Rioter possibly answer a couple questions? School project.

TurtleMan878·5/22/2015, 9:18:57 PM·151 votes·18,788 views

Hey!

I am doing a school project on the career of a Video Game Developer and I need an interview with one. It would simply consist of answering 5 questions. If anyone could get back to me that would be awesome!

Questions

What are the typical hours you work?
What are the tasks you preform each day? (doesn't need to be super specific)
What skills are required to preform the job you do?
How did you get in to the field?
Advice for people getting into the field?

Thanks in advance if anyone can do this.

61 Comments

RiotMeddler5/23/2015, 7:21:18 AM137 votes

Sure, happy to help.

{quoted}

What are the typical hours you work?

A normal day for me tends to be something along the lines of get in between 10:00 and 10:30, stop working around 8:00 to 8:30. Those sort of hours are pretty common, though some people prefer an early start/early finish approach.

{quoted}

What are the tasks you preform each day? (doesn't need to be super specific)

My average day looks something like this:

Quick synch up meeting for the day with the rest of the team, where everyone runs through what they're working on, focusing mainly on where they could do with some help, what they'd like to test and quickly covered topics relevant to the team (e.g. upcoming events, changes to the tools we work with etc)
Playtest - full game of SR, with a focus on testing new champions and significant reworks, followed by people getting together to discuss feedback and next steps in small groups.
Lunch, often including spillover conversation from the playtest.
An afternoon that's a mixture of meetings (e.g. with the artists working on new champions, with the balance team to figure out our next steps for a just released champ, with engineers working on new tech etc) and solo project work (putting new spells together to test, fixing bugs, hooking up new visual effects etc).
Another playtest and feedback session.
More discussion with other developers or solo work, depending on what's of most value at the time.

{quoted}

What skills are required to preform the job you do?

Goal oriented analysis and problem solving, an understanding of what creates satisfying gameplay (mechanics especially), the ability to communicate well with people from a range of different disciplines (verbal and written), at least some thematic/creative understanding, some degree of scripting skill, at least a moderately broad game background.

{quoted}

How did you get in to the field?

I was previously working as a transportation engineer, focused particularly on computer simulations of what the transport system of a city 10-50 years in the future might look like. At the same time I was playing LoL, and spotted a forum post from Riot's head of design, Zileas, looking for design applicants. Figured I'd throw in an application, since one of the things specified was a preference for people from analytical/engineering fields and game development was a subject I'd always been interested in.

{quoted}

Advice for people getting into the field?

Analyze games, make games, figure out what you want to do, be realistic:

Don't just play a couple of games/genres you know you like. Play broadly, and figure out why different types of games appeal to different people, why the elements in a game function as they do (whether you agree or disagree with the choice), what you'd do differently etc.
Start developing skills before you try to get into the industry. You'll learn a lot from trying to makes games/components of games that's extremely valuable both in growing your own skills and showing you ability in an interview. Whether that's modding, indie development, creating content using the various game making software out there, pen and paper design or whatever doing stuff makes you better at it (and gives you projects to show others).
Figure out what sort of game development you're interested in and focus a fair bit of your learning on that. Do you want to create concept art for new characters? Build levels for an FPS? Write the story of an RPG? Create animations for a fighting game? Do sound design for an RTS? There are a wide range of different skillsets needed, depending on what sort of career you're after, so figuring out what appeals to you and what you've got the potential to be good at's really valuable.
Be realistic and don't expect immediate success. Game development's a popular industry, some parts of it especially, so there's often a lot of competition for entry level positions. There are ways of improving your odds though if you want to take them, such as being willing to move to locations with lots of employers, putting a lot of time into personal development via your own projects, starting in a field you're not as interested in to get a foot in the door etc.

thePandev5/22/2015, 10:10:32 PM25 votes

Rito would you abandon this poor child?

RiotKindlejack5/23/2015, 11:39:25 PM20 votes

I hope this doesn't come off as 'me too' but I'd also like to answer as someone with a different role.

{quoted}

What are the typical hours you work?

I'm usually in the office between 9:00am and 8:30pm but it fluctuates every day and I'm not working every minute of that time as you'll see.

