Personal and Professional Practice 3: 'Research' Studio Brief - Frontier Developments

The next company that I wanted to look at was a nation company that is based in Cambridge in the UK and that is Frontier Developments who over the years have made some really interesting things over the years with a style that I think is really interesting. They are actually a fairly big team that they have working for them and have about 240 employees, but the games that they produce are interesting, especially the newer ones that they have been working on like Elite: Dangerous.

Where I personally know the company from though is when it brought out the first 3D installment of the Roller Coaster Tycoon series, with the third game, and it proved to be really popular and got a lot of good things said about it, despite it being a huge jump from the original two games, the first being created by only 1 guy, Chris Sawyer, but Frontier Developments helped to publish and develop it.

When looking at the required skills you need to be apart of the team, they seem reasonable but you need coding knowledge even when going for a art job with them. This makes sense but usually the code would be JS or C++ as these are what most pieces of software use to ready scripting, but they as a company use Python, something for me that is very difficult to get my head around. This is annoying as the company does produce some great stuff, but apart from this knowledge it does seem to just be the basics that they are after.

'Requirements
-Good\Strong knowledge of Maya.
-Scripting experience with Mel/Python.
-Good\Strong knowledge of other game engines and techniques.
-Good knowledge of shaders and rendering techniques.

Additional Information
-A good art and/or code background is beneficial.
-A positive and inquisitive mindset would be preferred.' (Source)