A game developer is a person who creates the code, visualization, and concept of a game. He also chooses the means to implement the tasks. This profession is taught to people interested in computer science. There are many specialties in game development. In this article, we will look at the professions associated with game development, find out their pros and cons, and find out about the salary of such specialists.
Game development is a complex process that can involve one person or a large number of specialists. Each of them is responsible for a specific aspect. You must have programming skills for various platforms. You need to be able to solve non-standard tasks. The project should be different from others in its originality.
The benefits of gaming companies San Francisco are numerous.
Professional team
In “ordinary” IT companies that develop at least b2b or b2c software, the usual composition of the project team is approximate as manager (often he is also the product owner), analysts, testers, programmers, and UI designers.
There may be a hierarchy inside the programming department – architects, leading developers, but this is all within the framework of the structure indicated above. At the same time, the majority of the team are programmers. In-game projects, the situation is fundamentally different. Even though games grew out of purely programming teams (or rather, even from the hobby of single programmers), now, to make a game, it is necessary to involve a very diverse range of specialists. And for different games, they will be different specialists.
Of course, for a specific project, these positions can be combined, overlapped, or absent altogether, but on average, something like that for gaming companies in bay area. Even from this listing, it is clear that, firstly, programmers are far from the most numerous cohort in the team – on average 20% of the entire team, and secondly, and this is perhaps the main thing – the team consists of very mentally different people. They all need to work together, and this is very difficult. As a rule, they are all wonderful people, but they do not understand each other at all. Thus, communication problems are one of the main features of game teams.
Great cooperation of all members of the team
Communication problems are one of the main features of video game companies in the bay area.
There is no definite recipe for how to be. But general recommendations are as follows:
- Nothing can be done. One should not hope that everything is organized by itself, because people, de, are adequate each individually.
- The basis of the foundations is informal communication and horizontal communication. Methodologies like FDD (adapted), the concept of a “game feature” and its owner are very important possible ways, but the main thing to try to do is to provoke communication between different specialists by all available methods. These methods, not least of all, include the correct seating of people in the office, namely, people who must communicate with each other must sit next to each other. And it doesn’t matter if it turns out that the programmer sits closer to the artist than to another programmer.
- Formal methods. Their successful application can lead to the fact that they become unnecessary, but at first, they are required. These include meetings in which experts from different fields take part, status updates in the mail, and much more. Daily and weekly meetings of leads, spontaneous meetings of people working on one “feature” and so on.
Individual approach
Game is cool idea. This is what most developers dreamed of when they were kids playing Doom, or artists who played Far Cry and WoW. But it’s also sleepless nights, it crunches, it’s a weekend at work. And “voluntarily and with songs.” Crunch in the gaming industry is no exception, it is a rule. And nothing can be done about it – because of the very uncertainty of the result, which we talked about above. Let me give myself another quote: “If you think you can work 8 hours without crunches, you are in the wrong industry.” This rule does not always apply to other IT projects and other IT professionals.
Modern technologies of gaming companies bay area
The game is a complex technological product. In current realities, as a rule, it is client-server. If you’re lucky, it’s highly loaded. In other words, all these millions of triangles falling apart at home and hundreds of thousands of CCUs interacting with each other – this is all technologically very difficult task. Yes, and it all happens in real-time.
It’s no exaggeration to say that games are largely at the forefront of technology. This has a downside – they don’t like it here, and there is simply no possibility of using “high-level” techniques. Starting with fashionable programming languages (still the most popular programming language in the game industry – C ++), even ending with such things as using the standard library or specific algorithms and data structures.