Oliver Rosten

The software testing community here on LinkedIn is appearing like the rest of social media lately. It has mostly binary opinions, and lacks empathy and respect for the context - with many saying one way is the only way. It's a shame more people are not open to being challenged across all areas of work and life. I remember a time when students were open to listen to talks that directly challenged their beliefs, now many won't accept it, so colleges and universities shy away from it. Free speech is important, as long as it doesn't violate someone else's rights (free speech doesn't allow for inciting hatred for example). Back to testing...I'm not suggesting people stop with their opinions on testing, yet it would be more effective if their binary argueing stopped, and an open conversation with various views were shared. Then we can all learn and make informed decisions. Just saying... It would be nice across all areas of life I think. Sadly social media appears to make people feel safe to do otherwise. I hope you're open to different opinions and are able to debate instead of force an argument based on a binary belief you have. #softwaretesting #softwaredevelopment #technology #whatinspiresme

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Lots of interesting info in this survey for people in the industry at every level. How does your pay compare? Which areas are struggling/thriving? Do take a look, there's some useful insights in there :)

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No squatch sightings last weekend...but wow...what a week since. A massively productive one for The Glitch (on all fronts), and apparently some other things happened around the industry as well...huh. Alright...let's-a-go: OMY@C 🤘 ⛏ - Metallica will be in Fortnite soon. The event is called "Metallica: Fuel Fire Fury," and it will kick off on June 22nd. The San Francisco band got on the Fortnite Festival stage yesterday - so if you're curious...hop on in there. RIP Cliff. RIP Eddie. 🍎 - Apple's WWDC was this week...and their formal entry into Ai was the big takeaway. "Apple Intelligence," was the name they landed on. Essentially, it's Ai integrated through every aspect of their various OS's...adding personal context to everything. My first reaction was...do I want that though? On one hand, this feels like the first real indication of where consumer Ai is headed...on the other: privacy? A big part of Apple's presentation of their Ai is "setting a brand-new standard for privacy in Ai." So...they're well aware of the line that's being crossed. Apple's 5-minute video overview (on their site) shows you how "Ai for the rest of us" will work...and it's easy to be cynical about it. A squirrel DJ...cool. Custom emoji's...neat. Still...you should watch it. When app devs finally start building for this though...look out. PREDICTION: iPhone 16 will be the best selling iPhone yet. The 6 sold 222M units total...71.5MM units in it's first 3 months...so we'll know by year's end how this crazy statement is trending. 📺 🎮 - Mike Verdu will soon be leaving his role as VP of Netflix Games (and starting a new role with the company). Speculation is rampant about what this means for the games unit. It's possible that it means...nothing at all. I'm still massively bullish on the gaming opportunity for Netflix. My personal opinion is that transmedia is the biggest, most exciting play here...but I've also heard there are internal headwinds on that. 🤷‍♂️ 🍷 ⛵ - I'm not going to Cannes...again. Maybe some day. I'll drink rosé and look important at home...again. I'm not bitter. 📺 🎮 - Follow Friday: Two nerds with a webcam...that you absolutely should be following if you're in the games business: 1) Chris Melissinos (Principal Evangelist for Amazon Web Services (AWS) - Video interviews with games industry legends, deep retro dives, and discussions on the top news. 2) Alexander Seropian (Founder/CEO of Look North World) - Host of "The Fourth Curtain," is always a headliner event. 📺 - Palm Royale (Apple+). Kristen Wiig as a social climber in 1960's south Florida. So good. Save a grasshopper for me. 🎵 - Spotify's "Daylist" - pull the throttle back a bit with your list names though. "90's Indie Twee Friday Afternoon," might be accurate...but it's embarrassing. 🎮 - It's been 2 weeks since I picked up Hogwarts Legacy and Vampire Survivors...haven't started either yet. THAT's how busy it's been.

