xilefian

I'm going to be a bit negative for a moment, please bear with me. This addresses some of the games industry career questions people have asked in this thread.

I remember talking about visual scripting with a team from a certain games company that makes their own hardware. The team was made up of a project manager, artists, a director and programmers.

The director started using visual scripting and got really into it, the artists already used something similar for shader work and then realised visual scripting massively helped out with other small things where they didn't need to rely on programmers.

Part way through the project the engine, which was an early version of the latest version of an extremely popular engine that begins with the letter "U", began crashing horribly. Memory usage became an issue almost out of the blue, and this was for a rather bare game prototype so wasn't like the system was being pushed with any ground-breaking, amazing technology.

The project manager had to get the team to shift gears to start fixing issues in the project and fixing issues in the engine (it was a very early version of the engine) and they ended up spending an incredible amount of time pulling apart very complex visual script implementations that the director and artists were creating pretty much overnight. Between sun set and sun down the project would get an entirely new system that was working as a unit, but it exponentially bogged down the run-time in terms of memory and then performance (and compile times, actually there's still complaints about this factor with visual scripting in this engine).

The project was forced to be scrapped (it might have been restarted, I don't actually know, but the team disbanded) and feedback was given to the creators of the engine about the perils of visual scripting in a large AAA production.

This lesson was learned across a number of studios (advice spreads, the games industry is oddly incestuous): don't use visual scripting for large systems in critical projects worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

For a single Unity indie developer building a small project over the weekends, it is perfectly fine and I absolutely think visual scripting is awesome (at least, the concept is awesome). Visual shaders are pretty much a solved problem at this point, everyone should be okay with these, but game logic is unfortunately still married to the technology.

I think we're at a point now where it's okay to let artists use it for scripting unique interactive/animated elements in their levels - that makes total sense to me.

People reading this thread should know that you're not going to get a career in the games industry with visual scripting. I doubt you'd even get a job doing it. Why hire someone to do visual scripting when any person already on the team can do it? But there's probably small start-up studios out there who hire visual scripters out of ignorance - I know there was a fad of doing this back in the late 2000s. If you want a career in the games industry, you must either be an artist or a programmer (programmers are always needed, artists is rather competitive) and you need to be a good one, which means BA for artists and BSc for programmers; definitely not BA for "game design" - that's a good way of saying you're not as good as any of those BSc game programmers who are competing for your job.

If you are young then absolutely visual scripting is the perfect introduction to game technology/development and logical thinking and it will quickly get you a portfolio. It was something akin to visual scripting when I was a very young child that got me on my path to my career (it wasn't quite visual scripting as we have it these days, in hindsight it was probably better that visual scripting, but definitely wasn't typing up a program).

PCs have enough headroom these days to make some awesome stuff with pure visual scripting, so for a hobbyist you can truly make some fantastic stuff - such as what OP has shown.

I laughed out loud at this. Very cheeky!

In seriousness though; EA own some studios that have incredible programmers and produce great technology. DICE in particular have contributed a lot to the real time graphics community.

There's a few famous EA code projects too, such as the "EASTL" which improves the C++ standard template library to be more suitable for high-performance games, EA gave it away for free for the C++ standards committee to either take a look at or for other game studios to use.

Absolutely, you can use both together if you already know how to program simple things and want to use visual scripting for the more complex stuff

Amusingly in the industry we do this the other way around. Program the complex stuff, use scripting (visual or otherwise) for the easy stuff. You'd set up a door opening by a button with a script, but you'd program the networking engine that sends that door open command to the other players.

Level designers are 3D artists these days. I included a small bit about how we're seeing acceptable scripting done by level designers - but they are very much first and foremost 3D artists. The design of a level tends to be discussed, tested and iterated on by a number of designers (including artists, programmers, whatever).

Portfolios of level designers that I see are guaranteed to be focusing on aesthetic design. That sounds awful, that sounds shallow, but it's how it is. If you can make a stunning looking level, then our team can teach you the game design rules that our studio has (and you can bring in your own rules if you have them) - but we will hire you for the very pretty levels you make. This is why a BA degree is recommended for game artists (will train you to make a portfolio of very pretty assets).

Game designer is not a real job (anyone on the Earth can be a "game designer" - but to have that as your job title requires a lot of years experience doing something else in the games industry that isn't credited as "game designer"). That level designer is also a game designer, as is the game systems programmer or even UI programmer these days. If you know nothing about game design then you will pick it up and learn it through experience and observation (and if that doesn't happen then you probably don't care about your job).

"Tech designer" sounds like a programmer/technology lead. If they're using visual scripting then something has gone horribly wrong. I don't think I've seen a role where a technology lead is not implementing technology themselves.

Of course there are exceptions to all this, I worked with studios that hired dedicated "game designers" - however for some reason they all seemed to be friends and families of the game "director" and the art teams tended to express their frustration at their designer's lack of design sensibilities and being deaf to the design ideas of their team.

But yes, bottom line is why hire someone for visual scripting when it requires almost no skill and anyone else already on the team can do it as it takes up such little time?

I'm in the UK. My work is all contract at the moment so naming names isn't something I do. Pretty much makes me a stranger talking shit on the internet, but oh well (I get real bad imposter syndrome and sometimes I have to step back and think "holy shit I actually worked on this", so even I feel like a stranger on the internet). I encounter a surprising amount of prototype hardware that I'm never allowed to directly touch; that might give an indication of where I'm at.

What I've described ranges from indie startups to medium studios that depend on publishers and then some of the software teams on the hardware companies (R&D is a big part of what I did, right now I'm kind of not doing much of that - doing tools for medium sized studios and definitely mobile and VR - huge market).

I have only spoken to people in full publishing studios (EA, Activision, Ubisoft - had a friend doing level design work at Ubi who's no longer there, actually) I haven't actually worked with them to my knowledge, but certainly talk with people involved in some of their studios. Always technical programming (graphics rendering side primarily).

Everyone I deal with in art tends to be contractors, friends and then technical artists - seem to avoid art teams unless I'm working in the actual studio making tools. Art contractors bounce a fair amount between film and games, I have noticed. In the UK I haven't seen too much contracting out to Asia, oddly. Very heavy reliance on local contractors, though. I'm probably avoiding the size of production that needs to out source large asset demands to cheaper markets.

Sorry that's a mish mash of studio sizes. I seem to get around. Right now I am at the perspective of a contractor who dips in and out various sized studios and talks with all sorts of people (because that's how I get work). Part of me talking to people to find work involves chatting to the hiring people so I end up seeing a lot of that side too and I relay a lot of info from there to universities trying to make their graduates hirable.

I am considering getting back into the industry proper. Finding contract work as a micro studio myself whilst doing game development at the side is not proving viable right now (it's been a really long few years). I didn't chase the indie dream like most people, was sort of forced to make a game studio as I had some very valuable game related software that needed to be protected legally before any clients could use it. Gamers certainly describe me as an indie developer when I try to explain my story in the pub or at a university.

Ranting again. Are you in the UK too?