Behind Massive Screens - a Game Development Podcast

In this episode of Behind Massive Screens, Petter and Dóri meet Brenda Bae, Lead Concept Artist on Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and Océane Näsström, Associate Lead Character Artist on Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora.

Hear about their roles, how they got to where they are today, and what went into designing the clans and characters in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora – and making them come to life in the game. How the environments in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora affected the characters in the game, in everything from their silhouettes, hairstyles, clothing and gear – and much more.

In this episode of Behind Massive Screens, Petter and Dóri meet Mikhail Greuli, Associate Art Director on Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and Kunal Luthra, Lead Technical Artist on Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora.

Hear about their roles, how they got to where they are today, and of course what it was like to create the immersive world of Pandora – as we deep-dive into the creation of biomes, scattering systems, shaders, destruction of plants, pollution systems, and so much more.

In this episode of Behind Massive Screens, Petter and Dóri meet Martin Jansén, Expert Game Designer at Massive Entertainment, to talk about the Game Design in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora.

Hear about Martin’s role, how he got to where he is today, and learn more about how Martin and the team worked with player movement, haptics, the three Cs (character, camera, controls) and much more.

In this episode of Behind Massive Screens Alex Riviere, Audio Director on Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, joins Petter & Dóri to dive into the role of an Audio Director.

Hear about how Alex got to where he is, and of course about some of the design, systems, and tech behind the audio in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora now!

In this episode of Behind Massive Screens, Petter and Dóri meet Johan Flote, Live Producer in the Ubisoft Connect team at Massive Entertainment, to find out more about how his job works and to talk about the open beta.

During the summer, Ubisoft Connect launched their open beta. But why did they choose to have an open beta? What sort of feedback has been implemented? Also, what is a Live Producer and how to you become one?

All these questions and more are among the things Petter, Dóri and Johan discuss on this episode of Behind Massive Screens.

In this episode of Behind Massive Screens, Petter and Dóri meet Julia Stegemann, Lead Knowledge Manager in the Snowdrop team at Massive Entertainment and Ola Holmdahl, Snowdrop Operations Director, to find out more about how their job works, through a discussion that touches on Academia, table-top games, late medieval love songs and more!

The Snowdrop engine, with its flexible and empowering tools, has helped develop a number of Ubisoft titles such as The Division, Mario + Rabbids, The Settlers, South Park and more upcoming games from Massive and Ubisoft.

But how did Snowdrop come to be? Why was it developed in the first place, and how do you set up the users, the game developers, to easily find the information and guidelines they need to do their craft?

In this 20th (!) episode of Behind Massive Screens, Petter and Dóri meets Conny Bengtsson, Technical Artist for Tom Clancy’s The Division 2, to find out what makes “technical art” technical. The discussion turns into a journey of spinning backpack fans, how you make glasses fit on characters’ faces, helmet shaders and – believe it a not – a big pile of virtual shirts that needed fixing.

We also get an insight into how Conny and his team worked on the latest The Division 2 apparel event, Nexus, and what brand-new innovations they brought to it.

Once a video game has been released, how do you keep track of all the discussions surrounding it? How do you gather actionable feedback to improve the game? How do you keep a conversation between developers and players going? And how do you make sure that a game’s community stays engaged and informed?

In this episode of Behind Massive Screens, Petter and Dóri meet Daria Ilyina, Community Developer at Massive Entertainment for Tom Clancy’s The Division 2, to find out more about how their job works.

In this episode of Behind Massive Screens, we delve into the subject of online programming together with Senior Online Programmer Omar Elbehaedi to find out what makes online games tick. We also delve into the subject of why code is beautiful and discuss that most forbidden topic – netcode.

You head into a Team Deathmatch, the Dark Zone, or a 4000-player battle in a space MMORPG. The players are located all over the world. The bullets are flying. But how does the technology that makes all this possible actually work? What do the online programmers do behind the scenes to make sure the information is sent over the Internet, in the most effective way, and that all those connections are stable?

Resources

Books:

A Tour of C++ 3rd edition, by Bjarne Stroustrup - https://www.stroustrup.com/Tour.html

C++ Templates: The Complete Guide 2nd Edition by David Vandevoorde, Nicolai Josuttis, Douglas Gregor - http://www.tmplbook.com/

YouTube channels:

That Dev Ops Guy YouTube channel - https://www.youtube.com/@MarcelDempers

Onur Mutlu Lectures - https://www.youtube.com/@OnurMutluLectures

Tools:

Kubernetes - https://kube.academy/

Intel VTune

Valgrind

perf (Linux)

Prometheus

Loki and promtail

Grafana

In this episode of Behind Massive Screens, Petter and Dóri meet Marthe Jonkers, Associate Art Director at Massive Entertainment, to learn about the role that art direction plays when creating a game – the impact it has on a game’s development, how it helps set a game’s style and tone early on, and how it together with concept art communicates ideas to developers.

We also get insights into what it is like to work in the Japanese games industry, and what it can take for someone from outside of Japan to ace a job interview there. And what role did a certain scary zombie girlfriend play in Marthe’s career? Let’s find out!

Resources:

Shotdeck - https://shotdeck.com/