Comment by SoftwareMaven | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SoftwareMaven | Hacker News Reader

My two experiences in the gaming industry taught me to stay away. The first was as I finished up my college degree, building the PC version of "Space Jam", the game (oh, boy, was that a fun one). The second was last year working on League of Legends (awesome game if you like PVP!).

In both cases, it was very apparent that the industry is built around taking advantage of peoples' passions and love of gaming. Pay is low, hours are ridiculous, and respect is sadly missing. People put their heart and soul into what they are building and get tossed with little to no thought whatsoever.

If you are absolutely passionate about working in the game industry, I say go for it. But go in with eyes wide open: it is a tough place to be.

It is more entertainment industry than software industry, and, just like most other entertainment industry groups have guilds/unions to protect their interests (screen actors guild, screen writers guild, etc), there probably ought to be a computer programmers guild as well.

League of Legends is a fun game - it's the only reason I still have a windows install. Good job on making the game awesome.

I wish I could take credit (I wasn't on the game engine but rather the matchmaking/store/chatting part), but I was working with some real geniuses there (technical and creative).

Still, by far and away the most interesting Java project I've ever worked on. I'd never heard of so many enterprisey technologies around a game before (unfortunately, I don't know what would be covered under my NDA, so I probably can't say much more than that :).

So you are the one to blame if I get matched up with noobs and leavers in a game ;)?

PS. I loved the space jam game when I was kid!

That bit of code was, umm, complex. The foundation was written before I started on the project and left to the original writers to maintain. I can promise you this: there were more conversations about (and really, more time spent on) how to handle match making than any other topic. The whole company was absolutely passionate about trying to make sure people got matched well (how well they succeeded, I can't answer :).

I'm glad you liked Space Jam. I was really disappointed that the game turned out so basic. Some of the original ideas were much more interesting, but I guess they figured they wouldn't market as well to the target demographic (don't ask me what they were; it was a long time ago).

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