Why Kotaku Australia Should Never Work With Children... Or Robots 
Three Words I Said To The Man I Defeated In Gears Of War That I'll Never Say Again 
New Doom 3 For Xbox 360 And PlayStation 3 Supports Head-Mounted Displays 
Far Cry 3 And The Stranger In A Strange Land 
Why Robin Makes Batman Better 
Resistance: Burning Skies: The Kotaku Review Martin Slater’s killer Bioshock post-mortem at the most recent Game Connect didn’t just highlight the less glamorous aspects of DirectX 10 – the 2K Australia lead programmer also discussed the issues facing quality assurance, and how important good QA is:
There’s a nasty trend in the industry right now, QA is not taken seriously enough. It’s not a career for people, it’s a step up for people coming out of AIE [Academy of Interactive Entertainment] , coming out of Qantm, coming out of wherever. Their first taste of the games industry is a stint in QA for six months on 15 bucks an hour, [where they]knock out some bugs until they’ve been known and hopefully chat it up with a few of the other people and get a job.
According to Slater, QA needs to be taken seriously, not only as a crucial aspect of development, but a career as well. Currently, it’s perceived as a rung on the ladder to a “better” position – one that has nothing to do with QA.
More from Slater after the jump.
I was fortunate enough to sit in on Martin Slater’s BioShock post-mortem down at Game Connect last weekend.
With hands firmly clenching his speaker podium, Slater held his ground against a steady bombardment of questions on BioShock. I found his experiences working with Microsoft’s DirectX 10 the most interesting, so I’ve replicated them here from data carefully extracted from my voice recorder:
[DirectX 10]offers your gameplay nothing … DirectX 10, probably for the next three, four, five years is not important to you. Microsoft are going to tell you everything under the sun differently. Everybody under the sun is going to tell you differently.
I’m not sure it offers your visuals anything either, judging from Crysis and its configuration file silliness.
DirectX 10 isn’t all bad though – hey, Microsoft didn’t go to all that trouble for nothing:
You’ve got the business side and you’ve got the games side. The games side, you want to minimise the technology because you want to maximise the amount of time you spend interacting with game design. DirectX 10, for all your game programmers, is a beautiful place.
I can’t help but agree with Slater. I also think people need to start understanding that DirectX 10 and Direct3D 10 are two different things – one is a collection of APIs, while the other is one of those APIs.
It’s just a shame that 2KAustralia.com looks almost identical to 2KBoston.com – but that’s to be expected.
At least they’re separate.
Both sites are light on features, however, the Oz version has gone to the trouble of adding a nice section with bios for some of the guys from the Canberra studio. For example, Jon Chey wrote just five lines of code for Terra Nova. He also has a secret love of “18th century English Rococo chairs”. Certainly news to me.
2K Australia [Official site, via Sumea]
Watch The New Tomb Raider Trailer Broken Down, While It Breaks Lara Down
‘Resident Evil?… Lost Planet?… Forget Them. You Know Dead Space 3 Is Going To Annihilate Them On Horror, Thrills And Action.’
Those Adorable Mini Ninjas Get Kinect-ified For Xbox Live Arcade
Helicopters And Artillery Fire Fly In ArmA 3′s E3 Demo Video