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Why is it important to understand games? Because they explain how a party turns 35% of the vote in an election into over 400 seats in Parliament. Labour’s win in the UK general election is many things. A sign that voters could not do anything other than boot out a tired and incompetent Conservative Party; a relatively unenthusiastic trade off of steady competence over wider vision; a least worst option that has opened the doors to smaller parties. It’s also a victory for ruthless campaigning. It’s an operational masterclass in which financial and personal resource was directed with strategic precision to get as many Labour MPs over the top as possible. And it is derived from a fundamental truth: elections are games with clear rules. Labour’s strategy - and, to be fair, The Liberal Democrat’s approach - rejected the idealism of “the best vision wins out” to say “how do we win this game within the set rules” to avoid another 2019 style disappointment. It’s an approach that is central to great campaigning. It is also, as Kelly Clancy posits indirectly in her great book Playing With Reality, a perfect example of minmaxing a game: controlling and risking as little as possible from your side while maximising opportunities within the rules (and errors from your opponents). Clancy argues that our failure to understand play and to take it seriously within society means we can’t understand fully the social, cultural and biological drivers that lead us to create the rules based systems that we play within. Elections are therefore one of those rare times where the dynamic of play is surfaced in a way that we can truly see, that we can understand explicitly and that we can talk about easily - demonstrating its immense value in a way little else can. P.S. If you like reading about the surprising ways games reshape society, think about subscribing to my newsletter Video Games Industry Memo. There will be plenty more where this has come from in the year ahead.

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Kicking off Game AI Uncovered (Volume Two), Steven D. goes behind the scene's of Team17's The Survivalists. This chapter discussed how the team handled synchronised patching with low bandwidth. It covers the difference between the logical world and the cosmetic world, and how they used an approach that built paths out of chunks and then handled interruptions. https://lnkd.in/eaTd4pJw

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So the last 2 weeks on BBBA have been pretty productive. In the last video I posted, everything was pretty much just layout for how I wanted things to go and where things were supposed to live. Technically though, everything was done by pasting tiles onto a tilemap one by one, by hand; either flat on the background or at a level in front of BB. I knew this had to change at some point so I've now tackled it with support for proper sprite sorting that allows all sorts of things to be handled and ordered correctly and most importantly, automatically. Also problematic was my own workflow for creating the map areas. The same way that the rest of the map was created, buildings on the map were made in the same way, only more painfully produced and with a lot less flexibility. I've now created proper building support within the project so that I can just place buildings on the map and set a bunch of parameters like how many windows and doors, chimneys, dormer windows, porches, etc. This is making building emplacements much easier now and with the sprite sorting in place, they look really good and respond in a manner that's much better. Along with this I've created some colour set support so that I can define a grouped set of colours that can be set on buildings to give them all a standardised or area specific palette. Another thing I wanted to do was spend a bit of time bringing more life to the map. With that in mind, I've added in support to animate the trees generally and the bushes when BB runs through them. Once that was in, I added support for the NPCs and enemies so that they triggered the bushes and everything else too. I've also added in support for audio zones so that each area can have an ambient noise associated with it and I can set up extra areas with other sounds attached, for example when you get close to the lakes or river you get extra sploshy noises that fade in and out as you enter and exit the areas. With a mind to saving some CPU cycles I've also added support to the main areas of the game so that when you transfer from one major section to another, the one you leave gets disabled so that it's not all ticking over in the background while the player is off busy elsewhere. I've added a few more gameplay features that I'll take advantage of soon, such as containers that you can open and close and that can be set to spawn items on first open. Instead of just placing monsters on the map, I now place spawners that allow you to specify which monster type, the maximum number of monsters alive concurrently, how often they spawn and the radius of the spawn zone. Focus for the next 2 weeks is to tackle the outside dungeon areas so that I can add those back to the map easily using a similar system to my new dynamic houses and then I've got to approach the next big issue; building internals! Like everything else before, they are currently just pasted onto the map tiles by hand in the same, painful way as before. And that has to change!

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Not a great weekend: Ballistic Moon (who are currently working on the rebuilt and enhanced Until Dawn) and Toadman Interactive (who have been working on titles such as EvilvEvil, Immortal Unchained, Everquest, Planetside 2, Vermintide 1 & 2) have both announced layoffs in the past few days. I am truly sorry to hear about this, as both studios are amazing. Those of you who are affected by this, please make use of my resources below: 🥇First, reach out to us at People Can Fly Studio, we have many roles open right now in Canada, the UK, Ireland and Europe, please check them out here: https://lnkd.in/eWpV5PbA 🥈Next, Discipline Games Jobs Resources: Over the past months I have created 9 (at time of writing) Games Jobs Resources to find jobs in a wide range of disciplines, and I would urge you to check them out, if anything just to see what would be available to you: https://lnkd.in/e2qSeKk6 You can find over 5,600 jobs there. 🥉 Third, 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/ I urge you to check out the areas in particular about CV support and mentoring, as these will help you no matter what industry you are hailing from or are looking into going next. 🎖 Finally, 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 ❤️ #ballisticmoon #toadmaninteractive #layoffs

