great! - Designer InLight Entertainment Employee Review

It's a very relaxed environment. You can come and go as you please as long as you're getting your work done (which is usually lots). Most of the people there are down to earth and are a fun bunch. The location of the office is also great as it is in Bastion Square.

You will have no opportunity for advancement and management doesn't encourage you to learn new things, even if you ask them to work on something new. If you're making them money where you are then you will stay where you are. You will struggle against management to push for features and tech that will help the company in the long run because the company is short-sighted and grinds from project to project. Despite the small size of the place (20 employees) management doesn't include the employees in anything to do with decisions. They hire large numbers of coops because full time programmers quit regularly.

-A local company in the small city of Victoria, BC. Not many game jobs here, so anything is good. -Location is prime and there are a hundred places to eat or grab a drink during lunch or after work. You can also get lots of shopping or errands done during your break since everything is so close. -The crew and management are all really friendly. Everyone is easy going and polite. -A very relaxed and chill work environment, no one keeps tabs on you so you can take over an hour for lunch one day and skip lunch break the next if you want. As long as you do your work and pull your weight, you're fine. No one is sitting there timing you or nagging you for peeking at your phone or social media briefly. -Cool events and outings every so often. There was usually a summer volleyball party at rooftop and an Xmas party at a bar. Both times the company footed the bill for all food and drinks. Also we'd often have game days on lunch breaks where we'd play board games or video games. -We'd usually get "early Fridays" or "beer Fridays" where work would stop around 3pm and we'd all either go home or have a few drinks and hang out.

-The clients we worked for were often clueless regarding basic gameplay mechanics and design. Even though we work on kids games, children still want a well designed product and will notice if it's poorly thought out. Instead of politely explaining the problems to the clients, management told us we had to implement the ideas anyhow 95% of the time. -There isn't a lot of room to advance, and raises/benefits are really hard to get. While it was a great starter job I don't think anyone could make this their full time gig for life. -Most of management are not gamers, they're very nice people, but are extremely out of touch with the realities of the industry -Near the end of 2015 I started to see the writing on the wall regarding one of our largest clients (about 90% of our work). They were simply not competitive in a market where low prices and quality products are require to succeed. Sure enough, a year later the client went bankrupt and the layoffs began. The fact that QA seemed to have more foresight about this than management was worrying, to say the least. -It's a bit like a game factory more than a place that cares about quality products. You have to hit sometimes absurd deadlines and in 3 years I helped churn out over 30 titles... Copy and pasted code is a standard practice and results in tons of bugs. -Rather unwilling to try to develop any in house projects, relying instead on grants and contracts with bigger studios. The couple in house projects were sidelined and underfunded/marketed to the point of being failures out of the gate. These results didn't help encourage more similar ventures. Because of this, they had all their eggs in the basket that dropped. -Almost everyone was laid off with little warning, since it took a few months to happen, many people picked up on it and found other employment beforehand. -The majority of games were developed on an in house engine that is neither stable nor cutting edge. Convoluted and troublesome would be the most accurate way to describe it. Unity would have made far more sense, and the tiny royalty fee would for sure be saved in increased productivity and less time hunting bugs.