Shaun Kime

Why Spliced Inc. should be on your radar if we aren't already. Especially if you're a Lead or Principal VFX Artist that's already working with or is excited about generative AI. What NOT to expect: Stage after stage after stage, without knowing why you're moving forward. We love giving feedback and we help set you up for success instead of throwing you into the dark. Being kept in the dark about salary or package right until the end. Ever had an interview process to land an offer at the end of it that misses the mark by a mile? That's not how we operate. Here at Spliced Inc. you'll know exactly what the role could look like before you go into finals and that means everything from our benefits, salary, the project itself, onboarding and importantly, how we're going to set you up for success. Limited flexibility that's labelled flexible working. I've heard several stories recently from people who are considering a move due to being sold flex and remote/hybrid options, to be hit with a very different reality. At Spliced Inc, you make the choice. Whether it be fully remote, fully studio based or somewhere in between, it's up to you. You don't even need to tell us. We're hiring for a number of roles at the moment but my main priorities if you got this far (!) are Lead/Principal VFX Artist and Lead Game Designer. I'll post later/tomorrow on that second role but if you're interested in learning more on either position, send me a message. As always - shares appreciated for reach! Liam Howard Jerlyn ChaiGabriele Sanfilippo

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Horrible news to hear about KeokeN Interactive having laid off their entire team today. In a statement published on X, CEO Koen Deetman and managing director Paul Deetman said the Netherlands-based studio was forced into the decision after exhausting all possible options for completing planned projects or taking on other work. To those affected, please find a comprehensive list of resources, below: 🥇First, Discipline Games Jobs Resources: Over the past weeks I have created 9 (at time of writing) Games Jobs Resources to find jobs in a wide range of disciplines: 🎨 Art, Animation, VFX and UI: This resource contains around 1,000 jobs worldwide across all links. Link: https://lnkd.in/eKAHK7VF ⚙ Engineering and Programming This resource lists just over 1,800 jobs worldwide across all links. It also talks about interview tips and questions to practice. Link: https://lnkd.in/eYdxANFM 🕹 Quality Assurance: This resource lists over 450 QA jobs worldwide. This post also talks about the craft of QA and contains tips and interview practice. Link: https://lnkd.in/dwwVjZuc 📑 Game Production: This resource lists around 400 jobs worldwide. It also contains info about game production as a whole and GDC talks. Link: https://lnkd.in/gxDvFM-Z 📢 Marketing & Community: This resource lists around 400 jobs worldwide. It also gives an intro into game marketing and community management. Link: https://lnkd.in/e5MuViug 🎶 Audio and Sound Design: This resource lists around 190 jobs worldwide. Link: https://lnkd.in/eSkPSsWf 📠 Studio Support, HR, Recruitment and BizDev: This resource lists around 290 jobs worldwide. Link: https://lnkd.in/ePG57_7v ⚙ IT, Helpdesk and DevOps: This resource lists around 140 jobs worldwide. Link: https://lnkd.in/e8ZsuiZh 🎮 Game Design: This resource lists around 440 jobs worldwide. https://lnkd.in/dCv_hQXv 🥈 Second, the Ultimate list of Video Games Career Resources: This should be your one-stop shop for all information. My dear friend Amir Satvat maintains these documents, he is a legend for doing this - please check them out: https://amirsatvat.com/ 🥉 Third, do not give up. Ever. No matter how dark things may look right now, I KNOW you will get through this, you have got this! 👊 Remember you are not alone. If you need help, advice, or even an ear to listen, we're here for you. Always! ➡ A request to my community, please can I ask you to repost this post to your colleagues and friends, so that we can get as many into jobs as possible! And please comment if you or your studio are currently hiring - let's help each other! Much love ❤️ #layoffs #gamesindustry #jobsingames #keokeninteractive (source: https://lnkd.in/eWK2PgvX)

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If you are a math teacher about to teach Pythagoras Theorem to your students, read this! Assign Pythagoras Quest games 1 - 3 for homework. These are playable on a Chromebook, and no installation or password is required. Here is the link: https://lnkd.in/gkE7jHyh Students will learn the types of triangles and their properties by sorting them into the correct groups. They will then identify all the right triangles in the game environment, which demonstrates that the student has understood the difference between a right triangle and other types of triangles. Through this part of the quest, students will also learn that a rectangle is made of two right triangles. In the third game, they will learn about the lengths of the sides of the right triangle and identify the hypotenuse as the longest side. This homework assignment serves as an excellent introduction to Pythagoras’s Theorem. By completing it, your students will come to class with a solid understanding of the properties of right triangles, ready to explore more, derive the theorem, and use it to solve word problems. Students are expected to fully interact with the problems and their participation is required at each step. Try it and see! #math #mathteachers #edtech

