Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Fredrik Mäkeläinen, Senior Graphics Programmer at Recoil Games
#Where do you work and what is your job title?
I work at Recoil Games in Finland as a Senior Graphics Programmer and are currently involved in the development of “Earth No More”.
#What inspired you to/How did you decide to become a game developer?
I’ve always been interested in computers and the demoscene (http://www.scene.org for info) caught my interest when I was around 15 years old so I’ve been programming graphics since then. After working in the regular programming industry for a few years, after upper secondary high school I decided that games/graphics programming was something I wanted to pursue further, nothing beats having your hobby as work.
So I started studying at gsCEPT and after earning a Bachelor of Science I joined the industry as a graphics programmer.
#How is working as a Senior Graphics Programmer at Recoil Games?
It’s fun, exciting, sometimes very stressful but at the same time very rewarding. As a senior level programmer you have a lot of responsibility, especially since Recoil is a quite small company.
#Describe a typical workday?
I usually come to work between 09.00 and 10.00 and the first things I do is check my email, browse some newsgroups to see if anything of interest has happened and if necessary a morning meeting where current progress and planned tasks are discussed. Then it’s just work as usual for a while with research, problem solving, programming, profiling, bug-fixing, answering questions and guiding more junior programmers and artists. Some time during the day I usually do a fast profiling pass of the current level the artists are working on to see that they are using the technology as it’s meant to be used.
#Describe your latest project?
My latest released project was “Colin McRae Dirt” when I worked at Codemasters. It was quite hectic at times since we we’re building the technology from ground up while at the same time getting the game together, fortunately Codemasters have really skilled and dedicated people who love making racing games so it all worked out in the end.
#Any tips for people that are interested in the career path or people looking for work or students.
If you are trying to join the industry as a graphics programmer right after university studies make sure to.
- Know your linear algebra and data structures by hearth, since you just graduated you are expected to have a really good understanding of them.
- Keep up to date with the industry, get a firm understanding of the major graphics techniques used by developers, read research papers.
- Familiarize yourself with various debugging/profiling tools and if possible get some console experience.
- Use your university time to train on public presentations, you never know when you’ll be asked to present your work/findings at either internal company training or external seminars.
- If you supply a demo of some kind (which you will need to for a graphics programmer position) be prepared to answer tricky questions on how it works and why you choose to implement it in that way.