Here are a few updates on Eidos Montreal, working on Deus Ex 3.

From Eidos Montreal’s forum:

My name is Kyle Stallock. I’m very happy to announce I’m the new community manager at Eidos Montreal.
I never thought I’d be here in Montreal working with two of the most acclaimed videogame properties (hopefully two turns to three, and maybe more, in the future). I adored videogames while growing up in the tiny little village of Lake Bronson, MN (population of roughly 250!), and idolized those working in the industry, but working with them…just a dream, right? Apparently not.
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I’ll keep an eye on the forums, oversee the company presence on social networks, blog, help plan events, etc, and more. As they say in the fighting game community, “get hyped.”

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P.P.S. I’ve attached a piece of concept art to this post. Enjoy

More details on Eidos Montreal’s forum…

From GameTrailers:

Check out this video interview with Jean-François Dugas, Game Director on Deus Ex 3:

See how the world of Human Revolution adapts to your decisions in this interview with Game Director Jean-Francois Dugas at GamesCom 2010!

Watch the high quality version on GameTrailers…

[…] Well that’s all partly thanks to a great Level Designer who help map out environments and decide where and when enemies appear. Level designers, like Visceral’s Rom Rodriguez,  are essentially the ones who "help determine the experience the player [should have] in a rough form," leaving the artists and animators to make it come to life.

My interviewee Rom here also draws, so read on if you’d like to see a piece of art that helped influence the original Dead Space.

Can you tell me your name, job title, and job description?
Romulo Rodriguez, Associate Game Designer, and I set up game play in Dead Space 2.

I know there are many different types of "designers" and what each of them do is different depending on what company you’re at. What exactly does an Associate Designer do at Visceral?

I am a Level Designer but the Associate Designer determines my level. I’d say I am a low level designer at the moment. My duties involve blocking a level based on the story and desired combat for that point in the game. I then pitch the ideas to my managers, the Lead Level Designer, and the Creative Director and make changes if needed. I later block out combat with simple enemy set ups to help determine the experience we want the player to have in a rough form. […]

Read the whole interview on EA Underground…

If you’re one of those people who want to work in the gaming industry and have that uncommon knack for both art and engineering, you may have considered becoming a Technical Artist. As this weeks interviewee Chris Trimble puts it, Technical Artist are the ones who "make the game do what no one anticipated trying to do."

Read on as The Sims Technical Art Director Chris Trimble discusses his career track and why studying Science and Math in school will be vital it the next 10 years.

So, could you tell me your name, job title and what you do at EA?

Chris Trimble, I’m a Technical Art Director on The Sims. The technical art director and technical artists help to build a bridge between the art and engineering teams. I’ve once heard technical artists characterized as "making the game do what no one anticipated trying to do." On Sims 3, I focused on the large number of assets we needed to create, and the processes around doing that.

For a position like yours, do you equally need a background in Art and Engineering?

We have people who come from either side-folks who went to art school who had more of a technical knack and folks who went into engineering who have an art knack. […]

Read the full interview on EA…

QA is often considered the entry point of the game studio. Many developers, artists, and designers start out in the QA ranks, using the department as a stepping stone to get to their final job.

But what about those people who want to turn QA into a career? These are the people that get up every day with no other goal than to make a developer cry with the sheer amount of bugs they are about to rain down upon him like fire and brimstone during the Rapture.

Great testers like these are pure gold to a game studio. Unfortunately I’ve seen too many of these brave souls come into my office for an interview, full of passion about games, but not much else. No one ever told them that all of their training and test experiences have not adequately prepared them for a full-time job at a game studio.

In this article, I hope to expose some of the not-so-obvious skills necessary to compete in the QA job market. You will be able to use this knowledge to not only wow your next interviewer with your bug finding skills, but also with your ability to be a long-term and productive member of the studio.

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Read the full 3 page article on Game Carreer Guide…

Here, president and CEO Ian Kelso discusses some of the recent successes of Interactive Ontario, and also shares his views on the growth of the wider videogame business, how to foster a community of business and creative talent, and why convergence with traditional film companies is the future of the interactive market.

Q: Can you begin by giving us an overview of Interactive Ontario, and how it fits into the the Canadian games business?

Ian Kelso: We’re a trade association like Tiga, but at a regional level. And we’re part of an umbrella organisation called the Canadian Interactive Alliance, consisting of seven new media organisations that includes Alliance Numerique and speaks on federal issues, and consists of the heads of the different associations together. I’m also the current president of that.