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This Rift Wizard descendent has me. I'm enamored with its scope, which seems to break down into... • Trigger-based RPG buildcraft (90%) • Roguelike progression loop (6%) • Literary dark-fantasy lore (3%) • Everything else that makes a video game (1%) This solo-dev delivered excellence in precisely the parts of these games that I love by absolutely punting art, animation, sound, and I bet by consequence a ton of engineering. It's a lesson in focus—a demonstration of what scope-creep costs the projects we never finish or which ship cluttered or underbaked. If those ratios above even approximate your priorities, this indie title is worth way more than the chump-change it's asking for.

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Hey folks 👋 ! I've just finished polishing a bit my Unreal PYthon Remote Control wrapper for Unreal, upyrc (available on pip) ! Just a quick reminder, this module is a wrapper around the Remote control REST api AND the remote execution of python code. Which allows you to execute python code ( as string, jinja templates, or .py file ) in Unreal, from another python process and get data back if needed. This would be useful for communication between DCCs and Unreal 😊. I mostly improved the remote execution part (so, not the rest api wrapper). I added a method to be able to execute python code built from jinja2 template(s), helper methods to execute editor utility blueprints methods, print logs, spawn blueprint widgets as tab ... But also a small documentation on the github's wiki: 🔗 https://lnkd.in/eaJvn-Gw ➡ But also a Unreal 5.3 test data project, just dummy cubes and Blueprints, but it would allow you to run the test files out of the box 😉. 🔗 https://lnkd.in/e_uEfuBk #unreal #python #techart #dccs

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Roblox Supremacy is Imminent That's clickbait, but... If you don't know Roblox, you should take a look. If you're already familiar, you should take another look. They make a Studio application that lets anyone build and publish immersive 3D realms called "experiences." Users can participate in them together with the world at large. The platform offers many other features, from personalizing your avatar to hosting online meetings. They have a currency, "Robux," that you can buy with real money and then exchange on their platform for virtual goods and services. All of this is grounded in principles of inclusion, safety, and civility. It's wildly popular with young people. So why are they so interesting? Because it rekindles the excitement, wonder, and sense of possibility of the early internet. It reopens the narrative of the digital frontier with the promise of a leap forward in shaping how we interact with each other. That's a big poetic step, but the parallels are there and best illustrate the point. The early internet vastly increased our ability to exchange information and democratized publishing. Much of the progress over the last 30 years has been in this vein, from publishing a life narrative on Facebook, professional narratives on LinkedIn, videos on YouTube, short videos on TikTok, and so on. Each of those ideas has had a radical impact on how we communicate with each other. Taking for granted that anyone would want to publish bespoke 3D experiences, how do you categorize a company that enables it? Their CEO, David Baszucki, calls them foremost a communications company. That's simultaneously vague and grandiose, but it neatly ties together their mission: their company promotes new ways for us to communicate through research and experimentation. When viewed as a communications company, their goals and strategies become clearer. They're learning by observing communication laboratories. They're not making those laboratories (experiences) themselves: they're making the tools for their community to create their own. They're ensuring those spaces are safe and civil. Users feel comfortable participating, which promotes engagement, wonder, and curiosity, which, in turn, makes participants curious to experiment with creating their own 3D worlds to share back with the community. One could ask when Roblox will create a product that appeals to a more mature audience or when an inflection point of adult adoption will happen. That's the impatience that causes your cake to fall when you open the oven door. It's exactly the problem that makes all this so intriguing and exciting. It's why their platform is reminiscent of the untamed wild west of the early internet: the solution is largely in the hands of the community itself, who is crowd-sourcing it in creative, playful, non-linear ways. Build it, and they will build it, and they will come. - The spice must flow.

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This is how I am mentoring my son his CompSci classes... I just keep repeating it over and over. I should hire my daughter to do the same thing as it's pretty common. READ THE REQUIREMENTS! That's all. That's every point he's missed on every project. Just read until you understand and ask questions if you still do not. His prof makes everything seem so simple, if you read and follow the requirements. But that seems to be the hardest part, the lesson the prof is trying to convey. He even lists the crash and burn rules. "If you support grammar that was not given then -100" etc. There is no room for misinterpretation. Therefore my help is just me reading the assignments back to him and making sure he has done what they say. Then again, maybe it's not a good lesson as requirements are rarely this in depth. Perhaps it's just 20 years of giving the same requirements that leads to this level of detail. I'll keep that to myself for now, he doesn't need to know that 🤫

