This guest lecture was from Sony/Evo who are a popular games studio developing games for the Playstation 3. Their popular titles include Motorstorm and World Rally Championship, both for the Playstation series of consoles. Evo explained the process of one of their games, some job descriptions and also CV/interview help.

Departments in the studio consist of design, programming, art, production, animation and QA. This is similar to many games studios. The programming section was the most interesting part for me as I’m studying programming. They spoke about the departments inside the coding section, such as rendering, physics, networking etc. This was interesting and thorough. They also showed many of the job positions that they have, such as junior programmers, senior programmers, testers, designs, etc.

An evolution studio game is developed in parts. It starts its life as an idea and once the idea is agreed on by the team, storyboards will be created. Story boards are used to show how the game will feel once its finished. The first story boards are usually just concept art and such and not for each scene in the game. At this point in the development there may be less than 5 people working on the game. Once the full development of the game is started then there may be up to 200 people working on it.

CV help
According to Evolution studios a CV should consist of the following:
• 2 pages
• Nothing that sounds desperate
• No old qualifications
• No templates from the internet
• University and work references
• Skills
• Accomplishments
• What games you play
• Any beta testing
• A cover letter

Portfolio
They also explained that a portfolio should be kept as up to date as possible. For programmers they said to include problems you run into with code, and how you fix them. Show lots of full work with code and ensure it is all commented and neat. Team work is useful but not necasery. Game reviews are also important as you must show that you are literate.

Overall I enjoyed this session. It was informative and interesting and its nice to meet some people from behind games that I’ve played before.

1 Comments

by gh @ 23 Jan 2010 09:30 pm

ghgh