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“Urgh, this candidate obviously used AI to help write their CV.” So what? This kind of reaction is surprisingly common and I have to say, I don’t get it. For decades, people have relied on CV writing and editing services to put their best foot forward, so why should AI be any different? Now, everyone has access to a powerful tool to help communicate their skills and experiences effectively. A CV isn’t a test of writing ability (unless you're applying for a job where your original writing ability is a core skill of course). It’s a tool to showcase someone’s potential and suitability for a role. So instead of focusing on how a CV was written, let’s keep our attention on what it’s saying. After all, isn’t that what really matters?

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Another busy sprint on BB's Big Adventure. Lots and lots of tidying up and restructuring of old stuff to allow me to replace the dungeon outsides and insides with much better mechanisms for generating the rooms. I've added in functionality for the castle gates and a bunch of other features inside. Once that was all done, I spent some time removing all the old stuff and consolidating so that I didn't get confused and accidentally use a deprecated feature or object. House internals have all been reworked along with a lot of decorations and props for inside of buildings. Lots of props for buildings. And more to go. I need to work on my own art skills a bit and come up with some sort of sofa or comfy armchair asset. We'll see how that goes... Now that I have buildings inside and out working how I want them (at least, this iteration of buildings anyway!) I have been working on bringing life back to some of the areas and improving the interactivity of the NPCs with their homes and areas. To this end, I now have the bear who lives in the cottage getting books off his bookshelf and then doing some cooking when he's inside. I have the two bears in the Teahouse (now named Bill and Ella), having a conversation and Ella walking around cleaning up while Bill goes back to some cooking. I've now got containers that can be opened and closed (and they can also spawn items when first opened) which can be seen in the Warehouse in Laketown. I've completely rewritten the door transfer mechanisms and they're now much much better to use. I've also added a bunch of audio support to things like the bushes and doors including when NPCs trigger them. I spent a bit of time also making sure that I utilise stereo features and adjust volume and L/R fade depending on where the noise originates in relation to the player. I've made improvements to the monster spawners to give me more options, including allowing events to trigger when a certain group of monsters have all been killed. I've added a gentle zoom in when you're inside a building and zoom back out when you exit to the overworld, along with displaying the name of the zone/building that you're entering during the crossfade. Overall, lots and lots of changes and improvements that should finally set me up with everything I dreamed up for the opening sections being replaced with decent systems instead of nasty prototype mockups. Now they're all in place, I should be able to start adding new areas. Next up; The Lonely Forest!

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Video Games Industry Memo is back out on Thursday morning and lord knows I want to share your news with 2000 lovely people in, and around, the video games sector. As per usual, I'm looking for news of your job moves, interesting open job posts and details of any cool forthcoming conferences you'll suggest I should go to. Tips on any of those to [email protected] OR straight to my LinkedIn DMs. Thanking you 🙏

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Two weeks ago, I attended Interactive Futures, a computer games outreach event held in Leamington Spa, UK. It changed the way I use AI in my workflow. Despite spending over 20 years in the industry, five of them locally, this was my first time at the event. I’m glad I went and I thoroughly enjoyed it. There were several highlights worth mentioning: * A great introduction to the vibrant games community around Leamington Spa and the West Midlands. * Opportunities for real, practical conversations with games industry professionals. * Engaging panel talks on industry hot topics. Of these, the panel talks stayed with me the most. I was particularly interested in the discussions on the future of games, especially the role that AI will play (many thanks to Clare Green, Laura Steel, 🕹️Csaba Berenyi, James Norris, Hernan Polloni) Over the years, I’ve attended many talks on AI and have a reasonable understanding of the subject. However, one comment seemed to challenge me directly: how much have I integrated AI into my workflow? The truth was, I hadn't—at least not to the extent I could. I knew of tools, the usual suspects, but they weren’t genuinely part of my workflow habits. Not as much as they might be. Since then, I've started to recognise and integrate the practical power of current generative AI tools, which feels like the sweet spot for my personal use. I’m now incorporating AI more into my daily routine—as a sounding board, a visualiser, a time-saver, and a productivity booster. This shift has led me to rethink how I view AI right now, even if my grander hopes for the possibilities remain. Initially, I saw AI as a grand intellectual game-changer, something that would mark a paradigm shift in how we perform jobs, but essentially unfinished and kept at arm's length. It might still be that huge leap in the future, but for now, for me, it’s more of a practical tool that I can weave into my approach rather than something that completely transforms the game. From a workflow perspective, it’s less like moving from two-dimensional to three-dimensional chess, and more like the introduction of metal rackets in tennis, DRS in Formula One, or VAR in football. The game remains fundamentally the same but, to play it well, you need to understand the changes, even if they aren’t immediately apparent on the surface. Because before the huge change, as is common, there will be a number of incremental changes for those who are looking. My goal now is to ensure I’m really looking. If you are interested in further insights into AI’s impact on tools, as well as the possibilities in the future, I'll include some links in the comments.