What are the tasks you perform each day? (doesn't need to be super specific)

When I get to my desk I begin by catching up on emails then checking out the most recent artwork from all the teams on LoL, then I set my personal goals for the day and jam on ideas.
Synch up with the team, take a look at how all the skins in development are progressing and make sure no one is blocked (meaning they are waiting on something before they can continue working). This is a good natural point to have any discussions about how a particular project is progressing.
Hit the gym and then grab some lunch - when you work on sustained focused tasks it's really important to take care of your health so you don't get burnt out.
I often get invited to play a game after lunch and if I'm not too busy I try to get in at least one game. I'm still relatively new to the company and when I was freelancing I had time to play 4+ games a day. I realise it's crucial to still play regularly! I can't stand artists that aren't completely in love with the Games/Movies they work on.
Work on my concept/s and prepare for meetings. This time is where I get the bulk of my work done.
Twice a week we have concepts reviews and once a week we have a whole team review where we look at the most recent work and get feedback from the rest of the team. Our projects are all very collaborative and there are always a lot of strong opinions about the work we are doing; 'My' work is more like 'My execution on the team's vision which in turn is guided by player driven information'. Whenever there is a divide in the group we ask ourselves what players will enjoy most and try to achieve that. On other days I make a point of visiting the other teams, building avenues of communication and leaning as much as I can.
After dinner I usually settle in for a few more hours and get some solid work done. As an artist I find I do my best work when it's dark and quiet and I can get lost in what I'm doing. The office is a very social place during the day, people stop by to give feedback, share ideas, talk about craft, talk about LoL, talk about The Witcher 3, talk about Mad Max (yes it is an accurate depiction of life in Australia), so it's good to have some uninterrupted time to just 'art'.

What skills are required to perform the job you do?

Concept art is a highly creative/crazy process. The people on the Splash team are on a whole other level when it comes to illustrating rendered art, but I have to merge super fast iteration with strong aesthetic and game design sensibilities, exciting ideas, material rendering, pop culture knowledge, deep understanding of champions and of the people who play them. It's not enough to just draw a cool picture, I need to understand the limitations of the medium I am designing for and what is achievable as well as constantly pushing those limitations and getting my team excited about exploring new frontiers.

Communication is equally important. I feel like one of the primary reasons I was hired was that when freelancing I proved that I could actively pursue and accept feedback, communicate effectively and punctually, predict and address concerns before they became problems, create and meet my own deadlines and accurately assess my own capability. It's not enough to be a great artist - our Art Director is constantly reminding us that we are 'Game Developers'; pretty pictures aren't enough.

Self-motivation and an endless hunger to improve. Another one of the primary reasons I'm where I am today is that, earlier in my life, I made a decision to accept no excuses from myself. I'll never be the best artist, but I'll never rest on my achievements and keep improving and learning from whoever is kind enough to teach me (and when I can't find anyone to help me out I teach myself although it's a slower process). One characteristic that everyone at Riot shares is that they are self-motivated: if they see a problem they ask 'what can I do to resolve this?' make a plan and carry it out. We don't have 'bosses' that set expectations because we set our own and if we fail to achieve them we ask ourselves what we could have done better. I was talking with another Rioter recently about the way that, if you ask a Rioter 'can you do ___?' they will never say no (even when they probably should) but will instead see it as a challenge.

This doesn't get said much, but you need to be a really cool person! No matter how talented an individual may be, if they aren't enjoyable to work with then they will struggle. When you have a full time job with long hours then your colleagues are the people you spend the most time with, more than family and friends, so they need to be great to get along with. This doesn't mean there aren't differences or conflicts; it's more about how people resolve things and move forward. I know this can be hard to quantify, but a great skill for self-improvement is ensuring that when something happens you accept responsibility and ask yourself 'how could I have done things to change the outcome?' instead of blaming an external force and saying 'well there's nothing I could do'.

How did you get in to the field?

I did a University course in Multimedia & Digital Art that gave me a broad base. From there I got a job with an animation company and fluctuated between full-time and freelance work (or just straight up unemployed) while spending all my free time improving my skills and comparing them to industry professionals. If I was just finishing University today I would look for work on Indie/Mobile Games instead of animation/film but at the time it was the best opportunity I had. When I felt like I had a chance of getting the job I wanted I began travelling to the USA and getting my work in front of anyone I could - this eventually lead to meeting people from a heap of large companies and it turns out that the Game Artist community is small place. After falling in love with LoL and starting to do some fan art I won 3rd place in the first Lunar Revel art contest. They had their eye on me after that. Eventually after a couple more years of improvement I was offered some freelance work which I gave 100% and managed to impress them enough for an eventual interview.

Advice for people getting into the field?

Whether you want to work in art/design/QA/talent/etc. the advice is the same: educate yourself on the realities of the job (with questions like these), practice your craft every day, show how passionate you are for the work you do, seek advice/feedback/improvement, work on communication and ensure you are a person that people want to spend their days working with!

