Week 33 : Lua Game Play Programmer

Let's look at the Tell Tale Position 'Lua Game Play Programmer' and breakdown how I am an ideal candidate.

Telltale’s Gameplay Programmer group is responsible for bringing the visions of the designers and artists to life, as well as contributing in meaningful ways to user interactions and overall game play.  Working on small product teams alongside industry innovators in game narrative design and cinematography, push the boundaries about how players consume and experience games.  Development is done entirely in Lua and Telltale’s multi-platform downloadable game development system; the “Telltale Tool”, you can help to create tons of amazing content for Xbox, PS3, Wii, iOS, PC, Mac and Android.

Essential Skills and Experience:
• A minimum of 1 year of professional experience in the games business or 3 years experience developing games in any environment.
• Experienced with languages such as Lua, Actionscript, Perl, Python, and C.
• Experienced at level building, prototyping, UI design, writing, and other game design elements.
• Self-motivated and diligent, with good habits for tracking one’s own tasks, seeking out answers when needed, and actively participating in the entire production effort.
• Posses strong knowledge of programming data structures, logic, and algorithms.
• Passionate about being in a highly iterative environment with a desire to participate in many areas of game development.  This is a position for a ‘Jack-of-all-trades’ programmer!
  
Preferred Skills and Experience:
• B.S. degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience.
• Experience building your own games or levels from scratch with the ability to demo these personal projects.
• Experience working in a 3D rendering environment or 3D game engine (i.e. Maya, 3DS Max, Unity, Torque, Unreal, etc.  )
• Solid working knowledge of Lua
• Passion for interactive fiction, narrative game play, and cinematography.


1) A minimum of 1 year of professional experience in the games business or 3 years experience developing games in any environment.

As of right now I have been working in the game industry since 2001. I joined my first company in 2003 then I joined Plastic Games in 2005. We had our first Disney contract in 2006.

2) Experienced with languages such as Lua, Actionscript, Perl, Python, and C.

Of the languages described I have the most experience with C and Python, I dabbled in Actionscript when I was teaching and Lua I am learning right now. At this point I am not intimidated by any 'C' style language, I know the core data structures, learning nuances of a language are usually covered in how to books. I find that having a good IDE is key to how successful you are at producing bug free code.

3)  Experienced at level building, prototyping, UI design, writing, and other game design elements.
Gosh, all of these concepts are the reasons I enjoy game development. I have done each of these for any number of products let it be a Disney attraction or something added to Bit Shifter (Plastic Game's flagship product)

4)Self-motivated and diligent, with good habits for tracking one’s own tasks, seeking out answers when needed, and actively participating in the entire production effort.
As an Indie there is no way you will succeed unless you are self disciplined and motivated. As for tracking tasks, I love marking things off my to do list, and well my white board might be the best thing I ever bought. My success in my Master's can to be attributed to learning how to ask the 'right' questions.

5)Posses strong knowledge of programming data structures, logic, and algorithms.
Check, let see this last year I implementing convolution for Computer Vision image processing, created a compiler, added a planner to Unity3d and developed a data set comparing Fringe & IDA* to A* path finding.

6)Passionate about being in a highly iterative environment with a desire to participate in many areas of game development.  This is a position for a ‘Jack-of-all-trades’ programmer!
 As an Indie it is crucial that you can assume multiple roles. Normally I am the game play programmer but if I am needed as a technical artist I do so, if the web page need fixing then that is what I do. When you only have two engineers on a team you tend to put on many hats. As a small company we have also learned that agile iterative development is the only way to find the 'fun' in a game.

7) B.S. degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience.
I have a Masters and over a decade of experience!

8) Experience building your own games or levels from scratch with the ability to demo these personal projects.
I'll have plenty of examples to show.

9)Experience working in a 3D rendering environment or 3D game engine (i.e. Maya, 3DS Max, Unity, Torque, Unreal, etc.  )
Yep, I taught 3d modeling, Animation, and Game Engines  over the years, and have worked with each of these applications.

10)Solid working knowledge of Lua
Check, I have already read many interesting articles about Binding C/C++ objects to Lua objects. Now I am gaining familiarity with the nuances, like .. upvalues, closures, & tables.

11) Passion for interactive fiction, narrative game play, and cinematography.
Eleven year ago I wrote this. I always felt games would be a great medium for story telling and cinematography.

So there you have it every point is covered, I have yet to find a job description that I fit more perfectly into.

Tell Tale Game you are my # 1

See you in eight weeks