I often get email from people looking to get their first job in the game industry asking me for advice. What are companies looking for in candidates for entry-level programming positions? How come it’s so difficult to land a job? I can’t answer for the industry as a whole, but I can certainly tell you what I am looking for when trying to fill an entry-level programmer position.
Book Review: Waltzing with Bears
Exactly a year ago today, I put up the first article on Games from Within. It was a review of Tom DeMarco’s book Slack. I thought it would make for a nice, symmetrical bookend to wrap the year up with a review for another book by DeMarco: Waltzing with Bears.
As the subtitle indicates, Waltzing with Bears deals with managing risk in software development projects. Managing risk, not reducing risk, or removing risk. Do you think that low risk or even no risk is a good thing? Think again. One of the central points of the book is that a project with no risk is not worth doing. Yes, you read that correctly. Intrigued? Go and read the book right now.
Exploring the C++ Unit Testing Framework Jungle
Update (Apr 2010): It’s been quite a few years since I originally did this comparison. Since then, Charles Nicholson and I created Unit Test++, a C/C++ unit-testing framework that addresses most of my requirements and wish-list items. It’s designed to be a light-weight, high-performance testing framework, particularly aimed at games and odd platforms with limited functionality. It’s definitely my framework of choice and I haven’t looked at new ones in several years because it fits my needs so well. I definitely encourage you to check it out.
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One of the topics I’ve been meaning to get to for quite a while is the applicability of test-driven development in games. Every time the topic comes up in conversations or mailing lists, everybody is always very curious about it and they immediately want to know more. I will get to that soon. I promise!
In the meanwhile I’m now in the situation that I need to choose a unit-testing framework to roll out for my team at work. So, before I get to talk about how to use test-driven development in games, or the value of unit testing, or anything like that, we dive deep into a detailed comparison of existing C++ unit-testing frameworks. Hang on tight. It’s going to be a long and bumpy ride with a plot twist at the end.
2004 GameTech Report: Game Tech Leadership Summit
The GameTech Leadership Summit was the second part of this year’s Game Tech Seminars. Underneath a somewhat confusing name, it really was an analysis of the tools and technology in games today.
The first day is where the real meat of this second part was. It was a postmortem/analysis of the tech involved in some of the most successful games today (Halo 2, Half Life 2, The Sims 2, and Stranger) done by the tech lead (or someone close to that position) for each of the teams. Each of the talks was packed with information and some of them are freely available online, so I’m not even going to try to summarize the talks. Instead, this is going to be more of a highlight of things that caught my eye or I thought were particularly important.
2004 GameTech Report: Creating Believable Characters
They say good things come in small packages. That was certainly true of this year’s Game Tech Seminars. It was a four-day intensive conference dealing with very specific topics (realistic characters and engine/tools technology) with a very impressive list of speakers. The best part though, was the attendees. There were only about 80 people total in the conference (due in no small part to the hefty price tag attached to the conference, I’m sure), and they were mostly tech leads or directors of technology of their companies. It was great to see lots of familiar faces, but also a lot of new ones I only knew through the Internet or not at all before. The great discussions following each session, or even over lunch or dinner were worth the price of admission alone.