Stardock is looking for developers and artists to work on our upcoming games ranging from the fantasy strategy game, an RPG, an MMORTS, and of course future versions of GalCiv.
So what do you need to do to work at Stardock?
Here is the check list:
If you think you or someone you know may fit this basic criteria, send us your resume. bwardell@stardock.com and jobs@stardock.com should do the trick.
Also, no interns, co-ops, etc. We're looking for people who are ready to get into making cool stuff right now and stay at it until the game is done.
A few other things about Stardock:
I find the almost same holds true in business application development, but this time with c#/vb in comparison to java.
I still find the eg java swing library a bit sluggish in performance when it come to gui design.
Basically a client/server .net solution is mostly preferred, since most target clients run Windows.The database server may vary, but who cares
And implementing the wpf foundation into .net, I find it a really promising and powerful new GUI technology. But it needs more time. Plus I am in love with LINQ and lambda expressions
And another big factor to me is the far superior Visual Studio IDE, which I find the most advanced on market, it simply makes coding pure fun
Btw ,Cari
what do you think about the first games coming out soon completely written in managed code?
Would you even consider managed code in a future project, lets say in about 5-10 years?
The performance aspect comes instantly to mind, but those folks claim they are almost en par with unmanaged code.
I couldn't really believe that, when I read about it
Do you see a managed game future?
Cool thing is I just need to get my Bachalor Degree in CS at Western Michigan and I'll be there to work for ya... but I am taking a year off to work full time to get more money... and then back to school for me. Ya so hopefully things work out.
Sounds to me like the USA wants too much from it's workers. A doctor may work 50+ hours a week for a massive salary but for a general office/retail woker roles.... 37.5 hrs is enough time out of anyones life to commit to work. Don't forget that you will work for 3/4 of your life or thereabouts..how is that right?
The Europeans value free time to spend on this earth doing what you want i.e. gaming, family etc which I think is only right considering you only live once depending on your religous viewpoint, I can't recall my previous life anyway
In Toronto Canada, if you work 40 hours a week it is consider full time, and anything over that is consider to be overtime by law.
I disagree with those who says that 40 hours are little. In America, people live to work, in Eurpose and other places, people work to live. That is a huge differences. I was born in Hong Kong, and they work like dogs over there, some people work an average of 14 hours everyday. But there is this misconception that if by increasing the number of working hours, then productivity increases. See there are place in Europe that works much less that can have the same amount of productivity. So the relationship between working hours and productivity is not a linear relation, rather it can be an inverse relationship at certain point. Besides in Hong Kong, they did a survey, hong kong people are so overworked they have the least amount of sex amongst industralized coutries/states. They dd a survey in place like Shang Hai too and the result is virtually the same.
I'll reserve judgement on those games when I see how they perform vs. their complexity.
Whether the industry converts to mostly managed code will depend on if ( a ) the managed code provides a benefit that outweighs the need for performance (on a per game basis) or ( b ) if hardware makes it such that there is no discernable difference between managed and non-managed code.
I don't really have anything against managed code other than it's slower and that programmers who mainly use managed code tend to become poor coders in unmanaged languages. Any good C++ developer can master Java, but a Java programmer will have to overcome bad habits to become a C++ developer (and learn what a pointer is).
There would have to be a significant benefit to switching to managed code because all of our codebase uses unmanaged C++, so switching to say C# would mean completely re-writing our libraries, which would be a huge expense and throw away all the benefit of having a codebase that has stood the test of time.
It makes a lot more sense when you start getting into developing software to run on multiple threads, especially when there are a lot of available processors.
Because when you look at how threads and processes communicate, you see that things get complicated quickly: Mutexes, semaphores, shared memory, signals, sockets, etc.
. . . and then you realize most of the "solutions" to threaded communication are over engineered, and all you really need is message passing between objects. Erlang and Smalltalk use message passing extensively.
You may be interested in an interview with Dan Ingalls on the FLOSS Weekly podcast. He's one of the pioneers of OOP, a co-founder of Smalltalk, and the inventor of BitBlt algorithm. He was a huge influence on early OOP development, and I hate to say it, but your teacher was probably right: What we have today isn't actually what the original visionaries thought OOP should be.