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A lot of people have written about the devastating closures of Arkane Austin, Tango Gameworks, and Alpha Dog. I don't want to repeat that stuff. It's a terrible situation. As a developer, it's heartbreaking. As a player, it's even worse. I just want to say something personal about Arkane Austin, and the kinds of games they make/made, and in particular, Harvey Smith, who heads up (headed up) the studio, after Raphael Colantonio moved on to new things. The first game I really fell in love with was Half-Life. HL showed me the way forward for games, particularly first-person ones, as an expression of deep and interesting -- often claustrophobic -- exploration, combat, and puzzle solving, excellent balance, and the power of first-person interactive narrative to create super immersive worlds for players. The second game I really fell in love with was Deus Ex (Ion Storm). DX showed me the way forward for extremely systems-centric experiences. The power of player choice, experimentation, and improvisation. The promise of a more mature, sophisticated narrative than you mostly found in games of the day. The joy of a game that was responsive and adapted to your choices as a player. The freedom to contrive your own solutions to problems. These games, together, rewired my brain. DX followed the work done before it by games like Thief (Looking Glass), System Shock (also Looking Glass), and later Arx Fatalis (Arkane's first game), but really locked in on the idea of the "immersive sim" that, later on, BioShock (made by ex-Looking Glass people) would replicate. Then Dishonored (Arkane). Then the 2017 Prey (also by Arkane Austin). Other games have riffed on the formula, even when taking it in different directions. There's some DX in Far Cry. There’s some DX in Fallout. There's some DX in Stalker. There's even some DX in The Long Dark. Player freedom. Experimentation. Thoughtful narratives. World dynamism and responsiveness. Affordance of player improvisation. These are core tenets of Immersive Sims that make all games better. They've never set the market on fire. But just like there are movies for movie-makers, these are games for game makers. These are games, we as developers who recognize the alchemy and miracle behind them, stare at in awe, wondering how the creators were able to harness this black magic. That's what we lost in Arkane Austin yesterday. Harvey Smith was the lead designer on DX, and his work has always inspired me. The team there was dedicated to making these sorts of complex, wonderful experiences that we need more of. These are important games, important ideas, important ideals, and it will once again fall to independent developers to keep them alive. So be it.

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Building Motion Sets are a lot of repetitive work, the more I build sets the more I try to build tools to reduce the main repetitive tasks. I wrote a nice script for Motionbuilder's Python to automate creating a Character Track, adding a clip to the track, calculating the transform offset required to align the character to the scene's origin (center

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Now that Timbre is officially closed -- and my heart goes out to all those affected -- I think someone should ask WTF Sumo Digital Ltd was thinking in making this drastic cull. You have a team of about 100 folks who -- just based on the outpouring of support and collective love between them; I know nothing about the studio itself -- seem to have been a high-functioning group of developers who had worked together for up to 2 years (obviously some of them were newish, as the median time employed was about a year; I saw some layoff notices from people who'd been hired within the past 2-3 months, so this suggests the leadership team had no idea the closure was coming, unless they are just evil...). Anyone who has built a team understands the value of having folks across many different disciplines who work well together. There is significant value in this, and you don't just throw it away. I understand Sumo decided they needed to make 15% cuts to save costs, but then why not cut 15% uniformly (more or less) across all your studios and the parent org? If you are cutting 250 people worldwide across multiple studios (I count 14 studios: https://lnkd.in/gxmRTJcz), why then cut 100 of them in one place? 250 people across 14 studios is less than 20 people per studio (some of the Sumo studios have 100s of people). You could have cut 15 from Timbre and kept 85 employed. Could they not have sold the studio to another publisher? Or found a buyer from outside games? Both Relic and Phoenix were bought by non-game buyers (private equity in Relic's case, a blockchain company in Phoenix's case), so there's clearly money from outside the industry looking to invest and own a piece of the games business, even in super expensive Vancouver. This doesn't seem like just another "oh whoops we overhired during COVID" story. What, did you set up an entire new studio from scratch and hire 100 people between 2022 and 2024 by mistake? Tencent bought Sumo a while ago. Tencent has more money than anyone. Did Tencent not want this studio? They could have spun it out from Sumo. Microsoft? Ubisoft (they used to have a Vancouver studio...)? Anyone? Nobody out there wanted a team of 100 folks who knew how to work together and had built some amount (maybe a lot?) of a game together before they were unceremoniously shut down? No publisher wanted to pick up the game and continue to float the studio until it shipped? There's been a lot of love being generated from the demise and aftermath of this studio. But where's the rage?