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Awful news last week with Thunderful Group announcing a second round of layoffs (the previous one was earlier this year) as it is looking to “increase its focus on third-party publishing and reduce the production of internally developed projects”, therefore resulting in significant redundancies within the company’s own development teams, affecting Thunderful Games, Thunderful Malmö, The Station, Thunderful Skövde and JUMPSHIP. Additionally, roles within administration and management will also be affected. To those impacted please check out the following resources: 🥇First, reach out to us at People Can Fly Studio, we have many roles open right now in Canada, the UK, Ireland and Europe, please check them out here: https://lnkd.in/eWpV5PbA 🥈Next, Discipline Games Jobs Resources: Over the past months I have created 10 (at time of writing) Games Jobs Resources to find jobs in a wide range of disciplines, and I would urge you to check them out, if anything just to see what would be available to you: https://lnkd.in/eGE2vzUt You can find over 5,900 jobs there. 🥉 Third, 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/ I urge you to check out the areas in particular about CV support and mentoring, as these will help you no matter what industry you are hailing from or are looking into going next. 🎖 Finally, 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 ❤️ #thunderfulgames #thestation #jumpship #layoffs

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What is the future of music software development? Recently, someone asked us why we don't do more audio programming tutorials of alternative approaches outside of the JUCE Framework... The thing is, he's right! There's room for a wider array of tutorials and discussion. One of the reasons JUCE has been a core focus is that it has one of the easiest "onboarding" experiences for developers - especially for those just getting started. Another is that it has a very good "out of the box" cross-platform workflow that's easy to teach. It's a very large, fully fledged solution that has abstractions for most conventional use cases. JUCE also solves some of the toughest challenges that still don't have direct open source alternatives. With that being said, I believe that as an industry we are moving towards a wider array of tools for audio software development, and that trend is heading towards more solutions. Here are a few that come to mind and discussions on each: 🖥 Cmajor - It's VERY easy to get into, has a lot of workflow advantages, and will export straight to a CLAP plug-in / raw C++ / JUCE project. It also solves many of the platform specific challenges that you get with C++, especially multi-threading. Uses JS / HTML / CSS for user interfaces - a more modern and faster solution (though there are still challenges to solve around this). https://lnkd.in/eafB-Cw8 🖥 CLAP w/ various open source tools - the CLAP open source plug-in format and its VST / AU wrappers has (almost!) open sourced what has been one of JUCE's biggest "walled gardens" - cross-platform packaging to various plug-in APIs with the click of a button. https://lnkd.in/edMFbdzH 🖥 Elementary - Uses JavaScript and is awesome! https://lnkd.in/enfsj46P 🖥 iPlug2 - A great solution but a little rough around the edges for beginners. I think it will win more appeal once they officially support CMake as a build system. https://lnkd.in/e_up9MRm 🖥 RNBO w/ Max MSP - A similar approach to Cmajor, but within the Max MSP ecosystem. https://lnkd.in/eVT4E8q9 I'd love to hear your thoughts on where we are going as an industry!