Problem is, my ideas tend to be a bit too ambhitious - I want to create something big, then some time down the road realize I'd need a small army to finish it.
. . . and sometimes I don't have any good ideas at all . Writer's block you might say.
Sometimes, there's a feature that needs a disproportionate anount of work compared to everything else. Networking, especially. In the early days, it was easy to establish a connection. Today, it's difficult because of firewalls and routers everywhere. I tried a game I had made earlier and found out my ISP was blocking incoming packets. Now I have to try to figure out how to "punch" through it and get the game working again. Joy.
In any case, C++ is still the most powerful language out there, period. I've looked at other languages, but I always seem to always get stuck at some stupid incomplete API, which means writing a C++ wrapper anyways.
Crunchtime is a sign of bad management. Don't tell the managers I said that.
The thing is, when it comes to gaming industry - its very popular on the job market, probably because lots of people think making games is all fun and play, but also because it probably offers the largest amount of oportunity to be creative at work when it comes to working with computers. And also, I think you have a lot of people who are very passionate about making games. And I mean, very passionate. And when you are passionate about your work, its easy to fit into a description of a "workaholic". Hell, I know when I am not at my computer making stuff, sometimes I keep thinking about "how that spaceship could benefit from less metalic skin and more hard tissue jutting here and there and blah blah...", and that's my hobby. Like, casual - and I still sometimes spend a whole day at it. So I can at least imagine how people can keep at it for weeks on end when its their job.
However, does that mean that the "super-passionate" game makers set the benchmark for the rest of the mortal world? That because "passion for making games" is defined by their example, anyone who likes to kick back from time to time and, I don't know, read a book or go fishing - is suddenly "not passionate"?
I don't know. Maybe its just the nature of the industry. Though I would agree with Elias001 when he says that productivity can be adversely affected if people are overworked, passion or no. There is such a thing as "burnout"... if you keep yourself going full throttle all the time, it does not necessarily mean you are going to get to the finish line ahead of everyone else or if you do that your proverbial car is going to be driveable. Lots of companies make games, but few of them make good ones. Maybe because of the lack of talent or inspiration, but perhaps also - at least to a degree - because game making, be it inventive programming or inspired design, requires a somewhat artistic approach; which is always at odds with the cold and harsh reality of surviving in an unforgiving market.
Gone are the times when two dudes in a garage would make a killer game. They used to do it for fun and therefore at their own pace. Nowadays all too often profit comes first (everyone wants to eat [and drive Ferrari's] after all) and that changes the whole nature of the game - excuse the pun.
Someone's never heard horror stories from EA workers or their friends.
Anyway, I love smaller companies that are closer to their consumers. EA likes to make a game, patch it 3-4 times, and be done. I'd consider the job if I had advanced modeling skills and wasn't 19 in college....I may take some programming or modeling classes for my own enjoyment during college to have another set of skills to pull from.
Want some sources?
Ti/99-4A (extended basic stuff; HoneyBees! & Chexx being just two VEEEEEERRRRRY old attempts at some personal freeware)
PC (Psyclon, basic again and a few Pascal routines i could never compile how i really wanted)
And, bazillions of co-authored lines somewhere around the realm of the 1987 final flop in my carreer hopes; went on to sell lumber in a Renovation center. Still in debt for that 'Analyst level course' though.
Meaning, i'm waaayyy too old for this programming job. But i can mod (using GDI and precious lead pens, that is!) - with some community help.
Winter is comin'... anyway.
Get real... Delphi has an edge so slim, it makes me wonder if we ever going to get out of OOP candidates in one piece. Long gone are the days of declaration blocks or managed libraries tied with some weird non-MS-OS'es.
If i recall correctly, convoluted assets (or specific resources, btw) ganged up in pre-set routines. Don't start me on Apple Juice and offshooting foreign devices.
My point is that even if some genius high-level gear would replace C (and all following generations of IT), one would still have to jmp off a registry somewhere along the buggy highway of fixed binary asm calls. And, don't even think about mentioning Linux either.