I realise that Artist and 'Game Developer' aren't always viewed as synonymous, but if someone reads this and gets some benefit or insight then it was /worth

Thanks in advance if anyone can do this.

Thanks for taking an interest!

TheTyeGuy5/23/2015, 2:42:13 AM9 votes

Hello. I am Rito Frek. I have the answers here.

Too many
Get paid. Get laid. and Gatorade
Must be at least challenjour.
They told me to mow it.
This shit's MY field. Go mow your own.

Gavran5/22/2015, 11:38:52 PM8 votes

Not a Rioter obviously but let me get you started.

All of them. Normal hours (9-5 and such), then 18/5 during crunch time. Seriously, working on a game nearing release will devour your life for months. Possibly less true at Riot, though I'd be pretty surprised if they never crunch for internal deadlines.

2 & 3) You need to be more specific (or amend your target job to "whatever the job of the Rioter that posts is"). Programmers don't do art, artists don't write stories, writers don't fix bugs etc.

Networking. The industry is very well connected, and experience driven because there's a lot of stuff in Game Design that is just different from other professions and mostly learned by experience.
Portfolio. If you're an artist, draw tons of game art. Vary your styles and subjects. Work on actual games. Mods, indie stuff, solo projects, whatever, have real work that you've done and can say to someone, "Hey, I like making games, this is what I've done."

Also, stay away from "Game Design" schools as a general rule. There's maybe one or two good ones and a lot of terrible ones, and they all claim to be the best. If you want to get a degree that's fine, not bad at all, but get it in something else that's related to the job you want. E.g., if you want to be a game programmer, get a Computer Science degree. A good programmer can adapt his knowledge to game programming. Someone who got a shoddy education in "Game Programming" is going to have a hard time adapting it to anything.

By and large, the industry doesn't care what the words on your degree say, they care if you have useful skills. Most (all? depends on your definitions I suppose) industry veterans are people who did something else for a living and made games as a hobby until they made it big.

Ukrost5/22/2015, 11:04:28 PM7 votes

Bump for support...

Nauthes5/22/2015, 9:49:30 PM7 votes

Riot dont crush a kids dreams!

PikaCHU5675/22/2015, 11:09:05 PM6 votes

Bumperino >o<

daemanic5/22/2015, 9:30:32 PM4 votes

COME ON RIOT ANSWER THIS

Goose1sland5/22/2015, 10:04:36 PM4 votes

Rito Plz

RiotRiot Nitsuabo5/26/2015, 6:47:15 PM4 votes

Wall of text. Sorry?

I work business-ish hours, about 9am - 6pm. This varies day to day, including start time, stop time, and number of hours at the office. Riot's very flexible this way.
My time is split between technical and organizational work. As a data scientist, I spend time

constructing datasets from the raw information we store,
doing statistical analysis and building machine learning models of player actions and other events in our ecosystem,
visualizing and presenting these results,
writing code to automate the above processes, and
talking with collaborators about how to interpret results and helping with strategy and decision making As a manager, I spend time
supporting the career development of other data scientists
recruiting and hiring
working with other folks to figure out vision, goals, and strategy for the Data Science discipline

Skills:

SQL
at least one programming language with extensive data processing / machine learning libraries (R and Python are most common, some SAS, recently some Scala)
at least one programming language for more general-purpose programming tasks (Python is most common, some Java and recently some Scala)
knowledge of statistics and machine learning
knowledge of big data processing frameworks and tools (for us this means mostly Hadoop, Hive, and Spark)
visualization tools (we use different combinations of R, Python, Javascript, Tableau, and Platfora)
ability to design experiments, break a complicated analysis down into smaller tasks, estimate effort and timeline for completion
communication (about progress, about problems, about results, about everything)
ability to take and give feedback (about everything)

I came from academics. After a post-doc I decided my favorite part of the work I was doing was solving problems with data, and that I thought I'd be happy solving interesting problems in lots of domains, not just my scientific subfield. The job title "Data Scientist" was (and, possibly, continues to be) pretty fuzzily defined, but I was vain enough to think it applied to me. A couple of places agreed with me, and I got my first gig.
Advice for people getting into data science (largely inspired by mistakes I've made):