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Games Industry vets - hands up if you got your start in QA? 🙌 It's WILD to me seeing the majority of EU/US QA departments being decimated, shut down, and off-shored all over, when so very many of the best people I know in games started right there. If you want to build teams of talented all-rounders, with understanding of multi-discipline requirements and workload, who will move heaven and earth to make your games the very best they could be, then why are you cutting the biggest entry point to find them? But sure, keep looking to hire those mid-level and senior folks, they're definitely not a dwindling resource pool... 🙄 QA deserves to be treated better by our industry - the eternal truth. (Also, this isn't to say QA is only for gaining entry level into the industry - it's an absolutely essential discipline as well! 🐞)

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Try as I might it's not going to get easier to say this, so I won't spend any more time wordsmithing: after 7 incredible years working with the best team I have ever seen in game dev, my time at Fire Hose Games is at an end. I won't try to sugarcoat it: this sucks. Anything else I say would be a lie. But it sucks for the best possible reason: my years at Fire Hose were incredible, and I wouldn't trade them for the world. I am so, so proud of the team we assembled while I was there, and of the games we made together. We created experiences that were uplifting and fun, and we had fun doing it. There isn't a person I worked with who I wouldn't run through a brick wall for, and wherever they end up next will be all the better for it. If I know you and you are thinking about hiring an ex-Fire-Hose dev, hit me up. You are about to make the best decision of your professional life, and I cannot wait to give you a preview of the good times that await. From a professional standpoint, these have been the best 7 years of my career. I did my best work and had the best work-life balance I've ever found. We built a studio where respect and kindness were the rule, and every single day I went to work with people who made me laugh even as they pushed me to be better. In particular I'm so proud of Techtonica. It's a gem of a game that isn't quite like anything else out there, and that I believe stands head-to-head with the best work of studios several times our size. Making video games is hard, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something (probably video games). One of the things I tell people contemplating getting into this business is that it's easy to go broke making bad games, and it's just as easy to go broke making good ones. I've been incredibly lucky in my career to have only experienced the latter, and I say that with complete sincerity. A lot of these "today is my last day at GameCorp, and I'm thankful for the opportunity" posts have the quality and cadence of a hostage video. If you read between the lines of all the professionally-acceptable sentiments that folks are supposed to type at a moment like this, you can practically see the writer blinking out morse code for "screw this place, I'm done." This isn't one of those posts. Working at Fire Hose rocked, and my only sadness is that, for now, it's over. Endless love and gratitude to my fellow ex-Fire-Hosers, and I sincerely hope folks who haven't yet taken Techtonica for a spin will give it a try. You've got a good time waiting for you. 💙

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From Screen Time to Skill Time, Transferable Skills Your Kids Develop in Minecraft. As parents, we often wonder if the hours spent in front of a screen are genuinely productive. The good news is that when it comes to Minecraft, your child isn't just playing; they are learning and growing in ways that extend far beyond the game. Minecraft is more than just a sandbox game; it's a tool for building skills your child can carry into the real world. https://lnkd.in/eZ2x9biJ

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A lot of contracts have been terminated last year, a lot of studios have been closed, many projects canceled. At the same time that means: a lot of new contracts are being negotiated right at the moment, or will be negotiated soon. One has to put away the dust and recall all the nuances that are to be kept in mind when looking for a partner. I have just had some good time watching Oleksiy Savchenklo’s video where he reviews all the major points of developer/publisher deals negotiations as well as fulfilling those deals from legal, development, production, supervision and marketing viewpoints. https://lnkd.in/ds2NPeUm The one and a half hour video concludes with some sharp insights on how recent publishers’ practices made a big impact on the industry leading to the crisis we are witnessing at the moment, when a lot of golden egg laying geese have been killed after their owners tried their best to do optimization of golden eggs laying procedures.

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George! How do you write a newsletter during a conference? With some difficulty, of course 😬 Putting together this week’s Video Games Industry Memo was such a stretch that I was editing it in the pub last night just minutes before England continued their efforts to return football from whence it came. But as per usual, VGIM landed in the inboxes of nearly 2000 exceptional people at 8am UK time and featured: 🌊 Insight from Develop Brighton by the seaside, including political delight, wobbly industry morale, games media shenanigans and mooting the idea for a Brighton Games Week. 🗞️ Top stories from the industry including Epic Games finally getting its mobile app store notarised, Nintendo’s lukewarm response to generative AI and a Kwalee investment. 💼 Job moves and job news including a range of video game brand jobs at Sega, Jagex and Riot Games. 🛩️ Ace Combat 7 flying onto devices in this week’s big game releases. Want to get VGIM the moment it lands? Sign up to the newsletter by searching for Video Games Industry Memo on Substack or by hitting the link to the newsletter in my profile. And don’t forget, if you want to get 20% off a paid subscription to VGIM Insider - which gets you more content, early access to events and discounts on sponsorships - use the code KEENBEAN when subscribing to get a year of VGIM goodness for just £40.

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