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Since I've had to update my game Auto Jump recently for mobile. I've started playing with getting it ready to run on consoles. Adding controller support has been fun so far. Current gamedev tools I use are Visual Studio 2022, Graphics Gale, Unity, Unreal Engine, Onenote, and Azure Devops. #gamedev #gamedeveloper #unity3d

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Paradox Interactive announced today that Double Eleven, the developer behind Prison Architect 2, will be stepping away from the project after nine years with the Prison Architect franchise. Good news first, construction on Prison Architect 2 isn't being halted! Co-development studio Kokku, who's been working on the game since 2023 and previously collaborated with Double Eleven, will take the lead in bringing the sequel to completion. The news comes with a hint of complication. While Prison Architect 2 passed certification, negotiations between Paradox and Double Eleven for continued development reached an impasse. Technical hurdles, particularly with memory usage and minimum specifications, emerged during final testing. Paradox, likely wary of past performance issues (think Cities: Skylines 2), emphasizes their commitment to delivering a high-quality sequel that honors the Prison Architect legacy. Kokku, a Brazilian studio with a history of co-development and outsourcing on major titles like Horizon Forbidden West and Call of Duty: Black Ops: Cold War, is now at the helm to ensure Prison Architect 2's smooth launch. The Prison Architect series, which began in 2015 with the original simulation/management game, is still on track for a 2024 release with Prison Architect 2. While the development team has shifted, fans can rest assured that work on this highly anticipated sequel continues. (source: https://lnkd.in/dWtBvDhN)

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Unionisation has historically been lagging behind in games, with workers in the industry slowly catching up with protections that are more standard in film. When we mention that reality and ask what needs to change for games to reap similar benefits, Elmaleh says she's interested to see what will come out of the current situation. "The truth of any sort of basis of a union is that you have to resist," she says. "Corporations don't give things. Employers don't give things without resistance. To come into that awareness as a worker that you have something that they need, and that it is leverage that can be applied effectively – and has been proven to be applied effectively through collective action throughout history – is an awareness you need to step into and really take ownership of it. It takes a fight. "But what precipitates a willingness to fight is the kind of situation that we're in now. The layoffs have been absolutely brutal. That sense that sustainability isn't a priority for some of these folks… that the people who are currently deciding how things are run may no longer be acting in your interest, or that it will take a certain degree of frustration, disillusionment with the system that exists currently, and a willingness to build a new system… Unfortunately for some people, I think it takes a really dark, difficult moment like this to be like, 'You know what? I'm ready to try and really fight to make this look different for everyone's benefit'." ------------------------------------------ Excerpt from the article

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To celebrate 10 years of AI and Games, there was one topic that warranted being revisited one last time: the AI of Monolith's 2005 shooter F.E.A.R. But this time we're doing something special. Over the past 3 months I've sat down and had several (online) interviews with Jeff Orkin, Ph.D.: the AI programmer on F.E.A.R. In this hour-long retrospective, we get into the backstory of how the AI of F.E.A.R. came to be. The academic influences, the crazy risks being taken, the lack of oversight, a pivot from 60s espionage to sci-fi horror, the creativity of the development team behind it, and the legacy the game has in the video games industry. A huge thank you to Jeff for participating in these interviews. I've had a great time listening to his stories. I learned a lot, and equally am excited for my audience to hear what he has to say. On a more personal note, F.E.A.R. was massively influential in my own career path and without it, my trajectory through grad school would have been drastically different. And of course, given it was the inaugural episode of AI and Games, without Jeff's contributions my YouTube channel may never have been created. I hope you enjoy it! Watch on YouTube: https://lnkd.in/eCG4466t Read on Substack: https://lnkd.in/e3Rtu5PS

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1:13 am normal person :: ZzzzZzzzzz 1:13 am Colin :: you know humans 70,000 years ago were a nearly extinct group of noisy tool using mammals. If we didn't know they were human and met them, like if we were an alien species, would we consider them intelligent life? I think they'd be seen more how we humans see crows, otters, and chimpanzees. All tool using animals even capable of rudimentary communication and with surprisingly complex social structures. But not advanced enough for us to consider them as intelligent in the sense we use when speaking about ourselves. I wonder, given 70,000 years to advance without us around what would they be like? well obviously the opposable digits give the otters and the chimps and advantage but in some ways the crows are the more clever and sophisticated. Maybe the crows will enslave the otters and drive the chimps extinct. Then after a few thousand years the otters will rise up and overthrow their crow masters driving the crows into the shadows, where they will go extinct having adapted to lives of convenient technology they cannot make for themselves. Now otters are the dominant life on earth, and as they enter their fledgling age of space exploration an otter engineer considers what their species was like 70,000 years prior according to historians and if some other species could be recognized as similar in development. Insomnia and ADHD are a fun combo.

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