 You can find over 5,600 jobs there. 🥉 Third, the Ultimate list of Video Games Career Resources: This should be your one-stop shop for all information. My dear friend Amir Satvat maintains these documents, he is a legend for doing this - please check them out: https://amirsatvat.com/ I urge you to check out the areas in particular about CV support and mentoring, as these will help you no matter what industry you are hailing from or are looking into going next. 🎖 Finally, do not give up. Ever. No matter how dark things may look right now, I KNOW you will get through this, you have got this! 👊 Remember you are not alone. If you need help, advice, or even an ear to listen, we're here for you. Always! ➡ A request to my community, please can I ask you to repost this post to your colleagues and friends, so that we can get as many into jobs as possible! And please comment if you or your studio are currently hiring - let's help each other! Much love ❤️ #rocksteady #layoffs (source: https://lnkd.in/e3bXuFhy)

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So the last 2 weeks on BBBA have been pretty productive. In the last video I posted, everything was pretty much just layout for how I wanted things to go and where things were supposed to live. Technically though, everything was done by pasting tiles onto a tilemap one by one, by hand; either flat on the background or at a level in front of BB. I knew this had to change at some point so I've now tackled it with support for proper sprite sorting that allows all sorts of things to be handled and ordered correctly and most importantly, automatically. Also problematic was my own workflow for creating the map areas. The same way that the rest of the map was created, buildings on the map were made in the same way, only more painfully produced and with a lot less flexibility. I've now created proper building support within the project so that I can just place buildings on the map and set a bunch of parameters like how many windows and doors, chimneys, dormer windows, porches, etc. This is making building emplacements much easier now and with the sprite sorting in place, they look really good and respond in a manner that's much better. Along with this I've created some colour set support so that I can define a grouped set of colours that can be set on buildings to give them all a standardised or area specific palette. Another thing I wanted to do was spend a bit of time bringing more life to the map. With that in mind, I've added in support to animate the trees generally and the bushes when BB runs through them. Once that was in, I added support for the NPCs and enemies so that they triggered the bushes and everything else too. I've also added in support for audio zones so that each area can have an ambient noise associated with it and I can set up extra areas with other sounds attached, for example when you get close to the lakes or river you get extra sploshy noises that fade in and out as you enter and exit the areas. With a mind to saving some CPU cycles I've also added support to the main areas of the game so that when you transfer from one major section to another, the one you leave gets disabled so that it's not all ticking over in the background while the player is off busy elsewhere. I've added a few more gameplay features that I'll take advantage of soon, such as containers that you can open and close and that can be set to spawn items on first open. Instead of just placing monsters on the map, I now place spawners that allow you to specify which monster type, the maximum number of monsters alive concurrently, how often they spawn and the radius of the spawn zone. Focus for the next 2 weeks is to tackle the outside dungeon areas so that I can add those back to the map easily using a similar system to my new dynamic houses and then I've got to approach the next big issue; building internals! Like everything else before, they are currently just pasted onto the map tiles by hand in the same, painful way as before. And that has to change!

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I wrote a bit of an overview of how we animate our Citadel band ("The Wingnuts") using 'silent MIDI' tracks, as well as some of the reasoning behind having them in Badlands Crew. Read more, and see them in action here: https://lnkd.in/eSKcXspE

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Kicking off Game AI Uncovered (Volume Two), Steven D. goes behind the scene's of Team17's The Survivalists. This chapter discussed how the team handled synchronised patching with low bandwidth. It covers the difference between the logical world and the cosmetic world, and how they used an approach that built paths out of chunks and then handled interruptions. https://lnkd.in/eaTd4pJw

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Forgive me, I want to repost this Games London update to do a classic LinkedIn 'reflect and tease' post. But hear me out. For just over eight years our Accelerator and other programmes (like the Pitch Training Bootcamp of old and now Game Changer) have supported new games businesses with workshops, mentoring and more. Today we pass another milestone as we kickstart the second Game Changer cohort with their first workshop, hosted at BAFTA 195 Piccadilly - fittingly the location for our first bootcamp back in 2017! - we've supported over 150 games studios with these programmes, giving them fast-track insight and connections. Well done again to the 2024 Accelerator cohort and thanks to our speakers, mentors and partners. Giving promising new businesses access and learning is so crucial to ensure emerging games studios can be sustainable and successful. Good luck to the Game Changer cohort who start their journey today (we'll be officially unveiling the cohort next week) - you're another ambitious and promising cohort. That said... there's now a bit of an oversupply in these programmes, we've got to admit. After we debuted the Accelerator in 2020, there's now similar programmes up and down the country. Brilliant! But there's nothing in the market to help studio start-ups convert to their first successful release, right? Publishers and investors faced with industry turmoil (or at least the perception of it!) are increasingly demanding that prospective developer partners have released at least one game on their own stead before starting a conversation. So now we're cooking something up to help businesses go from 'accelerator graduate' to successful debut launch. More news in Sept. Watch this space.

