What would you ask a Game Dev?

Hi guys! Sorry I haven't posted in ages, but my work and life often keeps me quite busy!

Anyways, some background info on me:
I'm a Lead Animator at a AAA games company (SEGA) and I've been at my job for the past 5 years. I've also recently started a new youtube channel and I'm looking to share more about my life and about inspiring people to get into the industry, and to also help other artists who are currently struggling with how to progress with their art and how to overcome common artist struggles (especially when it comes to mental ones.)

I'll write more about myself below, but before I do, I wanted to open a question up to you guys:
What would you love to ask a game dev? Feel free to ask me anything! From "How do you get into the industry?" to "What's your typical day like?" to "How can I become a better manager at my own job?" to "What makes a good animator?"

I am really passionate about sharing my knowledge with you guys, but please be aware that I cannot share any details about undisclosed projects as some information is confidential. I also will not be able to share an opinion on company politics.

I currently lead a small team of animators on the Total War Team at Creative Assembly (a division of SEGA.) http://www.creative-assembly.com/
Our studio's most recent releases include Total War: Warhammer and Alien Isolation.
I collaborate with designers, programmers (games and tools), production, and other artists (including character, UI and concept artists.)
Along with my own animation, some of my other responsibilities include: animation signoff, holding meetings, sourcing actors, doing motion capture, doing onstage talks, attending gaming events (working the recruitment booths), interviewing candidates, production, the process of bringing assets from their resource files (maya) to the game engine, debugging, production, and general collaboration.

I hope a thread like this is allowed and I'm excited to hear about any questions you'd like to ask :) I'm thinking of making this video next weekend! I'm not sure if I want to make a youtube video, or if I want to jump on Twitch, but I'll definitely let you know later in the week!
Looking forward to meeting you all and sharing our love of games! <3
-Kura

I'll have to try and come up with some better questions later, but for now... Um...

What's your favorite thing to draw/animate? Why? Or how about "Is there something you used to hate drawing/animating, but have gotten better at over the years? Is there any specific technique or advice that helped you get better at whatever gave you trouble?"

It's pretty surreal that someone from TPC of all places is a project lead for one of my favourite franchises, and they actually come back here to talk about it. Most people are pretty eager to get away from their work after each day, it seems; what makes you so enthusiastic about it? Your position involves a lot more 'people work' than I expected it would; is it not stressful?

For TWW, what spurred the change from synced animations back to soldiers performing individual actions? I mean no doubt it comes from the difficulty of doing syncs for all the different statures and forms of all the races and monsters, but maybe there are other reasons, and I'm not clear on if this is representative of a return to Rome 1/Medieval 2 mechanics or if it is still entirely stat-based with the animations not actually representing abstract actions.

Oh and why are there no reload animations? It looks strange... though they've always bugged out unit responsiveness; could you ever find out why that is?

What's animation signoff?

Is it anything like the anime "New Game!?"

Kura said:

What would you love to ask a game dev?

Click to expand...

How do the programmers work, and how many, roughly, would you say there are? Is your game engine custom? Who builds it?

I know how much work programming takes, so I'm curious how the programmers cope with it. Obviously with a few hundred people, it's probably easier, but still. How do they incorporate art into the games?

Thanks!

Kura said:

I hope a thread like this is allowed and I'm excited to hear about any questions you'd like to ask :) I'm thinking of making this video next weekend! I'm not sure if I want to make a youtube video, or if I want to jump on Twitch, but I'll definitely let you know later in the week!
Looking forward to meeting you all and sharing our love of games! <3
-Kura

Click to expand...

Its nice to actually hear from people who are ACTUALLY working in the industry. I'm pretty sure threads like these are allowed as long as the mods are okay with the direction of the discussion.

I may not be a mod, but as a regular vigilante around these parks, any attempts at trolling this thread with meaningless questions to downright harassment will be met with my BFG and they'd lose their dignity as individuals. Don't thread with the bear. NCR!

