STAFF PROFILE: JAMES, GAMES PROGRAMMER (cont.)
What do you do day to day?
My duties revolve around Xbox Live and all the fun (read 'bugs') it entails. I’ve been lucky in my role, and on my current team I have been able to create a whole network solution for one of our titles and I have relished the task - the only downside is that with as many ingenious solutions you come up with for the networking problems, you get at least ten times as many bugs.
Currently the area I’m looking at is the synchronisation of the game across the network. There is now a routine of setting up test scenes, sample messages and gameplay snippets and making sure that they all behave in their expected fashion.
On my previous project I mainly concentrated on helping implement the characters within the game; this was very different to the networking tasks as they involved putting into practice the look and feel that the designers wanted from the in-game actors.
Aside from programming I also run our team’s internal website. This holds all the information relevant to the development of our current project, along with hosting some of the company’s sports, games, and videogame competitions or information, so time can be spent keeping things up to date with latest scores, team picks, and general titbits dragged from the web. |
