I’m probably not the expert on this subject since I’m not the CEO of Globalcorpbiz Inc, but I have a gut reaction to this Game Set Watch article on moving your career forward.

Once you are in [the industry] you should ship as many titles as possible.

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This is one area where MMO developers get screwed. It takes at least three and possibly as long as six years to build an MMO. In that same amount of time a console game developer could ship 2-4 titles.

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You can improve your title count by picking what projects you work on carefully. All other factors being equal, you should prefer the project that is closer to shipping.

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If you have an opportunity to work on a mega hit (like GTA, Rock Band, Bioshock, Halo, Half-Life, etc.) you should take it. Getting one of these on your resume is worth at least 5 other titles.

Here are my thoughts.

If I am in the business of hiring developers, a wall of credits will look impressive on a resume. But that sets expectations higher. If once you land an interview, you can’t talk about each title and what your role was in a way that meets those expectations, then you are going to look sub-par.

All else being equal, I would (and have) chosen titles that are further from shipping. Why? Because the longer you spend on the project, the more you can impact it. Who has the better experience? A programmer who worked for three months on the Halo team or one that worked through the whole Iron Man game? You mean to tell me that someone who worked on four shovelware DS titles in a year has a more impressive resume than someone working on Warhammer for the same year? You mean to tell me name-dropping Bungie is worth five times the value of someone who had meaningful experience on a game that wasn’t successful?

I’ve learned the most and grown the most when I was on titles that weren’t successful. That isn’t to say that you should go out there and try to find doomed projects, but I don’t want someone leading my army who hasn’t seen war.

And if a company is hiring just on name recognition, what kind of team are you going to get hired into? Are they all going to be people who hitched themselves to the right wagons or people that actually have the requisite skills? I’m a big believer in that you hope everyone else in the room is smarter than you. What better environment is there to learn and grow? But you want to be hired in a place that values excellence, not pedigree.

Know your data.

I have an XM Satellite Radio that displays the first sixteen characters of an artist’s name or a song title. Most often, I have to guess at what the name of the song is from listening to lyrics that match the first sixteen characters. It’s quite annoying. Why do they do this? I don’t know. Perhaps earlier screen models could only fit sixteen characters. That’s fine. Why didn’t they broadcast the full length of the name and then scroll it? Future-proof your tagging for displays like mine that can clearly display more than sixteen characters.

We do this all the time in designing interfaces for games. We make decisions based on ease of implementation over more customer-facing metrics. We design screens where your character can only have a name five letters long. Or we let it be as long as you want it to be and then we truncate it into some abomination of the name you entered when we decide it doesn’t fit. Or we don’t let you enter special characters or numbers when they really wouldn’t hurt.

Etrian Odyssey 2 only lets character names be eight characters long. This is mildly annoying when you want to name a character Aristotle and he can only be Aristotl. Character naming is important in Etrian because you can have dozens of characters that you need to tell apart by name. A smartly designed UI could have allowed for longer character names when there was room (menus) and truncated names when there wasn’t (battle screens). All this would take from the user’s POV is showing the user what the name will look like when fully displayed and abbreviated before they confirm, thus avoiding truncation surprises like in the shot above. But doing this takes time.

Or they could assume that it isn’t important and take the easy way out. With so much involved in making a game, we usually take the easy way out whenever it is presented. But if you don’t know your data, how can you weigh the importance of losing flexibility?

The point is: If you think you will only need five characters, think again, you’ll probably need ten. If you think you will only need sixteen characters, think again, you’ll probably need thirty-two. If you can’t fit more than sixteen, then figure out how you will handle situations with more than sixteen characters. Will it happen? Does it matter? Do you have a plan?

In XM’s case:

• Will it happen? Yes, many bands and songs have names longer than sixteen characters. Get an engineer to do a quick study of all the songs in your database and see how many are longer than sixteen characters.
• Does it matter? The purpose of displaying tags is to let the user know exactly what he or she is listening to. The farther away you get from showing the full title, the farther we get away from that goal. Yes, it matters.
• Do you have a plan? Truncation is a plan, but if XM knew their data, they would have easily understood that it is insufficient. Truncating leads to frustrated users who don’t know what song they are listening to (and isn’t that the fundamental reason for the display? Can you imagine someone looking for a band called “The White Stripe” after listening to this song?) and gaffes like “The Hardest Butt*”.

