The world of mobile games development
Mobile game programmer
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Name: Luke Bond |
Describe your job and what you do.
My job is basically to implement the game as per the game design. This involves taking artwork from the artist and implementing it in the game following the design decisions made by the designer. I work in the studio department, which means I pretty much develop the entire game from start to finish, for generally around five lead handsets; the game then goes into QA and the porting team begin porting it to a myriad of handsets.
What do you like about your job?
Programming roles vary vastly across the IT industry, from corporate financial and business roles to even military software development. To me, game programming is both fun and innocuous, and in that respect is set apart from other programming roles I could have gone into (and have done in the past) in the IT industry. While it’s true that you’re always ‘working for the man’ unless you are self-employed, it somehow feels less like this in the games industry.
What do you dislike about your job?
The short timelines of mobile games (compared to console or PC games) means that the project is always moving at a brisk pace and there’s not much time to rest until the project is over. Although I don’t do much overtime (usually only a bit at the end if the project is running late), the time constraints often mean cutting corners and you rarely get the time to spend on research and good design at the start of a project. This varies from title to title.
In your opinion, are jobs in the computer games industry easy/difficult to come by?
That depends on the prospective employee. Provided you are talented and skilled enough, people who really want a job in the games industry generally get one because they are determined, and put in the hard work to get their first games job. Once you have one, it’s a lot easier to get another, of course.
I firmly believe that you won’t fall into a games job just because you’ve done a course where you were taught game development. These students are becoming more numerous, so to get a job you need to be good, and you need to stand out.
What are your longer term career goals? Where do you see yourself in five, and ten years?
I’ve decided to continue my career in London so that I could travel while I’m working—Europe is so close from here that it makes it so much easier to travel to another country for a short time than it is from Australia. I see myself staying here for a while and doing plenty of travelling and most likely settling down back in Australia someday.
Hopefully I’ll move up to a Lead Programmer role here in this time, or perhaps get a job working on the Nintendo DS or the Wii, elsewhere. But my main reason for being here is to travel.
A day in the life
9 am
On arrival I’ll check my email and grab a coffee. I might look at a few games news sites and check out some game trailers.
9.30 am
Today I have an AI system to develop. So I spend a bit of time reading some game design books and websites and considering the various methods of solving the problem at hand, before I can sit down and design my solution.
11 am
I’ve been given some updated sprites to put into the game. We recently changed direction a little with the artistic style and revised artwork has been put into the game regularly over the past week or so.
Midday
Lunchtime
1 pm
I continue my research in preparation for designing the AI system. Currently I’m looking into hierarchical goal-orientated planning systems. They may prove too complex for mobile, but it’s good background material.
2 pm
We had a studio meeting today about various internal programming team issues, such as coding standards and the internal application framework for our games.
3 pm
Another meeting, this time for the project I’m working on. We have a weekly meeting where the producer, designer, artists and myself, the programmer, get together and discuss what we’ve done for the past week and what we’ll be doing in the coming week.
4 pm
The meeting raised a few issues that I needed to fix. Just some minor changes and bugs. I spend about an hour on these.
5 pm
Back to my AI design. I’ve just about figured out what I’m going to do, so I spend a bit of time making some notes for an early design of it before heading home at about 5.30.