Jon Moore, Graphics Engineer, Iron Galaxy Studios

Hi, I'm Jon Moore, and today I'm going to be talking to you a little bit

about my job as a graphics engineer at Iron Galaxy Studios.

A little bit about Iron Galaxy first, we've got two offices in Chicago and

Orlando, and we're currently at around 110 full time employees.

And the company was kind of made out of the ashes of the Midway bankruptcy

in Chicago.

And the focus of the company

because of that is try to be a company you could retire from if you wanted to.

Trying to be more stable than the average game development studio.

Part of that is that our work is super diverse.

We're a mid-sized internal projects include things like Wreckateer,

Killer Instinct, and Divekick.

But that's usually up to only about 60% of the studio

working on a project like that at any given time.

We also have projects like Capsule Force,

Elder Scrolls Online being the most recent one to come out.

We do contract engineering where we lease out specialists to other studios

to work on now, big name titles like Destiny.

And we've also recently gotten into publishing independent video games.

Capsule Force just came out recently.

Videoball will be coming out in the future sometime.

So, a little bit about me.

When I was a kid, I started getting interested in game development because I

realized that my dream at the time of being a researcher at

NASA like my uncle wasn't exactly something that I thought was

that interesting when I actually realized what being a researcher entailed.

So then maybe something more focused on

creating something would be exciting to me, and I really liked video games.

I started trying out computer programing and

realized that this was actually something I might enjoy.

So going through high school I started to read up a bit and eventually decided to

come to Michigan State in 2008 when I graduated high school to pursue

computer programming and and video game development as a serious career interest.

And one of the things that I did when I got to Michigan State was that, for one,

I started being involved in the local game development club as soon as possible.

Started participating in 48 hour game jams, and events that the club put on,

to just try start to get to know people and figuring out how to work on a team and

make a video game with people that had similar interests.

Similar to that, I also had a really important opportunity where I got a part

time job in a lab making serious video games,

as a programmer mostly, which I really wanted to work

in big Triple-A games as a programmer or a designer when I graduated.

But just getting involved in a lab doing game development was really important for

me to start learning the ropes.

As I went through college I started taking more and

more computer science classes, working on games.

I started realizing that I was frustrated that when I finally got to classes where I

was working on games as one of my central projects as a component of my grade,

that our games didn't look as good as the latest Triple-A game that had come out and

I was trying to figure out how to solve that problem.

I started learning more and more about computer graphics and

rendering and engine programming as a result of that and

figuring out how to do what the cutting edge techniques were.

And I started to realize that that was actually what I enjoyed more

than anything else.

So I started seriously looking at that as a career.

I had a chance to go to the Game Developers Conference my sophomore year

and saw some talks that were really inspirational to me

from other engine graphics programmers and started following that as a hard line.

And then in 2011 I started looking for internships,

applied to a whole bunch of places, got a few interviews.

I also started blogging a lot just trying to

practice talking and communicating my ideas about game development.

And the CEO of Iron Galaxy actually happened to read one of my blog posts and

reached out to me.

I'd been interviewing at a few different places at the time.

But Iron Galaxy ended up being a really good fit for me.

I accept an internship, came out, started working on Ms.

Splosion Man for iOS for the course of my internship.

And then in 2012,

when I graduated, I came back to Iron Galaxy full time as a graphics engineer.

And I've been with the company for three years now.

Currently, I'm working as the rendering lead on Killer Instinct.

I've just become more and more involved in graphics and

rendering over the course of the time that I've been here.

So a little bit about what engine programming is as a career.

So this is a job that you're basically trying to get at the most difficult

core systems problems that you need to handle for

shipping your video game.

This is almost always going to be a job that involves working in native C++ code.

I very rarely touch scripting languages like C# and

Unity would be an example of a very robust scripting language.

On Killer Instinct, we used all of the game play programming code and

the technical design code happens in Lua.

C++ layer is below that.

And everything from file IO to rendering to core networking

calls happens in the C++ part of the engine.

And the way to think about this is that we build the systems that content developers

making the game use.

More specifically on the engine team, I'm a graphics programmer,

which means that most of my time is spent specifically supporting artists.

Because just because a company might spend a lot of money on

a rendering team at like EA or Activision or whatever to make their games look good.

The real secret to having a good looking video game is to have a team of amazing

artists that are well supported by the programmers.

So we spend a lot of time on investigation and

optimization of things that are limiting to artists,

like if they need to be able to have more triangles in their models.

Or they need some sort of custom shader for rendering water.

And that kind of ties into some of my time is spent on R&D for new visual effects for

artists to use, or just overall quality improvements to how our games look.

