A bite at last

Well it's been a while for me looking for work, at least it seems like it. I've registered with many online recruiters and I've had quite a lot of phone calls. There was the interview with KBC, the large investment bank that would have payed me lots of money but worked me hard in something I'm not really sure I'd like to do. There were a couple of other calls that were related to the financial market as well (Anvil Software was in the works, but I don't know what happened with that). A couple of days ago I got a call from Probe Games, a games recruitment company, saying that they had something I might be suited for. It's a job with Ideaworks3D who basically produce games for mobile platforms, that mainly means mobile phones of which the Nokia N-Gage seems to be the most prominent. From what I'm told, Ideaworks3D produce 3D graphics engines and network systems for mobile platforms, then they port established games (like Tomb Raider, Tony Hawk and The Sims) onto that engine. They also often add multiplayer modes to games that don't already have it to take advantage of the networking aspect of the phones. Apparently they also do some original titles, but I'm not sure what they are.

Programming games onto mobile phones was not exactly my idea of working in the biz, but they do work on mainstream games (even though it's port, there's still a lot of work in that and I'd get to see the guts of top selling games) and a lot of it is engine design anyway, so that can be pretty universal. Since this is for mobile platforms, it may be considered Embedded programming too, which can be very beneficial for other jobs outside of games programming. And this company works with some brand new hardware too, so it all sounds really good. I'm told I might get around £25k to start with, I'd like a little more but beggars can't be choosers. I've done some little quiz thing for them, a mix of brain teaser type questions and some actual job related questions. The recruiter said it went down well and I'm set up for an interview on Monday at 11am. Unfortunately it's a grilling type interview, even worse they mentioned C questions. I thought it was supposed to be a C++ job, so we'll see how we go. Also, they're interested in filling a position on their Airplay team (the networking product they've made) so they'll also ask me about network programming. I'm not against doing it, but I'm not sure what they're hoping I'll know.

So I'm pretty pleased with how that's going, it'll be my foot in the door for games programming and I'll soak it up to hopefully move on to bigger and better things, either within Ideaworks3D or some other company. I did hope that the Sony job panned out a bit better than it did (I haven't heard anything) but I'm just happy that something happened that I'm interested in. I'll let you know what happens, Ciao