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Why is it important to understand games? Because they explain how a party turns 35% of the vote in an election into over 400 seats in Parliament. Labour’s win in the UK general election is many things. A sign that voters could not do anything other than boot out a tired and incompetent Conservative Party; a relatively unenthusiastic trade off of steady competence over wider vision; a least worst option that has opened the doors to smaller parties. It’s also a victory for ruthless campaigning. It’s an operational masterclass in which financial and personal resource was directed with strategic precision to get as many Labour MPs over the top as possible. And it is derived from a fundamental truth: elections are games with clear rules. Labour’s strategy - and, to be fair, The Liberal Democrat’s approach - rejected the idealism of “the best vision wins out” to say “how do we win this game within the set rules” to avoid another 2019 style disappointment. It’s an approach that is central to great campaigning. It is also, as Kelly Clancy posits indirectly in her great book Playing With Reality, a perfect example of minmaxing a game: controlling and risking as little as possible from your side while maximising opportunities within the rules (and errors from your opponents). Clancy argues that our failure to understand play and to take it seriously within society means we can’t understand fully the social, cultural and biological drivers that lead us to create the rules based systems that we play within. Elections are therefore one of those rare times where the dynamic of play is surfaced in a way that we can truly see, that we can understand explicitly and that we can talk about easily - demonstrating its immense value in a way little else can. P.S. If you like reading about the surprising ways games reshape society, think about subscribing to my newsletter Video Games Industry Memo. There will be plenty more where this has come from in the year ahead.

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Awful news last week with Thunderful Group announcing a second round of layoffs (the previous one was earlier this year) as it is looking to “increase its focus on third-party publishing and reduce the production of internally developed projects”, therefore resulting in significant redundancies within the company’s own development teams, affecting Thunderful Games, Thunderful Malmö, The Station, Thunderful Skövde and JUMPSHIP. Additionally, roles within administration and management will also be affected. To those impacted please check out the following resources: 🥇First, reach out to us at People Can Fly Studio, we have many roles open right now in Canada, the UK, Ireland and Europe, please check them out here: https://lnkd.in/eWpV5PbA 🥈Next, Discipline Games Jobs Resources: Over the past months I have created 10 (at time of writing) Games Jobs Resources to find jobs in a wide range of disciplines, and I would urge you to check them out, if anything just to see what would be available to you: https://lnkd.in/eGE2vzUt You can find over 5,900 jobs there. 🥉 Third, the Ultimate list of Video Games Career Resources: This should be your one-stop shop for all information. My dear friend Amir Satvat maintains these documents, he is a legend for doing this - please check them out: https://amirsatvat.com/ I urge you to check out the areas in particular about CV support and mentoring, as these will help you no matter what industry you are hailing from or are looking into going next. 🎖 Finally, do not give up. Ever. No matter how dark things may look right now, I KNOW you will get through this, you have got this! 👊 Remember you are not alone. If you need help, advice, or even an ear to listen, we're here for you. Always! ➡ A request to my community, please can I ask you to repost this post to your colleagues and friends, so that we can get as many into jobs as possible! And please comment if you or your studio are currently hiring - let's help each other! Much love ❤️ #thunderfulgames #thestation #jumpship #layoffs

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🎲 I’ll be networking around #DICE with #XDSspark Business Solutions from Feb 10-13 🎲 I’m looking forward to having some thought provoking and stimulating conversations surrounding #gamedev and #externaldevelopment in #Vegas! If you’re attending DICE and are interested in chatting about external development and how xdev can make an impact in your development strategies, or how your xdev strategies may change as the development landscape continues to morph and evolve, I have some new insights to share, so let’s meet up! On a side note, how smart are these pin badges?! ✨ #xds #gamedevelopment #xdev

