You Are Doing it Wrong


I play this online game Legend of Green Dragon about twice a day. When I do well, I want to see how I compare to other players. So I click a link that shows all warriors. It feels like most of the time I get the following message:
Too many accesses: Your subnet has accessed this page too many times in the last 24 hours. Sorry, but this page requires a huge amount of resources to generate, and we can't afford the resources to have people just crawling all over this page. Try again tomorrow. 
Ummm. This should not be too hard. You just need to show me a list of players ranked by level and experience. How hard could that be? If you are running some sort of mikey mouse database that cannot support this in real time, then cache the results and show me those results that are a little stale.

Heck. The base code for the game is open source. Might be time to take matters into my own hands. How hard can it be? I think the stuff is written in PHP.

Becoming a Game Programmer


I just read this article on determining whether you have what it takes to be a game programmer. Check out John Ratcliff's post and see what you think. It sounded very harsh. {retty much John sees that there are two feasible paths: software engineer and artist. They are both hard jobs to crack in the game industry. And you got to be one in a million to make it.

Furthermore, there is more bad news. You might hate it if you do get a job in the game industry. The hours are long. The pay is low. You might get canned as soon as you deliver the game. The only goo news about being a software engineer is that it translates to other better jobs.

Ack. What is a game developer to do? Code a game ont the side as a hobby. It is the only way to stay sane in the crazy world of commercial game devlepment.