Any game programmers at Anand?

[you2]

I fell in to the second group; did extensive rewrites of multiple mud engines and had a so-so gui for creation of objects on-line. Was fun but was also a different age. Used to do pacman type games in college.

If modding counts, I've created a few addons for WoW.

I was in a group that designed and coded a MUD back in college.

 

[brandonb]

I worked at a game development company during the late 90s.

I wanted to be hired as a developer (and applied as that). I showed them programming demos, etc etc etc. Once I started, they forced me to make missions. I left the company shortly after because it seemed like they did not want me to be a developer. All they had were developers and artists, and nobody to create content. I remember having a talk with the owner and I remember him saying : "We really want you to have it in your heart to create missions, not as an after thought, because if you do not have it in your heart to do this, then the quality will not be there... I want you to think about it and get back to me." I immediately responded saying "I do not have it in my heart to create missions, I want to be a developer." And that was pretty much it. Mutual decision to leave.

I would have probably stayed except that all their future projects were clones of games that had already failed, and they did not interest me much and would have little interest writing missions for those games. Now the company is defunct and has been for years. Was a good move probably in the end.

Not to mention the pay was horrendous.

 

[Ross Ridge]

I can only think of 1, Blizzard. Who's the other 2?

Lets see, Activision Blizzard, Valve and Electronic Arts (The Sims) would be the three biggest publishers in the PC space, but all the big publishers produce profitable PC games. There's also all the MMORPG companies making tons of cash on the PC, like Turbine, CCP, NCSoft and even Sony. I suppose you can count the hotest of all gaming companies right now as well, Zynga.

In any case, game programmers and the vast majority of people who work on games have little or no input into the platforms they develop for. Those decisions are made by a small handful of executives and game designers. The average game programmer is certainly not choosing to "go where the money is". He could make a lot more money applying his skills in any other industry.

 

[you2]

Where does that leave Bethesda; #4 ?

 

[Aikouka]

I fell in to the second group; did extensive rewrites of multiple mud engines and had a so-so gui for creation of objects on-line. Was fun but was also a different age. Used to do pacman type games in college.

I worked with a team on a tetris clone project while in college, and it was actually pretty fun. It was definitely different getting away from the usual event-driven command-line or GUI application into a cyclic game. Later on, I made a networked version of othello/reversi complete with server software. I think the fun part about that was trying to flesh out the message structure and writing the networking portion. It was in Java, so it wasn't terribly complicated, but I've actually used similar programming paradigms/concepts in other pieces of software.

I had something similar happen at my last job. I was learning VBScript, and as silly as it sounds... I wrote a scripting language in VBScript . I used a lot of the helper functions that I wrote while learning that in other scripts later on to help parse things like log files, etc. It kind feels good when you get a bit of reuse out of things .

Agreed, and that trend is inevitable as well, imo. What will suffer will be the ability to utilize higher end hardware to produce truly outstanding environments, visually and otherwise. That kind of work will go on in the commercial simulation world, but not as much for games. It's pretty amazing/saddening when you think that the primary platform competitor for the gaming PC now is really considered to be the XBox, which is what? Six years old now? Six year-old graphics hardware.

I think certain developers are starting to realize this and try and provide a better experience. id Tech 5's megatextures seems to be capable of providing a far better experience depending on your platform's capabilities, which is a good path to head down. UE4 certainly had a "pretty" demo, but I don't believe any of those fancy effects will be seen on the current crop of consoles (or the WiiU). A PC today would probably have issues performing some of them as well!

As for defense work, I looked at getting into that but the company I was looking at decided to hire all their interns instead. I guess they work cheaper than I do. I also heard from someone inside the military that with all the budget cuts that it is not as stable as it once was. Although still better than working for a gaming company.

Defense can be a mixed bag. Let me say... if you hear the term "Nunn-McCurdy" being thrown around, start looking for a new job or position within your current company. That doesn't mean your program will get canned, but it means congress noticed that the DoD has gone way over their proposed budget for your program and it's gained a lot of bad press .

As for them hiring interns, if they did that, then chances are the work would have been pretty menial and/or very low level. So unless you were just out of college, it may not have been for you anyway. Another thing you want to look for is to find a position... even an entry-level position... that requires a security clearance. Most of them don't require that you currently have one, but are capable of getting one. Chances are they won't waste the money/time on an intern getting a clearance... it simply takes too long in most cases. Another nice thing is that an active security clearance looks great on a resume if you're applying for defense jobs.