Welcome to Incremental Social! Learn more about this project here!
Check out lemmyverse to find more communities to join from here!

SurvivalMariner

@SurvivalMariner@lemm.ee

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

Is there any demand left for 'game systems developers'? As in, people knowledgeable on Win32 or POSIX API, PE/ELF, Compilers and Interpreters, etc, when it concerns games exclusively? (+UNIX engine?)

I don't think my knowledge is complete about Windows side of things (PE and Win32 API, MASM, VC++ etc) so I never dared apply for such jobs. But I have never seen one either. I think it theoretically should exist. The systems side of gaming, especially developing a portable framework, developing retargetable, optimizing...

SurvivalMariner , (edited )

I'll be honest, and sorry in advance, but it'll help you more. Your cynicism is probably the thing getting in the way. I understand it's rough and not fun, but you've got to avoid it grinding you down.

You need to give yourself reasons to stand out. Making a half baked unfinished engine that no one uses isn't as impresive as improving an existing one that people use. Greenfield projects are rare and you probably not going to get that as a first role. So you need to prove to employers you can take legacy code, learn it, understand it, improve it and get it live. Demonstrating you have the capability to do that on a FOSS project demonstrates you may be able to do that on an in-house engine. You also learn from the code others write. Why did they do it this way? Is it better? What are the pros and cons? Degrees differentiate, yes, but a green person out of uni vs someone who has proven they can do a similar job, you have an advantage. Plus, 5 PRS is probably easier than a new engine. Making one from scratch cannot hurt, but it doesn't prove everything they need to know. Businesses hire because they have a problem and need someone competent to solve that problem. Tick those boxes and remove the risk and you have reasonable chances.

If you only demonstrate you're not comfortable going out of your comfort zone and getting your hands dirty, you are not helping yourself.

So give them reasons to hire you, give yourself a chance, and keep applying. Give yourself a 2% chance, apply to 50 jobs, give yourself a 10% chance, apply for 10, but always go over the odds.

Remember, industry is rough right now. A lot of experienced proven folk got let go in last year. Might need to improve your odds and bide your time.

SurvivalMariner ,

Unreal Engine. I've been enjoying learning it and building it. It's powerful and so far has solved every problem I've had without much pain.

EDIT: Fake screenshot about some facts from the Palworld development, very loosely based on a really interesting blog post from the dev that's linked in the post body. (programming.dev)

UPDATE: So, apparently it's mostly fake, taken from this article [translation] (where they even mention some kind of VCS)....

SurvivalMariner ,

Project zomboid had to start again after flat got burgled and laptop gone. Offsite backups are key for theft and fire. Version control is the easiest and cheapest way.

Someone always knows someone that drinks, smokes and eats crap and lives until mid 90s. Doesn't mean it's good health advice.

Beware anecdotal evidence.

SurvivalMariner ,

Even legacy codebases get migrated easy. SVN etc. belongs in a museum. Best red flag for dead end dev job.

SurvivalMariner ,

Where you are... I've never seen an example of this yet in the UK.

SurvivalMariner ,

Games industry is mostly binary files. Especially in Unreal. Perforce is popular from what I've heard from those in the field.

SurvivalMariner ,

It's an indie. Indies just piece stuff together based on the experience of their devs.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • random
  • incremental_games
  • meta
  • All magazines
    •