Figure out what "data science" means to you, and make sure your definition is pretty close to the jobs you're applying for. For some people (like me), it means "solving practical problems using data and whatever methods will get the job done". For others, it means "advancing the state of the art in statistics and machine learning in areas that are important to my employer". Neither of these is right or wrong, but they lead to different kinds of projects and different day-to-day working styles and (often) different employers. My satisfaction comes from devising (hopefully?) creative applications of known techniques to new problem spaces. Other people get their satisfaction from doing research at the cutting edge of the field.
Find a version of the data science venn diagram and make sure you know how you fit into that space (this is the first one I saw). If you know you're weak in one of these areas, figure out how to get stronger or how to make the case that your other strengths make up for it.
Get used to working with messy data. If you're doing MOOCs or taking courses in a university setting, seek out additional datasets beyond the ones provided for your assignments. Datasets from homework problems are often sanitized and easy to work with in ways that real world data is not.
Get used to solving problems with your models, not just building and tuning them. The point of modeling in industry is to make better decisions. This (usually) entails building models either to gain deep understanding of something that happened in the past, or to predict how things will happen in the future. If you're used to ending a modeling project once you've minimized the test set error, you need to start focusing on how people will use the results of your model.
Think about how to explain the model building process, how to quantify the progress you made at different steps in model tuning, and how to present the parameters and predictions of the final model in a way that non-technical collaborators can understand. Develop a sense for which decisions and assumptions you've made are important to the end result, and which ones are just implementation details that can be postponed for subsequent technical discussions.
Be wary of becoming a "black box" data scientist. This means a lot of things. Don't use any dataset as if it was generated by a black box; work to find out where your data came from and how it was collected so that you can represent this understanding in your models. Don't treat any modeling technique you use as a black box; make sure you deeply understand the assumptions and constraints of the technique so that you can get the most out of your tools. Don't let your collaborators/customers think of you as a black box; help them understand your work so they can help make it better.
Learn to appreciate the contributions of your (technical and non-technical) collaborators. Doing data science well is hard, but that's true of any job worth doing-- we should recognize we're not special in this regard. There can be a tendency among folks who do complex technical work to overlook or even dismiss the work of collaborators who use less complex methods or whose contributions are very different from our own. This is shortsighted and definitely toxic to a team. Take the time to learn about the workflow of your collaborators in other roles and to appreciate the effort and expertise required by their craft. You'll build stronger relationships, you'll learn interesting and novel (to you) stuff, and you might even identify new ways to help each other out.

Melledoneus5/23/2015, 12:01:30 AM3 votes

We shall see red, or we shall Riot!!!

Rico Nasty5/22/2015, 9:23:54 PM3 votes

bump cause this would be cool for a rioter to do!!!

TheDabberBoy5/22/2015, 9:25:52 PM3 votes

Bump

BlunterMonk5/23/2015, 5:32:42 AM2 votes

I am a video game developer but not with Riot. I'd love to throw a bone but I think the impact will be much greater from a Riot developer.

Come on Riot, help a human out.

RiotJooballin5/26/2015, 11:55:27 PM2 votes

Hello TurtleMan!

I can give you my experience as well, hopefully it's not too late and it's still helpful.

What are the typical hours you work?

I work Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday in the office. I get to my desk around 10:00am and I leave at 6:30pm. Wednesday and Friday I work from home, and start an hour or two earlier.

What are the tasks you preform each day? (doesn't need to be super specific)

As an engineer, I'm mostly coding. I work with other engineers, artists, designers, production etc. to determine which tasks are highest priority and tackle those I can.

What skills are required to preform the job you do?

I think one of the most important skills is the ability to talk with people of other disciplines. In game development, you will need to discuss with engineers, designers, artists, producers, marketers, and so on. You need to be able to discuss your ideas and what you are doing to all of these people who have different skill sets and understanding of game development.

How did you get in to the field?

I went to school for game development, and applied to as many jobs as I could. I got my first job in 2007, and have been working in games ever since.

Advice for people getting into the field?

Speaking from an engineering standpoint, study study study for your interviews. Whether or not you can do the job is irrelevant if you can't prove it in the few hours you will be interviewing. I had to study up on linear algebra, graphics, and gameplay among others. I failed many interviews due to not being prepared.

Best of luck! Eric

YtqN4LOn9D5/23/2015, 3:54:56 PM2 votes

Logged in for the first time in forever, just to upvote Meddler. <3 Good man.

warpenguin5555/23/2015, 12:05:52 AM2 votes

bump for da rito

dr lichdeath5/22/2015, 11:02:13 PM2 votes

...meh lets see tomorrow

Cordel8a115/27/2015, 3:57:21 PM1 votes

As someone going into this type of field. Bless this post. Ahri

Rootworth5/23/2015, 12:03:35 AM1 votes

Why not do some research? There's info about this already.

The Dark Knight5/24/2015, 8:32:45 PM1 votes

Bump