ALPHA | NEWS
EDITORIAL NEW YEAR, NEW YOU
DON’T LET the headline worry you. We’re not here to force diets, fitness regimes and fashion tips upon you. However, with the doom and gloom of January just about behind us, it’s time for optimism, and maybe even a new career. This issue is packed with advice on finding a new job, securing a promotion – and for those of you in managerial roles – tips on motivating and retaining your staff. On page 18 a huge six-page feature brings
you 128 pieces of advice from dozens of the industry’s best, covering CV writing, interview technique, pitching, portfolios, disciplines, recommended reading and even guidance on setting up your own studio. If you’re tempted to make a move on furthering your career this year it really is essential reading. Following that there’s the results of our annual salary survey, which pools data from the hundreds – and so nearly thousands – of industry professionals who told us about their employment. Sadly, it points to a depressing disparity between male and female wages that should have long ago been consigned to the past, but it’s filled with heaps of fascinating information that will help you give perspective on your own wage – and take a nose at other people’s. Elsewhere in this issue there’s a peak behind the doors of Ubisoft’s creatively risky Montpellier studio, an in-depth investigation of the UK’s Cambridge games development hub, and a look at the potential of a new wave of free-to-play games. Perhaps the most fascinating piece, however, looks at an academic computer named Angelina, that can develop games itself using AI. It’s a remarkable and slightly unsettling glimpse of the future where mere humans might not be needed for games development. Oh, and I lied. There are some fashion tips.
Will Freeman
will.freeman@
intentmedia.co.uk
To Infinite and beyond
It’s been a long wait for BioShock Infinite, but with 2012 upon us its release is drawing close. Michael French caught up with series lead Ken Levine, to find out his hopes for the game and beyond
By the time BioShock Infinite is released it will have been five years since the last game in the series came out, and far longer since you started. What’s changed for you over that time, having personally overseen one game series? Over that time we’ve had to reimagine the company a little. We were originally working with the Australian team, and since then we’ve had to build up a much larger team. We’ve quadrupled the size of the studio in Boston and so we had to build a new office space and hire a lot of people. We’re not a company that can hire a lot of people very quickly. We can’t just hire 400 people at once, because you’re going to get very mediocre people if you do that. It took us a long time to build up the team. That’s one of the primary reasons our work on BioShock has taken so long. But also, our process at Irrational is really organic and slow. We’re like the slow food movement of games because we made a lot of mistakes, I think; I don’t know what better way to put it. We did six months of prototyping on a
product that we sort of abandoned. It still lives on and we used the assets from it in the game. But it all takes us a long time.
06 | FEBRUARY 2012 Originally we had an idea for this city in the
sky and for a long time it looked a lot like Rapture. It was like dark clouds and purples and originally the conflict in the city was between technowadice and luddites. Lead characters Booker and Elizabeth didn’t exist. It’s the same with the first release of BioShock. If you go back in the history of the game, it was set on a tropical island for a long time with former Nazis in a modern day setting and you played the role of a cult de-programmer character. I think that’s OK; it’s a very natural way to
work. Fortunately, the team and I are allowed to experiment, and the company is behind that. Not everybody has that luxury so we try to leverage what we have the best we can.
How did you earn that kind of luxury? Is it the success of the first BioShock that affords you the time you need from Take-Two? I can’t speak for Take-Two. They write the cheques and that’s great. No one comes in and hits me on the head with a frying pan and says ‘what the hell are you doing?’ The company in general understands that we’re not generally planning to annualise these franchises. You could do that, there is
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