Sunday, April 13, 2008

Why game development?

Well, like I mentioned earlier, I have been thinking a lot about game development as a career. So this is what I think:
  1. Game developer needs to work a lot of overtime. In fact I read that quiet a few companies are exempted from overtime law if they hire developers for game development. I am not sure if it is true. General law says, a person who works 2-4 hours overtime should be paid 1.5 times the actual money, and twice after that. Anyway the point is that you work overtime a lot and the best part is that not even 1% of the community complains about it.
  2. You as a game developer gets to work on exciting projects all the time. As a mobile game developer , you get to learn a lot about writing optimized code, making the code portable otherwise port it somehow. I was informed by one of the devs from Javaground that they tend to port over 100 odd games every year and each game is ported onto at least different devices. That is like generating over 200,00 builds in 300 working days. And if my math is right, it is over 67 builds every day. That is amazing amount of "interesting work", not to forget the semi-annually releasing game-from-the-scratch of their own. Again, the best part is to have the honor of being involved in such an amazing work. As a normal developer, you would hardly be involved in 3-4 products in your lifetime as a developer. Be a mobile developer, you could be involved with so many different products all the time.
  3. After all my ranting about game devs writing optimized code all the time, there is a question - do I enjoy writing Employee e = new Employee(); or do I enjoy manipulating bytecode? Well, I am not sure about others, but I really enjoy working with hardware, I enjoy the fact that software is more closer to a person through a mobile device than through a PC(Of course, PC software is always great). So what is it different? Firstly, I am telling this based on my personal enthusiasm and I am very eager to be termed as Game Dev. Probably, if I miss the opportunity, I would be little disappointed(to say the least). Anyway, as a developer at Javaground, I imagine, I would be learning a lot of internals about JVM, about mobile phones, about ARM Processors and others, a lot about games. I was told that the entire team is amazing and it is for that reason that they come up with super-cool games (I just watched the demos)
Why should we hire you?
This was the question asked by the CTO of Javaground during the interview. I was not expecting such a question after a series of technical questions from different people. Anyway at that moment, I answered that I am a good programmer who plans his work well, who never misses deadlines and who is really good at translating requirements into working code. I guess, when I think over the question, even now I do not have a convincing answer, yet I know I make a good hire and a good team member.

So my wellwishers, who-so-ever is reading my blog between today and 25-April-2008, please pray that I get a good offer from Javaground, and if you are reading this after that day, then please pray for my success at whatever firm I am at.

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