It's not about the Language used or not - more of an efficiency limit. Even, C# has that.
Hegemony notwithstanding.
Opinions of the many integrated.
To me, the solutions are INTO the mind. And how much of it we get to allow competing against we all know who or why.
Bends over and kneels before the obvious essential.
ART is a three letter word. Mastering it takes a lifetime of commitment as my teacher at FAS in Connecticut wrote to me as a final good luck note when i got my degree.
Lots of interesting discussions in this thread.
I'm actually searching for work right now, but I'm probably not what Stardock is looking for. I'm actually in a similar situation to Lost_WLD as far as programming goes; I've got my copy of C++ For Dummies which I've been banging my head against for months, but somehow it's just not sinking in. I'm beginning to think it's the book's fault, because I know I'm capable of understanding programming. I did some Visual Basic in high school, programmed a text game on my graphing calculator on the days I stayed awake in math class, and I once modified someone's kixtart scripts without any knowledge of the language (or scripting in general), and managed to add a feature the original developer didn't think was possible. I don't think "problem solving" is my problem.
Maybe I should try reading the book backwards? It seems to take a highly analytical approach, starting with the small details and working its way up (which probably works really well for the sort of person that usually takes up programming), but I'm more of a big-picture learner. I need to understand the higher concepts before I get into the details.
hmm... Gets along well with others...
I'm screwed. lolz.I'll just sit here in wonderful Socialist state of California playing with my Zippo for 7DS.70hr/wk... HAHAHA try putting in 96hr/wk like my cousin in NY. Worse, try being a teacher working from 7am-3pm with 30 min lunch and putting in hours from 3pm to 6pm for administrative functions -for a glorious $34k, union bs, and disrespectful tykes. As a principal asked a group of us starting our student teaching at his school, "What attracted you to teaching; the low pay or lack of respect?"
"Game programming sounds so much funner [more fun][,] but its [it's]just the job security and a part of me thinks once I start programming games all day I will hate gaming."
/grammarbot overload/syntax error/ lolz"If you do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life." -anonymous proctologist.
"A man can get used to anything if money's involved." -probably quoted from the above proctologist or a politician.
The thing is, starting to work on a game is a different thing from completing it in its entirety. If you can realise an idea in code, and then show how you would fill it out if you had the resources, and how you would overcome some of the problems, and how it could be worked on as a team project, then you have a better undrstanding than someone who hasn't taken that step. Obviously it would be nice to have a completed game on your resume, but a working idea is better than nothing.
Also, if you can find someone like-minded to work with, an impossible project isn't quite so daunting.
. . . or it would be if all languages had similar libraries. Problem is, I've encountered many languages that are great for writing software in, only to get stuck when trying to connect it to the OS, hardware, or software written in a different language. Way too many languages focus so much on being "pure" somehow that they can barely communicate with the environment they live in.
Thanks for the advice. I'll take another look at my previous ideas.
When you are talking about working 40-45 hour weeks as average in the US are you including lunch breaks in that?
I'm contracted to do 37 hour weeks, but obviously I take lunch breaks in my own time and I always do a little more but to do 45 hour weeks every week not including lunch breaks, travel time, making dinner in the evenings, house work when would I ever have any time to game? seriously ^^
I'd blame free-market & human ingenuity for this. Not that, the best (or latest gimmicks) can't ever be outwit for the good of all.
I really miss the days of good'ol Borland's Pascal when slick coding mattered rather than the latest Intel (etc) invention(s). If someone were to define a coherent approach to an entirely independant soft processing from hard support (and vice-versa, if that's any possible - one may or can always dream aloud), i know of a few many people who'd jump into the innovative rush -- if only, to blast false conceptions of proper design where it belongs; the past.
What is common understanding today, may be just be perceived as a terrible flaw in any given future. It's just like economic inflation - there HAS to be a rational limit, somehow.
Blast that. We touched a little bit on coding during Mathematics BSc but nothing hardcore and it wasn't even C or VS!