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Another busy sprint on BB's Big Adventure. Lots and lots of tidying up and restructuring of old stuff to allow me to replace the dungeon outsides and insides with much better mechanisms for generating the rooms. I've added in functionality for the castle gates and a bunch of other features inside. Once that was all done, I spent some time removing all the old stuff and consolidating so that I didn't get confused and accidentally use a deprecated feature or object. House internals have all been reworked along with a lot of decorations and props for inside of buildings. Lots of props for buildings. And more to go. I need to work on my own art skills a bit and come up with some sort of sofa or comfy armchair asset. We'll see how that goes... Now that I have buildings inside and out working how I want them (at least, this iteration of buildings anyway!) I have been working on bringing life back to some of the areas and improving the interactivity of the NPCs with their homes and areas. To this end, I now have the bear who lives in the cottage getting books off his bookshelf and then doing some cooking when he's inside. I have the two bears in the Teahouse (now named Bill and Ella), having a conversation and Ella walking around cleaning up while Bill goes back to some cooking. I've now got containers that can be opened and closed (and they can also spawn items when first opened) which can be seen in the Warehouse in Laketown. I've completely rewritten the door transfer mechanisms and they're now much much better to use. I've also added a bunch of audio support to things like the bushes and doors including when NPCs trigger them. I spent a bit of time also making sure that I utilise stereo features and adjust volume and L/R fade depending on where the noise originates in relation to the player. I've made improvements to the monster spawners to give me more options, including allowing events to trigger when a certain group of monsters have all been killed. I've added a gentle zoom in when you're inside a building and zoom back out when you exit to the overworld, along with displaying the name of the zone/building that you're entering during the crossfade. Overall, lots and lots of changes and improvements that should finally set me up with everything I dreamed up for the opening sections being replaced with decent systems instead of nasty prototype mockups. Now they're all in place, I should be able to start adding new areas. Next up; The Lonely Forest!

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You know how much I appreciate Neil Long of mobilegamer.biz and what he does for the industry, so when he reached out to share my fav game of the year, I instantly dropped playing Royal Kingdom by Dream Games to tell him - it's Royal Kingdom, fam. I then continued playing Royal Kingdom. Now, I'm just sharing this article to let you know that my new favorite game of the year is Royal Kingdom. It turns out that Jens Lauritzson of Flexion also loves Royal Kingdom, which is cool. You can learn what other notable people in the industry played this year by clicking the link in the first comment. Also, go try Royal Kingdom. #mobilegames #gamingindustry #royalkingdom

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I feel like my generation is going to go down as the one that understood what AI was, how it actually works, and refused to use it because of how terrible that is. I am so weary of every company thinking "lets cram 'AI' into everything!" AI image scaling - it errors a lot AI text summaries - because why should I read when I can just hope it didn't screw up AI smart edits - cause I don't know what I want to do, please get in the way! AI password storage and generation - if you don't see the security issue there I can't help you AI powered Emoji - <-[0w0]-> I'm good, I've been personalizing emoji longer than they've been a supported rich text feature ;-)

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Not a great weekend: Ballistic Moon (who are currently working on the rebuilt and enhanced Until Dawn) and Toadman Interactive (who have been working on titles such as EvilvEvil, Immortal Unchained, Everquest, Planetside 2, Vermintide 1 & 2) have both announced layoffs in the past few days. I am truly sorry to hear about this, as both studios are amazing. Those of you who are affected by this, please make use of my resources below: 🥇First, reach out to us at People Can Fly Studio, we have many roles open right now in Canada, the UK, Ireland and Europe, please check them out here: https://lnkd.in/eWpV5PbA 🥈Next, Discipline Games Jobs Resources: Over the past months I have created 9 (at time of writing) Games Jobs Resources to find jobs in a wide range of disciplines, and I would urge you to check them out, if anything just to see what would be available to you: https://lnkd.in/e2qSeKk6 You can find over 5,600 jobs there. 🥉 Third, the Ultimate list of Video Games Career Resources: This should be your one-stop shop for all information. My dear friend Amir Satvat maintains these documents, he is a legend for doing this - please check them out: https://amirsatvat.com/ I urge you to check out the areas in particular about CV support and mentoring, as these will help you no matter what industry you are hailing from or are looking into going next. 🎖 Finally, do not give up. Ever. No matter how dark things may look right now, I KNOW you will get through this, you have got this! 👊 Remember you are not alone. If you need help, advice, or even an ear to listen, we're here for you. Always! ➡ A request to my community, please can I ask you to repost this post to your colleagues and friends, so that we can get as many into jobs as possible! And please comment if you or your studio are currently hiring - let's help each other! Much love ❤️ #ballisticmoon #toadmaninteractive #layoffs

