Today we had a site visit to Glass Egg Studio, a Virtuos company. It was such a cool site visit. They do high-end 3D and 2D art production for AAA video games. They have long partnerships with different game developers and have produced assets for the Forza Motorsport/Horizon series, Rockstar Games, 2k Sports, Spiderman, PUBG, Farming Simulator, Flight Simulator, Fortnite, and basically any game with vehicles in it. The lady who started off our tour and led us got into the industry because she loved video games, and that was proved true after she mentioned to us that she is the #3-ranked PUBG player in Vietnam. Crazy! But we basically got to take a look around their studio and saw their designers’ work. Lots of expensive PCs and decorations. The designers’ desks had any decoration they wanted on them, from small organizational tools to giant mecha figures to a 1-1 sized replica of a rifle from a game they designed. The studio allows this because they want the designers to feel like they are working from home. I wonder if the studio includes a decoration stipend in their contracts? I’m guessing they started doing that after covid to incentivize the designers to come back to the office. But we got to see some unreleased designs for a bunch of video games. I wonder how strict the security protocols these employees have are to prevent any leaks to the public. We were also told that companies are now asking for end-to-end service rather than simply specialized digital assets. For example, companies like Forza Horizon would only have Glass Egg make the vehicle assets. Simple and what they do best. Now, Forza asks Glass Egg to design the vehicles, hard surfaces, and environment assets. Full package, end-to-end. But Glass Egg won’t complain because more work is more money, and there isn’t a project that is out of the depths of their designers. Speaking of the designers, since they recruit the best talent, roughly 30-35% of their team are expats.
After Glass Egg, we went to get Pho, and it was overly delicious. I did put a bit too much of the spicy sauce in it, but it was still amazing. The food here continues to blow me away.
After eating, we went to the professional boxing gym Trigger Boxing. The place is an extremely nice gym, and they also use it to host their own boxing matches. We did a few exercises and hit the bags a bit before we had the opportunity to do some light sparring with one of the pros… I have bad defense, and if we were going at 100% effort, I definitely would’ve been cooked. I did boxing back in middle school, and I am tempted to pick it back up over the summer. As everyone knows, boxers have some of the best muscle development in all sports.