Total War: Warhammer and Alien Isolation

Click to expand...

Oh I'm pretty down with these titles. Its nice to actually to have worked on some lovely titles.

Anyway, Warhammer related:

1) What where your favorite things in working with Total War: Warhammer as well as Alien Isolation. Like things you enjoyed working with the most.

2) As a follow up to the first question, the least favorite things when working on those said games?

3) Among the factions in Warhammer lore, which are your favorites? Space Marines? Orks? Tau? Necrons?

"When you see something leak that is 100% true... what goes through your mind that tells you denying it instead of just ignoring it is a good idea?"

Do I need a degree to be an animator or improving myself in Softwares like 3ds Max and Maya and so on can be enough?

Might be the wrong person to ask given your area, but are you ever under pressure to rush a product for an earlier release by the publisher or whoever at the expense of the final product? I've noticed with a lot of big games these days it's commonplace to release a semi finished product and just patch it everytime a crack shows than to spend an extra few months on the game and from what I understand, it is nearly always because of the publisher as opposed to the dev team.

I have a few things. Mostly boring ones.

How did you get started working as an Animator? And what skills did you need to have? Lastly, what kinds of tasks do animators do on a day-to-day basis? I'm pretty interested. c:

Hi guys! I'm just here to update you all just to let you know that I will keep the questions going for another day and then I'll close the questions so that I can prepare my video for you guys :)
I'll have another round after that if you guys like this, so don't worry if you miss the first round.

I'll update this thread tomorrow night when questions are closed. I'm really excited to answer some of the stuff you want to know already! :)

Satoshi Ookami said:

Wait, video? There won't be a simple list of answers?

Click to expand...

Instead of a simple list, I wanted to do it as a simple video. It would serve as an introduction for me to get more confident with the camera to prep me for then possibly trying a livestream Q and A with you all in the future :)
I have detailed this in the first post, and I will link the video back here for you, too. If you have an issue with this then, of course, no one is forcing you to watch. I eventually want to try and get more interaction with it and I feel I may be able to express myself better with voice and video. :)
Hope my reasoning is sound with you! :)

Hands said:

Might be the wrong person to ask given your area, but are you ever under pressure to rush a product for an earlier release by the publisher or whoever at the expense of the final product? I've noticed with a lot of big games these days it's commonplace to release a semi finished product and just patch it everytime a crack shows than to spend an extra few months on the game and from what I understand, it is nearly always because of the publisher as opposed to the dev team.

Click to expand...

Actually I am interested in this question as well. Probably since I think all publishers are scum...

Also, being an animator, do you work a lit with Mocap stuff, and if so, how is this work?

Lastly are there any things you prefer to animate over other? Anything you simply hate to animate?

Also can you tell us when Half-Life 3 will drop? All developers know right?!

Oh! And how is your perspective on other big devs out there. Especially ones in the same genre? Do you collaborate with them at all? Is there any jealousy around your workplace towards other dev companies?

Hi, everyone!
I just wanted to state that questions for the first round are now closed :3 Keep your eyes peeled for a video hopefully coming either over the weekend or on Monday! I'll link back here when it's up! I'm super excited to answer these questions :33

First round?! I don't know if I can come up with more question for a second 0.o

Arsenic said:

First round?! I don't know if I can come up with more question for a second 0.o

Click to expand...

I'm sure even if you didn't, there would be other people who would feel sad that they missed out on asking a question. I'd love to make it fair to everyone :)

Hey everyone! Just to update you all, I shot the video and it ended up being over 45 minutes of footage, lol.. so I'm going to split it up into two parts to be able to get you this content quicker! (It would've taken me days to type up everything that I said haha, so I'm glad I had a chance to do it this way.)
This was a really amazing experience and I've love to do something live for the next round! :3 Stay tuned for the videos coming at you this week, and thanks so much for being patient!

Oooooo! Can't wait! Any ETA more specific than 'this week by any chance??