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Two weeks ago, I attended Interactive Futures, a computer games outreach event held in Leamington Spa, UK. It changed the way I use AI in my workflow. Despite spending over 20 years in the industry, five of them locally, this was my first time at the event. I’m glad I went and I thoroughly enjoyed it. There were several highlights worth mentioning: * A great introduction to the vibrant games community around Leamington Spa and the West Midlands. * Opportunities for real, practical conversations with games industry professionals. * Engaging panel talks on industry hot topics. Of these, the panel talks stayed with me the most. I was particularly interested in the discussions on the future of games, especially the role that AI will play (many thanks to Clare Green, Laura Steel, 🕹️Csaba Berenyi, James Norris, Hernan Polloni) Over the years, I’ve attended many talks on AI and have a reasonable understanding of the subject. However, one comment seemed to challenge me directly: how much have I integrated AI into my workflow? The truth was, I hadn't—at least not to the extent I could. I knew of tools, the usual suspects, but they weren’t genuinely part of my workflow habits. Not as much as they might be. Since then, I've started to recognise and integrate the practical power of current generative AI tools, which feels like the sweet spot for my personal use. I’m now incorporating AI more into my daily routine—as a sounding board, a visualiser, a time-saver, and a productivity booster. This shift has led me to rethink how I view AI right now, even if my grander hopes for the possibilities remain. Initially, I saw AI as a grand intellectual game-changer, something that would mark a paradigm shift in how we perform jobs, but essentially unfinished and kept at arm's length. It might still be that huge leap in the future, but for now, for me, it’s more of a practical tool that I can weave into my approach rather than something that completely transforms the game. From a workflow perspective, it’s less like moving from two-dimensional to three-dimensional chess, and more like the introduction of metal rackets in tennis, DRS in Formula One, or VAR in football. The game remains fundamentally the same but, to play it well, you need to understand the changes, even if they aren’t immediately apparent on the surface. Because before the huge change, as is common, there will be a number of incremental changes for those who are looking. My goal now is to ensure I’m really looking. If you are interested in further insights into AI’s impact on tools, as well as the possibilities in the future, I'll include some links in the comments.

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The experts' guide to mobile games monetisation: Part one

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We're in the middle of the main recruitment time for HEIs, so we're only days away from our second Open Day of this academic year, slotted in between a range of taster sessions and other recruitment events. "Selling" a games related course is always a little interesting, but in recent years it has become quite a bit harder; between the industry itself going through significant job losses, the cost of study amidst a cost of living crisis and more generally the broader view of games courses being wasteful or not worth it ("I can learn that from Youtube!"), the team have to work hard to demonstrate the benefits of choosing to spend three years with us. So how do we differentiate ourselves from the competition? What makes us a better choice over Youtube or a two week long bootcamp? It comes down, as ever, to the surrounding infrastructure that comes with studying at university. Spend three years with us and we'll not only give students the knowledge and skills they want, but we'll also help change them as a person (hopefully for the better). The course and the course team are just one part of the larger whole, we encourage students to talk to the careers team who will help them build confidence at interviews and in themselves. We'll link them up with the library staff who can help them find all sorts of resources, whether they're directly related to their course or just a current focus. We bring in alumni who can talk about their experiences since leaving the course; the route they've taken to get where they are and who may become the start of the students professional network. The three years are a chance for students to build a set of lifelong friendships, take part in social events through the SU and step outside of their interests in ways that might otherwise be difficult to achieve. Anywhere that even vaguely promises a job in the games industry at the end of any offering is being disingenuous at best. In fact I make a point of not promising that when I give open day talks, but I go on to explain that the skills we teach and the benefits studying at university bring can go on to open a range of doors that those students may not have even considered as options. It's on us as games academics to put in the leg work to change the perception of games courses; they're definitely not just for playing games and they shouldn't just be a pipeline into a relatively uncaring industry.

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Right, it's been a while so let's do one of my favourite things: hawk my newsletter to the lovely LinkedIn punters. Video Games Industry Memo comes out every Thursday morning with the mission to explain games to you in 15 minutes flat. Each newsletter is stuffed with: 🤔 One big read that unpicks a topic shaping the industry 📰 Five news hits to help you get across the news agenda 💼 The job movers and job vacancies in games worth checking out 📅 Events and conferences worth keeping an eye on 🎮 And three video game releases to play over the weekend The feedback on VGIM from my 1450 subs has generally been tip top, with readers describing it as "the gold standard of industry newsletters" and "like having a conversation with you every time I read it." Get subscribed to the newsletter ahead of tomorrow's edition, which looks closely at the fortunes of Embracer Group 👀 https://lnkd.in/eEd6mCPM

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