[gameprogrammer] Re: gameprogrammer Digest V4 #5

On Tue, Jan 09, 2007 at 01:06:18PM -0600, Bob Pendleton wrote:

> > That's absolutely true, it's difficult to layoff people here.  But that
> > would, as you note, mean that the interview should be more thorough.
> > Yet, complete games don't seem to be required here.
> 
> Yes, more thorough, because the employer takes a longer view of the
> employee. When hiring for the longer term you look for what the person
> can learn to do. When hiring for the short term you look for what the
> person can do *right now*.

I see.  I didn't understand your point previously.

> I don't know a single game programmer who did not do a number of small
> games. 

This is funny.  It must be a cultural difference, with American nature
being more "hands on" as they sometimes say, or something like that. :-)

Some game programmers I know did create a small game or two (or three
:-) at some points of their carreers, some of them didn't, I suspect.
Even those who did never explicitly focused on this AFAIK (that includes
me) - one just writes a small game now and then, often to demostrate
something, without thinking about it as a way to make yourself a better
programmer.

It's rather a byproduct of your getting a better programmer than a means
of getting to be a better programmer.  E.g. when I come up with a new
entity system, or a new way of passing messages throughout the game,
I'll write a program that's complete enough to prove that the idea is
useful in practice.  That program will often be a game, but it doesn't
have to be.  I never thought I would write games to prove I loved them.
It goes without saying for me that I like writing games.

No matter how I try I can see no or almost no correlation between this
and the programmer being good.

> > I guess you can do it both ways.
> 
> I suppose so... But, I would never hire someone as a game programmer who
> is not interested enough in the field to have written a game. Just as I
> would not hire a database programmer who had never written a database
> application. 

I gladly would, but it now occurs to me that we should make sure we're
talking about the same thing.

I'm coming from an A- or AAA-level mostly-PC title development.  Those
games are developed by rather big teams (which is unfortunate IMHO, I
might add) where everyone does only some part of the whole and the team
is "properly" managed (i.e. everybody works on-site, with a traditional
managerial structure in place).

In this environment, writing small games really seems to miss the point
because the most valuable thing you demostrate by this is the ability to
fulfill a goal and to self-manage yourself in order to do this.
However, goal-setting and management are supplied by managers and design
department during big title development.  Other than that, small games
don't really prove much by themselves.  They're just the basics, and
mostly a standard generic boiler-plate code.

So if someone told me he wrote 5 small games, I'm unimpressed at least
until I see the code.  Did the guy just copied over his mainloop all the
time?  Then too bad for him - even if he wrote 50 games this way you
don't need him for a 30-programmer, 3-year project.  However - did he
use those 5 games to develop a nice event-action translation library for
input handling that can load bindings from a text/XML file?  If so, then
that's much better.  But, in that case it doesn't matter that much
whether the programs he demostrated are games or tools or simulation
programs or whatever.

On the other hand, if small games development as such (e.g. for small,
handheld or mobile platforms, presumably Java-based) is what you have in
mind, then it's completely different.  For this you do need guys that
can manage themselves, that can work quickly and get things done.  The
emphasis on code quality is not very strong since everything ships in a
couple of months and then re-starts from the scratch.  For this, you
really don't need a guy who wrote a program demonstrating 15 different
3D pathfinders or a complete spherical harmonics lighting library
because only simple things are done.

So it depends on what exactly you want to do.

        latimerius


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