*I wonder what kind of Google keyword hits I’ll get in the next month with that phrase.

From an interview with Valve’s Gabe Newell:

Specialization and hierarchy are the norms in film production, and are antithetical to what needs to happen in the games industry. The reason for that distinction is that the game industry is more focused on invention than on repeatability/measurability.

That may be true at Valve where they can release whenever the hell they want, but here it’s all about measurability and specialization. I don’t know whether that is a sad fact about the rest of the industry or just a valueless distinction. Specialization helps measurability. If you know upgrades to System X take 100 hours because you’ve been doing upgrades of that type for the last six cycles, then that is valuable to reducing risk.

Not a particularly efficient or innovative way to run a company, but more realistic.

Back to talking about games for a moment.

• Did you see that the new Banjo Kazooie game is coming out not only to a whimper of marketing fanfare but at a $39.99 price point? That smacks of desperation that the game won’t see any sales in this crowded holiday season. A vote of No Confidence from the publisher is never a good sign for the quality of the product.

• A great weight was taken from my shoulders when I beat King’s Bounty yesterday. That game had a raw, uncut form of gamer RPG crack that I couldn’t shake. They ship the game wrapped in clear plastic and sealed with duct tape. You buy it by the ounce. Do you get my simile here?

Just a taste, man.

• I also got to play Buzz over the weekend with the complimentary cadre of eight players (not included) and it was a load of fun. I was a bit disappointed by the variety of game modes, however. It seemed to be the same format over and over again, where a game like SceneIt! (the sequel of which just hit and I also recommend) mixes up the format every time.

• As a big fan of the “Metroid-Vania” style Castlevania games, I’m sad to say that Order of Ecclesia suffers from “Hyperactive Art DIrector” syndrome. I’m having such a hard time separating the detailed characters from the detailed environments. There’s no restraint there. It is causing eye strain and I think I am going to give up on it.

  This is common in situations where the same developer is iterating on a title. It gets tough to see the game with new eyes and things like being able to tell the difference between enemy and furniture become assumed.

  From other screens, it seems like this clears up eventually or maybe it is only confusing in motion. Anyway, back burner for now. Too many non eye-strain games that require my attention.

Oh, the Onion. You are like some kind of national-scope lampooning organization of some kind. There’s no subject too sacred for you.

I’m always for colorful error messages. From my friend Neal’s Facebook:

I have a serious political question.

And it isn’t: “When the world doesn’t turn into a utopia and everything remains roughly as corrupt and wasteful as before, will folks use cognitive dissonance and blame all the reasons the administration blames or will they be honest and lose their starstruck hero-worship eyes?”

Such a cynic, I know.

It is this:

When Obama plays basketball, how is he defended? This Big Picture photo shows him playing hoops with some NBA folks.

Yes We Can Defend

So do they let him win? These guys play basketball for a living. Certainly they could embarrass him if they played at full strength?

I mean, let’s say you spot an opportunity for a big juicy block in the paint. Do you jump up there and slam it down in his face? Or would that mean you become the new exercise ambassador at Gitmo?

Do you elbow him for space when going up for a rebound? Or do you fear that letter that comes on January 20th with the IRS insignia that says you are being audited for tax returns dated back to when you were in your mother’s womb?

God, and what if you injured him? Stepped wrong and broke his ankle? Papers across the country would be linking you to various basketball-related terrorist organizations.

No, thanks. I’ll just ball with McCain. He can’t lift his arms over his head, so it should be a little safer for all involved.

I wonder if Obama is a ball hog. Does he call “pussy fouls”? Does he take an extra step? I mean, you don’t argue with the Man in Charge of Nuclear Weapons. Never.

Anyway, hoops is much more interesting for news-clips than the jogging that Clinton did or the kitten strangling that Bush did.

Well, it was a close race, but it looks like McCain won in the end. 51-48% is a pretty tight spread, but past the margin of error. Okay,everyone go to bed, stop using Twitter. The world will still be here in the morning. That’s it. Nothing more to see.

Posted by email from Zack’s Posterous