Meet the Team

Andy, Software
Engineer

How did you get started in the videogame industry?

I graduated from Cambridge in 2004, where I read General Engineering, specialising in electronics and information processing. After the usual post-university round-the-world trek I landed up in Bristol, and started to pursue a career in software.

Whilst not a main part of my degree, I was able to apply my skills to the role and have progressed ever since. I wasn’t looking for a job in the industry specifically, but I enjoy gaming and I’m delighted to be a part of its future.

What’s a typical day like for you?

We take customer support very seriously, and we have a close relationship with game developers; a few hours in the morning will involve discussing support issues and requests from game developers with our customer support team. After that, it really depends on what stage of our release schedule the debugger is at.

We decide upon the feature set for a particular release a few months prior and assign tasks between the five members of the team. So for a standard release cycle of approximately a month, weeks one, two and three I’ll be implementing the features assigned to me and working on any bugs from the previous release that crop up in the mean time.

Week four I’ll integrate my feature changes into our release branch, document them, and spend the week testing changes from other members of the team and fixing any bugs. We take it in turns to manage the release itself; one of the advantages of working in such a small team is having responsibility for all aspects of the development. As I’ve mentioned, we’ll make decisions about what major features a release will include about two months prior; our roadmap is largely driven by the game developers’ requests.

Along the cycle we’ll often have room to fit in a few features if we think they’ll be helpful. My job also sometimes involves the opportunity for travel. I recently presented to around 250 game developers at the SCEE DevStation 07 in London and at the SCEA DevCon conference near San Francisco. I’ve also visited many studios in Europe and North America, listening to feedback and trying to make sure they are getting the most out of the tools.

Working hours are flexible, but I try to keep a 9-to-5.30 routine, give or take. Lunch in the kitchen is dominated by the shouts congruous with the passionate application of PES 6 on PS3 – I can be found scoring goals from 12:30 most days.

What languages/tools do you use?

Development is done in C++ and we’ve just moved over to Visual Studio 2005 from VS2003. We use Perforce for source control and use Python quite a lot for miscellaneous scripting tasks. We find Boundschecker useful for checking for memory leaks after big changes and we have cruisecontrol running regular builds, unit tests and generating reports.

Being a tools programmer, are you envious of those working on glamorous titles, or does this job have its own rewards?

It definitely has its own rewards and benefits. We’re in a unique position at SN Systems in that our tools are used extensively on all the PlayStation systems so we have a critical role to play within the industry. From getting very early exposure to the development hardware all the way through to the maturing and broadening of the platform, it’s essential that we provide developers with what they need.

Working in any aspect of the industry is exciting. At the end of the day, when I see the games on the shop floor, I know I’ve played a small part in getting them there – not just a few, but lots of them!

What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about your job?

Often games developers aren’t seen as ‘serious’ programmers – that developing games is an extension of a hobby, but not a real job. Although it is a young industry that is still finding its feet, it is still a highly professional and structured industry with many talented individuals.