Guest Lecturer - Carrie Warwick

Our guest lecture this week was presented by Carrie Warwick who was previously a student at the University of Bolton, she graduated in 2013 with a first class honours. After graduating she was a 3D artist at Rivet studios, then went on to game testing at Rockstar North and now works at TT Fusion.

Carrie’s lecture was very interesting as she was very relatable, she even said that it was weird for her to give the lecture as she was sitting where we were a few years ago. She knew what we were all feeling and what we wanted to know as she had to go through it all in recent years, she gave us advice on applying for jobs and how to make our CVs and portfolios stand out.

Since Carrie has worked for both indie and AAA companies so she had a lot to say about job security in the industry, in the lecture she listed both the pros and cons for working in each area such as working for an indie company has less job security as they lack proper games publishers and therefore have a high chance of running out of money.

A thing that confused me was that she said a small games team usually is higher paid than working for a big company, so I researched into and found from the game developer salary survey of 2014 that Indie teams average a salary of around fifty thousand dollars whereas developers in the AAA industry earn on average around eighty thousand dollars. It seems that Carrie could be an exception but further research shows that indie teams have had a rise in salary from previous years and the pattern seems to be constantly rising.

Additionally Carrie talked about crunch time which I have talked about in a previous report, so there is a definite pattern among developers that crunch time is necessary and hard to avoid. While some think crunch time is bad management, I have found the majority of developers know that it is needed and feel that it a normal stage in game development and many seem to find it very rewarding. A quote from Jason Ruben says, “If the team feels like long hours of collaboration with close friends is ultimately rewarding, and if they feel fairly compensated, then who are we to tell them otherwise?”, which I totally agree with.

References:

Kris Graft. (2014). Game Developer Salary Survey 2014: The results are in!. Available: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/pressreleases/221603/GAMASUTRA_ANNOUNCES_RESULTS_OF_THE_2014_GAME_DEVELOPER_SALARYSURVEY.php. Last accessed 8th May 2015.

Mike Williams. (2013). Game Devs: When Does Crunch Cross The Line?. Available: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-10-23-game-devs-when-does-crunch-cross-the-line. Last accessed 8th May 2015.