We have about 220 companies in Ontario in the interactive digital media space. About a quarter of those are in the videogame business, and that’s grown substantially. We started the organisation in 2001 with nine companies and we grew incrementally for a few years. For the first three years we were mostly just a volunteer organisation and we ran a few lunchtime events and speaker series’.

But in 2005 we really took off, we started a multiplatform interactive conference and grew year over year doing more events and things like trade missions – going to markets, networking and working with the government on policy stuff. We started as a provincial organisation, and we’d like to see more activity at the federal level, but unfortunately that hasn’t been forthcoming. And we’ve certainly seen a lot of change in the province in terms of growth in the sector, the gaming industry has got huge momentum behind it right now.

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Read the rest of the interview on GameIndustry.biz.

Entrevue avec Benoit Durel (JVAU08) sur le développement de son prototype de jeu Kitchen Escape avec le logiciel Virtools. Benoit nous raconte son expérience…

Cette entrevue fait partie d’une série de 4 entrevues réalisées auprès des diplômés qui ont participé au projet d’intégration pédagogique d’une nouvelle technologie en prototypage de jeux vidéo au Centre NAD.

1-Expliquez-nous en quoi a consisté votre apprentissage du game design avec VIRTOOLS au Centre NAD :

L’objectif de la formation dirigée par Martijn Steinrucken, concept designer chez EA Montréal était d’apprendre les bases du logiciel Virtools. Plus précisément, cette formation devait nous donner la connaissance d’un nouvel engin de jeu, du scripting, ainsi qu’un avant-goût de programmation pour les jeux vidéo. Nous avons donc appris à développer (scripter) notre propre engin de jeu afin de l’adapter à nos besoins spécifiques.

Par la suite, sous la supervision de Matijn et de Pierre, nous avons eu pour mandat de développer un concept de jeu et d’en faire un prototype dans Virtools. Le fait d’avoir eu l’opportunité de travailler en équipe, dans les très bonnes conditions offertes par le Centre NAD, avec des échéances et un but, donnent l’impression d’être dans une vraie production, ce qui est vraiment agréable!

De plus, ce stage fait vraiment de nous des artistes/concepteurs plus polyvalents qui sortent du NAD. En effet, en ajoutant des bases de scripting/programmation à notre formation, nous sommes les seuls finissants à pourvoir créer un jeu vidéo complet sans l’aide d’une tierce personne. Cette expérience devrait permettre aussi une meilleure intégration au sein d’une production puisque nous pouvons comprendre, plus facilement, à la fois le point de vue des artistes et des programmeurs et faire le lien entre les deux.

Lire l’entrevue au complet sur le blog du Centre NAD.

Voici un video du Prototypage:

The sequel will build on the triumphs of its predecessor while adding a new twist. All of those choices you made in the first game will shape the story in Mass Effect 2. For BioWare, a studio that has in large part built its role-playing reputation on the concept of forcing players to make difficult decisions, this creates a whole new way to think about what a trilogy of games really means. Casey Hudson, Project Director for Mass Effect 2, recently divulged some new details on how this will work, even offering a brief outline of the future leading in to Mass Effect 3.

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The game will be much more personal for those that did play Mass Effect. Everything all of the way down to little side quests will be shaped by your actions in the first game. "If you were mean to a guy in a little side quest," said Hudson, "then he’ll show up in this one and something different will happen. It’s not better or worse, it’s just part of the ongoing story."

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Yes, you read that correctly. Different plots, and different side quests, will become available or be blocked off depending on your actions in the first game. Hudson elaborated, "The quests are different and the things that happen in them are different, and that’s true of a lot of the plots. The things you have to do really only make sense if you made a certain choice previously or if certain characters are alive or dead."

During my chat with Casey Hudson, he spoke a lot about the love subplot that played out in Mass Effect 1 and will continue in the sequel. "People are worried that the love interest from the first game is not recruitable as a squad member in the second game. I think people put too much emphasis on whether importance to the story is equated to whether they are a squad member. In Mass Effect 2, it really is about preparing for a suicide mission. It’s true that people on your squad are most likely going to die in this final mission. It’s not all that hard to make your character survive, but you can die as a permanent death at the end. I think people will have trouble keeping everybody alive. That’s a lot trickier.

Read the whole interview at IGN.

Tomorrow (Thursday) at 4PM EST, I’ll have Scott Mitchell – Animation Director of Shaun White Snowboarding – here to answer all your animation-related questions… live.

Join his chat if you any technical questions for Scott, or check back here tomorrow night for more details!