Graduation Day

I’ve been working for the Kuju Group for a very long time now, pretty much since I graduated from university in different jobs around the company. But since the start of last year I’ve been the technical director at Headstrong which means I oversee technical choices, help out on documentation for pitching for new projects, advise teams when they’re addressing technical issues, liaise with programmers, get involved in the recruitment of new programmers, particularly the graduate side of things which I’m keen on, and generally just help out on coding when an extra pair of hands are needed. Pretty much anything I can turn my hand onto really, generally something to do with programming.

I think important things are enthusiasm, when you get to the panel interview stage feeling comfortable with yourself. In a technical sense C++, C++, C++. It’s the most important language for games developers and gives you a good basis for if you’re working on other platforms like iPhone or tools developing C #. If you’ve got solid skills in that and you’re confident in that then everything else will follow from that. At Headstrong we're happy to find a solid C++ programmer who fits well into our team and we can teach them about more specific areas.

I would say grasp this opportunity, it’s a great opportunity to make yourself stand out since there’s more and more graduates every year and when there’s someone with no previous experience it can be quite difficult to judge what they’ve done and how good they are, and because there are so many candidates you can’t interview them all. It gives a good pointer where you can look and see they’ve taken the opportunity, and just taking the opportunity itself shows initiative and enthusiasm for the industry.

It’s worth reiterating that point: it gives you a basis. Learning about game play, AI physics, and the different things that are involved is always a useful background to have, but things become so specific with certain developers, certain platforms, certain projects… C++ is the common denominator. Beyond that its good enthusiasm. Maths isn’t the be all and end all. If you’re good at maths we can use you, but providing you have a familiarity with it and you can go ‘Okay so I need to look this up on Google, I need to find this concept’ and be sufficiently aware of the issues involved in the mathematical calculations you’re trying to achieve, then there’s always someone around who can help with the hardcore details.

At this stage I don’t think having a specialism is critical. If there’s something that you go for then it’s worth exploring your skills in that area and if it’s something that you find you have a natural flair for then dive in and make that your 'thing'. We had a graduate recently who is graphics focused and that worked out well for him he's in a graphics-orientated role on the project he's working on. But it depends on the studio you go to. At Headstrong we have relatively small code teams so everyone is a little bit of a generalist and they develop a specialist area to support that and they can develop that over the years, so a good solid grounding in the fundamentals is the key thing.

I think again that will vary. At Headstrong I will throw you in the deep end but we will assign a mentor to guide you - give a lifebelt - who will guide you towards doing something productive as soon as possible. We might say 'Okay here’s your task', something that might take an experienced programmer half a day to do but it might take a fresh grad a week. At the end of that week you’ll have produced real functionality that contributes to the project and you’ll have learnt so much about the code base. I think that good graduates can become productive and useful pretty quickly and that's something that we encourage.

When looking at CVs and trying to judge them at graduate level, how good someone is, the academic qualifications factor into that and help give us a picture. However, if there are good demos that illustrate you’re enthusiasm then that can stand out more those academic qualifications because obviously the standards are rising every year, and if you’ve got several candidates with a good level of academic basis then the one with the cool demo is going to stand out. One thing I would say about the demo is make it relatively simple and make sure it's complete, so give it a menu and high score table, etc. Quite a few demos I see are someone attempting a much more ambitious project and they only get parts of it working, there are bugs and it lacks polish. However, if you’re trying to illustrate a particular technique then fine, you can drill down and approach that and not worry about having the rest of a game around it, it can just be a technical demonstration of your abilities.

I would quite happily look at people from both courses. Computer science degrees can give people a more theoretical grounding which doesn’t directly relate into development but you do find it improves the way they think about the processes and the way they do things and develop code and design ideas and issues. Whereas games courses can give you a more broad grounding in specific techniques that what are obviously important, but aren’t critical in our opinion, the foundations (object-oriented design, an understanding of the fundamental algorithms, etc.) and strong C++ are key, other studios may take a different view on that. The important thing is to do some research and find the good courses, see if you can talk to some of the students on it. Perhaps contact studios and ask them what courses they’re graduates have been on because there is a lot of variety. Some of them teach quite different things from the others and it’s worth doing a lot of research to make that right choice because obviously it could have a big impact on the start of your career. You can always overcome it, but it’s a good start.

Well I’ve been in the industry a few years now. Back when I graduated from university there were no games programming courses and I hadn’t really thought about it as a career. I just walked into the careers office in the final year and recognised a company there that advertised as one that had produced games that I had played before. I applied, got the job and the rest is history. Obviously now people are much more aware of it and there are games programming courses and the industry has grown and has a much higher profile. In my experience it’ll probably be much different for someone else. It’s always something you can move into relatively late on if you’ve started on a general computer science path and develop the desire to move into games.