Question: Do you guys value experience with things like openGL and directX? If you do, what is the best way to demonstrate that you have said experience?
Mark: Yes. Build some kind of a little graphics engine. If you build it in C++ and you talk to DirectX or you talk to OpenGL and you have a little 3D demo where you solve some typical 3D problems - cameras and translations and all this kind of stuff - that’s very good. It’s a real good idea to build a game demo to get into the game industry. This is outside of class. This is not an assignment. This is something you did on your own with maybe a couple of buddies or something like that. It doesn’t have to be sophisticated or complicated, just fun to play and it has to be self contained and complete. Be sure to finish it, that’s important.
One of the mistakes people make is sometimes they’ll build a demo in 2D, which is not in and of itself bad, because it’s still a game and it’s still fun and so on and so forth, but we live in a 3d world in my industry, and you cannot demonstrate 3d building in a 2d game. What you’re talking about is really good because you would build a 3d demo and it really does not have to be a sophisticated thing. I’m trying to emphasize that you do the 3d stuff, it’s clear that it’s 3d, and it’s clear that it works.
We went to Devry the other day and we were judges in a senior project competition thing. They put us in a room with two projects and one of them was built on top of Unity engine? I think there is a system called Unity that they built there game on top of. It was all Javascript and it was kind of cool, it did a lot of different things. However they didn’t write the code themselves, they just wrote the Javascript. It was a fairly sophisticated 3d flying game. At the other end of the room were these guys that built this sort of thing that was based on Cooking Momma. Have you guys have heard of that game? It really took off as a cooking game. Anyway, the guy built the 3D engine from scratch. It was very simple, but we knew that he understood the concepts by talking to him afterwards and by looking at what he had done. So as far as technical achievement goes, we certainly graded this simplistic cooking game engine much higher then the built on top of unity engine because of that 3d aspect.
Question: Is a demo required when applying to Rainbow Studios?
Mark: Recommended yes. Required no. But we definitely want to see what you can do under your own initiative.
When I evaluate my people, one of the things I look for, is what I call, initiative and ownership, a combination of those two things. That means you can step up and do something that people are maybe not doing or don’t have time to do and you can finish it – see it all the way to the end. Building a demo on your own - your own idea and maybe your own 3D engine - is a great way of showing initiative. If you finish it, it shows the ownership and the drive to take it all the way to the end.
Most management folks or most leads don’t have time to baby-sit people. They want people to take a task, finish a task, and say “what do you want me to do next” or even “I see this is broken or this needs work”. OK, then go ahead and do that. So, I think it’s really important to have a demo. If it’s 3D it’s even better.
Question: Does it absolutely have to be 3D? Because me and my team are in the process of developing an iPhone application that is basically going to be XBox live mobile and PS3 mobile. Basically it’s your dashboard on your phone so that you can connect with all of your friends and can see all of the games they’re playing, etc.
Mark: That’s very cool. I think that’s an awesome idea that’s not 3D. So, what you’ll have to do is make sure you study because people are going to ask you 3D questions whether your demo is 3D or not. So for you to understand the principles is important. For you to build this thing is really neat also. So no it doesn’t have to be a 3D demo, but a 3D demo shows that you know what you’re doing because there it is on the screen. It’s just a little bit harder for you to prove it when you don’t do the 3D demo.
Question: I was wondering if you guys are still hiring for your internship program?
Mark: The internship applications are closed. We have like 50 applicants and we’re trying to plow through them and figure out who we’re going to interview. We’ve sent out a number of tests so far and we’re doing the grading.
How many of you guys know Asheesh? I work with him a lot on his game programming. I speak in his classes and I’m going to talk with him after this about what we can do to help aim people at classes that will help them learn the stuff that we need them to learn for them to get into the industry. We’re not unique in this kind of stuff – C, C++ and 3D math is what you need to know. You go to any game studio and they’re going to tell you that. So, even if we don’t hire or we don’t have open positions, if you learn that stuff that will give you a chance at some other studio (and there are a ton of game studios).
So to answer your question, right now no, but check back because we honestly have a hard time predicting what our needs are going to be from moment to moment. Projects start up, things shuffle around, something happens at corporate. Whatever, there is just a lot of stuff that goes on.
Question: Do you have any need for more hardware oriented people than software programmers?
Mark: If the hardware person is the person who likes to get down in the guts of a machine like the PS3 or the Xbox 360 and do, essentially, software optimizations that take best advantage of the hardware, than yes. Now I know you have parallelization classes and embedded systems classes and that kind of stuff - that stuff is valuable. If you understand parallel processing and you can show how to optimize code so that it works best on multiple processors, that’s very valuable. That’s kind of a cross over between hardware and software. That’s as close we get.
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