Lemmy&Binky Guide to Game Industry Jargon
2.gifSo, you’ve finally got that game development job you’ve been waiting for your whole life?
Well done you!
But what’s this? Everyone seems to be talking in some mythical language? “That damn Dreb’s been wheeling since Alpha!†What in buggery are we all talking about?!
Don’t worry, that’s just how game developers speak, and after reading our jargon busting guide, you’ll be able to talk just like a game developer.
And if you’ve not made it into the industry yet, try dropping these beauties in at your interview, and they’ll probably assume you’ve been busting out games for years!
Behold the wordage!
Alpha - A mythical date rumoured to be made up by publishers to scare developers into working faster.
Anonymouse - Rattish looking tester guy no one recognizes, and that you assume is new, but who turns out to have been working there for six months.
Asset Manager - A central repository for your incorrectly named files to get lost in.
Beta - The day you hug your family outside your house, and say goodbye to the dog with a tender rub of its head, before climbing into the back of a taxi to stare in mourning at your waving loved ones, whom you will not see again for several months.
Camracks - The particularly nerdy section of the programming team. Camracks are usually identified by their long black leather coats that they think make them look like Neo out of the Matrix, but don’t.
Deriver - Name given to a designer who is made so purely because they are shit at what they were actually employed to do. They survive by unceremoniously cobbling together “things that worked†in other games with little thought of why they actually worked.
Dreb - A senior employee that never does any work, but goes out drinking with the studio heads and so gets away with it.
Extension - The crucial stage of development where the release date is moved back three months.
Gatekeeper - The privileged member of staff that can inexplicably bypass the company firewall, and whose shared folder is the company’s primary source of Lost, Heroes, 24 and Battlestar Galactica episodes.
Going for a coffee - Going for a whinge.
Going for a ciggie - Going for a whinge.
Going for a meeting - Not having a meeting, but an excuse as to why you’re away from your desk having a whinge.
Graphics Tablet - Performance enhancing drugs taken by artists to make their art better.
Milestone - What the publishers believe has been done on the project in a given month.
Mollying it up - A term often used in marketing departments, or amongst staff when their studio head appears in an interview. “Mollying it up†may include making bold and erroneous statements about the game reinventing its genre, or detailing amazing features of the game that are sure to be chopped out before release on account of them being the rambles of a dangerously optimistic designer.
Nogylop - A back-facing polygon.
Paper beard - The pad of paper taken into meetings in order to look like you’re on the ball, which is generally only used for drawing little faces.
Placeholder - Final art.
Pray-day - A monthly opportunity to find out how much financial difficulty your studio is in.
Poly-pusher - A term used by programmers to describe artists.
Prick - A term used by artists to describe above programmers.
Pulling a Sid - Used to describe a lead designer’s actions when insisting that their name should be on the front of the box.
Previewing - The remarkable precognitive ability of some game developers to be able to read reviews of the game they are working on months or even years before they are even published.
Prototyping - A way of explaining not doing actual work.
Quoquadrahedrant - A really complicated thing to do with polygons your primitive brain couldn’t possibly understand.
Rendering - Something for your PC to be doing so it looks active while you’re away having a whinge.
Rebuild All - Same as above, but for coders.
Schedule - A joke.
Skribb - That weird new guy who gets dumped on that project… you know the one! Tee hee!
Sleep Token - The food, up to the value of five pounds (ten dollars) that is used to justify 5 hours of unpaid overtime.
Smirkey - The bizarre ambivalence felt by smokers when simultaneously joking and crying about the game they are making, as in “Fancy going for a Smirkey Tab?â€Â
Time-stomp - A mail sent out to your long-departed boss at 4am in the vain hope they will notice it was sent out at 4am.
The Brown Mile - The journey from home to work on a Sunday afternoon.
The Sims - The people game developers see out of the window that are mysteriously leaving work at 5:30.
Wheeling - Work-avoidance ritual carried out by programmers, traditionally on Fridays after the lunch time beer. The mouse-wheel is used to periodically scroll up and down a source file, along with a furrowed and intense thinking expression on their faces, and while listening to music on headphones. Sometimes writing “I am bored†into the code, then deleting is used for extra effect. The artist form of wheeling is more sophisticated, sometimes even involving rotating a model around as well as zooming in and out of it.
Wings - A rite of passage in the game industry. Getting ones wings pertains to the first time one has overdosed on Red Bull at 4am.
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