game programmer portfolio [closed]_问答_开发者

Closed. This question is opinion-based. It is not currently accepting answers.

Want to improve this question? Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by editing this post.

Closed 3 years ago.

Improve this question

i want to work as a programmer in a game modification team. Most teams require a portfolio to show.

I haven't any previous experience with game programming and I would like to know what I should program and include in t开发者_如何学运维he portfolio

Thank you

I'd seriously consider writing one or more small, simple games yourself before embarking on joining an established team. You'll learn a lot about yourself and the technologies involved in games development, and you'll be putting together your own portfolio as you progress. You may find that you'll be in over your head if you join the mod team directly, especially if you have no experience at all. If the team is modding a particular game like Half Life or Unreal, then I'd use the time to get familiar with those tools - using the assets which are already there will give you a useful jump start.

Your games needn't be complex or graphically rich. Concentrate on ideas and simple execution. It's too easy to get bogged down with detail, especially if you're trying to impress. How about a simple puzzle game? Or tacking on flight simulator style controls to cruise around an FPS level? :)

Best of luck!

A portfolio should present what you consider to be your best work in various categories. For a programming portfolio, you don't necessarily need to put exclusively games in it, even if you're looking to join a game development team.

For a portfolio that you want to present to a game development group, my suggestion would be to break down the different aspects of what makes up a game and include completed and polished programs that highlight certain aspects.

Suppose you break down the game development pipeline and come up with the following list which shows the skills you want to highlight:

3D Graphics
Physics
Human Interaction (Gameplay and UI)
Artificial Intelligence

Take a project for each category and make that aspect shine! Make each one interesting for the end user. Having different programs highlighting different skills shows that you are multidimensional - you're not just a one-trick pony.

Now, there's one more thing a portfolio should do, and that's highlight you! The small projects highlight your skills, but usually it's good to include one major project that shows many skills and, more importantly, your personality. This should be something you're proud of making, and something that you're excited and passionate talking about. Passion is contagious! When you show passion about something, people can't help but take interest.

Hope this helps.

Program anything you think you could do well. A portfolio is not as much about quantity as it's about quality.

It's been a few years since I interviewed with game companies so some things could have changed, but here are some notes from my experience:

If you are in college, try to get into summer internships with game companies. Microsoft, Blizzard, Epic, etc all have summer programs that will help you build your portfolio. Most of the time, they will have you work on tools for their full time developers to use, but that is how you get your foot in the door.
If you are coming out of college (or, as was my case, have been developing non-game applications for several years) and don't have titles you can put your name on, you'll have an uphill battle. The best way to approach it in this case is to do one of the following:

a) Develop your own custom game engine and make some simple games with it. This will show knowledge of the basic fundamentals the game companies are looking for.

b) Develop a mod of a popular game. A good example of this is DotA (custom scenario for Warcraft III), or various Unreal Tournament mods.

c) Develop some games with an opensource, or somewhat inexpensive game engine (e.g. OGRE, Torque3D, etc.)

Despite having 5+ years of application development (with shrink-wrapped software used directly by customers), I'd get to the 2nd, 3rd, or even 4th interview only to get the response, "You have a very strong background in application development, but you don't have much of a game portfolio. Please work on that and apply again in the future. Thanks."

Good Luck!

All of the suggestions made so far are wise, I'll also add this.

Games in the idea stage are pretty dangerous. You'll keep thinking of things you want to add, technologies you want to use, and so on. Get out of that as quickly as possible for every project.

Start by thinking of a core idea for a game, ideally this should be a short, one or two sentence description. Even better would be a two word description: "Asteroids RPG!". Then come up with a bullet point list of the features it should have.

Once you've got that list, absolutely never change it and never stray from it while you are coding. If you have new ideas and you just have to explore them, start a new list for another game.

Hopefully you'll have something you can actually play by the time you've completed one to three of those bullet points; you can make the character move on the screen, or enemies do their thing, something you can interact with. At this stage, although the game isn't very deep, it should already be fun. Just moving your guy around in an interesting way should feel a bit stimulating and make you actually want to play the rest of the game.

If it doesn't, figure out why not and fix it. If you can't figure out why it's not fun by this stage, or you can't figure out what would have to change for it to be fun, drop it immediately. If the core gameplay mechanic, the first thing you needed to make the game a game, isn't fun now, it won't ever be fun.

You need it to be fun if you want to use it in your portfolio. If it's not fun the interviewer won't play it much. You don't want it to be too much fun, of course, you really want the interviewer to be interested in it and then move on to the source code or the next game. You want to show them a variety of ideas you can explore, and a variety of techniques you can use.

Include the best programming examples that you have.

C++ is used in the development of a lot of games so try to use that language.
You can use other languages as well through if they show off your programing experience a certain topic.

If you have any well polish projects that involve computer graphics, AI, physics, or multithreading include those since are topics that are used very often in game development.

Another good idea is to go through these projects and provide comments if you haven't already. Include a description of the project and the goals somewhere easy to find in the project.

Overall you should try to use examples that feature the above areas and that show that you know how to structure a large programming project. Game development is alot smoother when you have a good project layout.

To quote an old professor: The first time you program a project you do it the wrong way. The second time you do it in a way that works but is not effective (difficult to modify, not efficent). The third time you program the project it's acceptable.