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 saw this change last generation when looking at the portfolios that studios were accepting and talking with students studying and professional game artists. Spoke a lot with the hiring teams and recruiter companies about it also, I seem to get around...

If I were to blame something, my hunch is the fact that studios started hiring those from the film industry to work on game assets at the beginning of the last generation. Rapid iteration on level design became incredibly quick and easy with modern tools.

Remember that the first generation of level designers came from Quake days in the 90s - they didn't have the high fidelity art requirement and their levels were judged based on a design and play-ability "feeling".

Times have changed and now tools are easier to use and people are expected to learn new tools as they are needed. Graphics have improved massively. The factor that makes me choose one portfolio over another is the incredibly beautiful 3D level that was created, if there's a massive paragraph about design considerations then I'm not going to read it. (EDIT: Okay I will read it out of personal interest, but I would probably move design discussion to job interview stage, rather than portfolio).

What I will look for is all the visual design hints. If there's a beautiful European map with a nice tower and a ladder going up the side of it, I'd like to see visual hints that would make a sniper easy to spot up there and some props that could aid the sniper in cover. I'd like to see paths with appropriate widths for what the level creator intended for - but this is my personal eye of level design, not everyone will share that eye, so best bet is to make the prettiest level you can and learn game design on the job like you would have done anyway.

I've seen separate art and design departments, but I don't think I've seen a case where people in the design department are not also using the same tools as those in other departments and at least communicating on that level. I am never, ever surprised when I see someone scrubbing up an orange mapped level who also has a few props that they modelled thrown in at various places.

Actually the idea of a "prop" team is something I've seen discussed recently over the asset-flip complaints. It's nice having a team of artists dedicated to making props (I consider that standard) but it saves money to just buy the props and not have as many artists. I'm definitely familiar with that set up, every studio is different.

My "game designer is not a job" talk is one that upsets pretty much everyone. I think "creative director" is pretty much what I'm addressing with it - you won't get hired as a "creative director" without the years of experience needed to get you to that level. Game designers will have secondary skills.

UX designers is a more recent field that's more specialised, sort of branched off from UI design. I'm more understanding of that specialist area as there's quite a lot of nuanced stuff involved with that (quite the field to study). But "game design" is something that everyone can learn, we're all game designers - the actual act of game design is a real job, but it's a job that the artists and programmers and entire team end up doing in some capacity.

Universities that offer "game design" BA courses do so because students who want to be "creative directors" asked for "game design" courses without knowing that the industry doesn't hire this at a graduate level. Universities get money for it, so why say no when demand is so high.

I am aware of a lot of what I say being anecdotal, but I'm rather passionate about all this, and that's because I know people who wasted a lot of money on "game design" BA courses and ended up being unemployable by the industry because they were mediocre 3D artists and mediocre programmers up against skilled 3D artists and skilled programmers in a world where everyone has the capacity to be a game designer.

Sorry for that unedited rant. Hopefully that communicates a bit about where I'm coming from with all this.

I am interested in the "technical designer" role helping out on visual scripting. That sounds rather bizarre to me, but understandable from a team lead point of view. I think I've been lucky and only worked with level designers who had no trouble with scripting, I'm sitting here trying to think of who in their team they'd approach if they did encounter a program and perhaps it would be someone on the technical side. I'm starting to think that would be me in a few of the jobs I did as I was usually the guy who worked with artists to train them for the engine tools being used on a project (usually because I wrote the tools for the artists).

I am a big fan of the idea of letting artists script their levels, sounds like a big offload of responsibility and moves the problem of scripting levels to the source of where it is created; the levels.