Anyway, i hope that RPG is the steampunk we were dreaming about, wink wink!
As I was telling people at Dragon*Con over Labor Day weekend, it's ok to have big ideas, just start with something manageable, like the first level of a game, and make that level feature complete. But before you start that level, break it down into smaller pieces and determine what HAS to go in and what you would LIKE to get in if you have time, can do it, etc.
No. I actually encourage the other developers to make sure that they try to go home on time when we're not in a crunch period. We are all workaholics, though, and we all have a very high degree of professional pride in our work, and since our work is more like a hobby, it can make it hard for us to leave. "I've ALMOST got this working!" is a constant refrain around here when someone is working late. Passion does not need to equate with workaholism, and that's not what I was implying.
Let's say I have two applications for an entry level game developer position, both applicants fresh out of college, each with a BS in Computer Science. Let's say that neither of their schools offered game design/game programming classes. One of them made games in his spare time and made a game for his senior project. The other talks about how much he loves games and how much he wants to make them and how many great ideas he has for games, but he's never actually tried to make a game, never gotten a book on DirectX or OpenGL, etc. and he made a website or something like that for his senior project. Applicant #2 is probably not going to even get an interview, even if he got better grades than Applicant #1. Why? Because Applicant #1 is obviously a self-starter, driven, and probably will need less direction than Applicant #2.
Now, if I have two applicants who both have game projects listed, that makes the choice harder for me. Applicants need to do everything that they can to make their application stand out above all the rest in the game industry because there is that much competition to get in, particularly at the entry level. If you want to make games and you can't find someone to hire you (even if you're willing to move), don't let that stop you from making games. Enter the Independent Games Festival and other contests. Submit your games to us to try and get them on Impulse. Submit to XBox Live or Garage games. You will learn so much more in making a game than you will in any college class, and having a resume with 2-3 really good games on them (even if they're casual) puts you ahead of other people.
I didn't find it very helpful either when I was in high school trying to pick up C++ on my own. I liked the book that we had in college by Deitel and Deitel, and some of my friends liked C++ in 24 hours or C++ in 21 days.
Hyeah, I know that one... "I've allmost got this working..." Next thing you know its 5AM.
Anyway, I can definitely understand why hands-on experience is preferred. Although my main area of interest is game art and design and not programming, I can say that since I started serious modding I learned a whole lot more about game-specific stuff than I knew before. It's way easier to make cool visuals when you don't have to worry about polygon counts, texture sizes, particle density...
One other possible venue for those enthusiastic to get into the game industry is - modding. Particularly for those not gravitating towards actual coding but other areas such as game art, level design etc. since you get a finished high-quality engine to work with and you can let loose and show off your mad skillz. I know of several cases of skilled modders turning developer and it seems that, as people take modding more and more seriously, that trend is on the rise.
Is Demigod the MMORTS mentioned in the ad?
The position does sound very tempting but the requirement for relo to Plymouth (which is completely understandable) is not currently appealing. I live around South Bend, Indiana.
I do worry that the last 3 years of C# development have ruined my C/C++ abilities and was very interested to see Cari's response to the questions about managed code and games. I'm currently trying to set aside more time to pursue my own hobby games in C# and XNA (since that is what I am now used to). Unfortunately, as another poster mentioned, game ideas tend to oustrip the time and resources available to an individual.
No, that'd be Society, which is currently on hiatus until we have the manpower and resources to do it justice.
Back when I studied computer science, the book to get was A Book on C, by Kelley and Pohl. For some reason it didn't seem to help back then but these days it's a handy resource to have at arm's reach, for C coding anyway. I think that when I found a practical use for C coding it was easier to get into.
Back when I was messing about with mouse support and windows-like interface (when Windows 3.11 was all the latest hype) in Pascal programming, I didn't read books. Pah! You just went in, cracked it open like a piñata and had fun.
Then a few years later came college, and C++ and I broke my proverbial fingers trying to pull the same thing there.
Kinda miss the old days when all you needed is an inquisitive mind and the built-in help file.
What does Stardock use in terms of an SDM? XP?
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:
Sign in or Create Account