And something to realize about graphics programming compared to other fields

in engine programming is that it actually requires a lot of specialized knowledge

as a sub discipline that can be a little bit tricky to get into.

Just like if you go and get a job and expect to get tasked out with things

that will make you better at rendering programming,

you really gotta have the drive to start looking at it on your own be like yes,

this is something that I actually have a lot of interest in and enjoy.

And then things will start to fall in place behind that.

So if you're interested in either of these two things, I've got some advice.

For one, definitely read this book.

Game Engine Architecture by Jason Gregory.

Jason Gregory was an engine program

at Naughty Dog working on the Uncharted games.

And it's not a perfect book, but it is legitimately the best

practical primer for getting into engine programming in Triple-A video games.

So if you're interested in rendering programming as a discipline,

there's another book that you should read after you finish reading

Game Engine Architecture.

And that's Real Time Rendering.

It's a little bit updated but probably due for a fourth edition sometime soon.

But both of these books I read cover to cover while I was in school and

it was one of the best decisions I ever made.

The advice in each of these books is very relevant to the sub disciplines.

So beyond those two main pieces of advice, definitely,

in your own personal studies, and if you're taking classes in university,

try to tackle some difficult subjects involved in the core skills that you

would need to succeed on an engine team working on Triple-A games.

Things like low-level computer architecture,

being able to understand how a computer chip works on a very fundamental level so

that way you can write code that's optimized for it specifically.

Same thing with just learning about general C++ optimization strategies for

modern computers.

And another more recent one is multi-threaded programming is

becoming very very important to be able to thread your systems to run in

parallel across all of the cores on a CPU.

Additionally, it's very useful to be able to understand

each of the main components that makes up a game engine.

So that way,

whatever you get thrown at as a problem, you can work through it and figure it out.

A big thing is that if you can write your own toy engine in your spare time,

that's a huge boost to your knowledge about how all of these things will

fit together and work.

The other big piece of advice that I have is to get involved.

I mentioned I got involved in the student club at my university, I started doing

game jams, those were both excellent things that I did before I even really

started taking serious courses leading me down the path towards engine programming.

Another thing is I spent a lot of time on Twitter.

I started really trying to pay attention to what the experts in

my field were saying.

A lot of people like to tweet out advice of hey,

like this is a new paper that just came out.

Or like new blog posts on ideas or

just argue about even smaller things on optimization or features.

And once you start identifying these experts in the field, read their blogs,

start writing your own blogs.

I mention that's how Iron Galaxy found me to actually start my interview process.

And another thing is consider attending professional conferences.

Game Developer's Conference has lots of great content and so

does Siggraph for rendering.

And that can be expensive.

In college, I started spending a lot of time saving all of

my money that I could to make sure that I could afford to go to GDC each year.

But if that's not really feasible,

make sure you just pay attention to the Internet.

There's lots of slides and presentations that are available for

free after these finish.

For example, the advances in real time rendering

course from Siggraph always posts an extensive selection of slides and

course notes that are incredibly useful even if you didn't attend.

A little bit about getting a job.

Start a list of companies early on that you think might be looking for

entry level people, at any level, that you would be interested in working for.

And then once you're actually at the point where you're ready to be applying,

you can start going through that list and

seeing who's hiring or cold contacting them with resumes.

Just seeing who might be interested.

Plan on getting lots of rejection.

I know a lot of people that had to go through at

least 50 applications before they even got an interview.

But when you do get interviews try to learn as much as possible

from them to prepare for the next ones.

I definitely flopped my first several interviews just because

I wasn't familiar with the type of questions.

I went to a presentation at my university about programming interviews, but

the games industry has a lot more specialized questions

than a generic programming job will.

And definitely, in the midst of all of your job hunt,

try to keep improving the quality of your work.

The number one thing amongst my peers that I've noticed that I graduated with,

was that the people that got jobs were the people that were persistent

in making sure that even if they didn't get an interview or

a job offer right away, they just stayed persistent at it and kept hunting.

Kept working their work on the side, or finding a job in a related field,

continuing to work their way towards their goal.

And they got there eventually.

So yeah, I guess that's my advice.

Stay hungry, keep trying to learn.

That's especially important in the path of my career,

to just keep learning as much as possible.

Even after I got my job at Iron Galaxy.

Thanks for listening.

Game Design and Development Capstone

Получаемые навыки

Рецензии

CS

DS

Преподаватели

Brian Winn

Casey O'Donnell

Ознакомьтесь с нашим каталогом

Присоединяйтесь бесплатно и получайте персонализированные рекомендации, обновления и предложения.