Behind Massive Screens - a Game Development Podcast

In this episode of Behind Massive Screens, Petter meets Concept Artists Topi Pajunen and Marie Isacsson to talk about their job, concept art’s role in game development, and how art can inspire the development teams and communicate ideas.

We also gain insights into how fashion can help design characters, the limitations and freedoms artists have, how to deal with feedback and how they keep the creativity flowing.

Resources:

Artstation - https://www.artstation.com/

FZD School - https://www.youtube.com/user/FZDSCHOOL

Blender Guru - https://www.blenderguru.com/

What goes into adapting a huge AAA video game to other languages and markets than simply English? How do localizers and translators work on the text, but also on voices and UI? How do you work with voice casting and actors, dialects, language differences, and any potential translation mistakes?

And how many people are involved in localizing a giant AAA video game? Let Myriam Forbes, Localization Project Manager, and Patrick Görtjes, Associate Producer, give us a deep dive into all those subjects – and more!

Resources:

Books:

Clyde Mandelin & Tony Kuchar – This be book bad translation, video games!

https://www.amazon.com/This-book-translation-video-games/dp/194590898X

Blogs:

Algo más que traducir (Spanish)

https://algomasquetraducir.com/

In this episode of Behind Massive Screens, Petter meets The Division 2’s Creative Director Yannick Banchereau to talk about his job, his background and the new content for The Division 2 that released last week.

What does a Creative Director on a Live game such as The Division 2 do, what decisions do they make and how do they work with – and encourage – their team? How does the game’s smaller team create the new content? How has Yannick's background as Community Developer impacted his role as Creative Director? How did Covid-19 affect development?

We also discuss the new Title Update, TU15, its content, what the idea behind the new game mode is, and dive into the continuation of the story as The Division 2 heads into Year 4.

In this episode of Behind Massive Screens, Technical Animator Rasmus Björk gives an insight into what technical animation is, how it works and its place in bringing characters to life in video games. How do you make sure that a human, or an orc, or even an animal move in a realistic way? How do you build a skeleton that animators can then use to work their magic?

In this episode of Behind Massive Screens, Cinematic Animator Soo Kang tells us how cutscenes in games are made – from script to motion capture, to ending up in a game.

How do you plan for a recording, how do you use the motion capture data once it’s done, how do you go from a pair of moving dots to a complete scene? How do you create drama and how do you connect it to gameplay? How do you use a mix of technology and storytelling to draw a player into the world of the game?

In our second episode of the Behind Massive Screens podcast, we sit down with Lead Game Designer Fredrik Thylander to discuss game design, how it works in practice and how you approach designing a new game from scratch. And how do you, with various tricks (and cheats), create fun, second-to-second gameplay?

Welcome to Behind Massive Screens, a new podcast from Massive Entertainment! In this inagural episode we meet Lead Data Scientist David Renaudie, who will tell us more about how data science can help us understand our players and our games better, and what it means for future development.

With all the puzzle pieces that make up a AAA video game, how do you make sure that those pieces are put together in the correct way and at the right time? This is where Associate Producer Lisa Kretschmer and her team comes in!

How do you project manage all the different development teams in an efficient way? How do you plan the sprints – and what even are sprints? What is SCRUM and agile development? How do you manage creative people and enable them to do their magic? How do make sure deadlines are kept? And what does being a leader actually mean?

Also, make sure you pay attention to the pastry Lisa brought - it might be one of the most beautiful ones ever featured on the Fika Sessions.

Tools & Links:

Books:

Clinton Keith - Agile Game Development with SCRUM

https://www.amazon.com/Agile-Development-Scrum-Addison-Wesley-Signature/dp/0321618521

Travis Bradberry, Jean Greaves – Emotional Intelligence 2.0

https://www.amazon.com/Emotional-Intelligence-2-0-Travis-Bradberry/dp/0974320625

Susan Jeffers – Feel the Fear …and Do It Anyway

https://www.amazon.com/Feel-Fear-Do-Anyway/dp/0345487427

Kim Scott – Radical Candor

https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Candor-Kim-Scott/dp/B01KTIEFEE

Joanna Root, Dean Hume – The People Manager

https://www.amazon.com/People-Manager-Guide-First-Managers-ebook/dp/B084WVGG94

Patrick Lencioni – The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

https://www.amazon.com/Five-Dysfunctions-Team-Leadership-Fable/dp/0787960756

In Episode 11 of the Fika Sessions, we meet UX Designer Izzy Martin to learn more about user experiences at Ubisoft Connect.

How do you make sure that the users get the best experience possible? How is the design work done? What does the process look like, and how do you make sure - and test - that the user flows make sense? How do work with accessibility? Izzy answers all these questions and more as we dive into her job in detail. We’ll also find out how you can go from being a “digital librarian” in the US to working at Massive Entertainment in Sweden.

And make sure not to miss out on the fika Izzy brought. There’s a story there, and also a lot of sugar.

Tools & Tips:

Game UX Summit 19 YouTube Playlist - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GblZTyg3XNM&list=PLt0pXp-xSmxa_UIPITlN3d132twVmhJHw

In this new episode of our Fika Sessions, we meet Daniel Gonzalez, Build & Infrastructure Engineer at Massive Entertainment, to discuss details about what it takes to get the actual game to your machines.

So you have all the graphics, audio, animations and gameplay programming. How do you get all of that into one package you can play on your console or PC? Enter the Build Engineers. Daniel and his team take all of that, put it on their machines and start creating their game builds.

Join us as we find out more about how that process works, but also about concepts such as devops (development operations), automation and alerts when working on major computer engineering projects.

Also, for the fika itself, what ARE those things?!

Tools & Links:

Google Site Reliability Engineering Handbook - https://sre.google/sre-book/table-of-contents/