So it’s finally the end of the college year, exams are done and dusted, thank god. Second year really did fly by, we were kept busy with many projects such as our OpenGL First Person Shooter, Ogre 3D Projects and assignments, Software Engineering Agile development projects to name a few. When I wasn’t busy with college work I got to attend some cool events like the Globe Games Jam and Games Fleadh in Trippary. I can safely say I can’t wait for next year, its going to be exciting with new subjects like Network Programming, Data Structures & Algorithms, Applied Physics II, 3D Graphics and Audio II, Software Engineering For Games II, a Large Team Project and of course our 6 month Internship in the games industry towards the end of the year.

Busy Busy Programmer

So back to the present, the summer holidays are upon us, a time to take it easy and relax. Not for the Flax team though, we are going to be extremely busy. Myself and Carl will be working at Ericsson at their R&D Software Development Campus in Athlone , while simultaneously working on the Flax HTML5 Game Engine, other projects (which we have yet to talk about, but watch this space) and hopefully attending some interesting events though the year like, the Dublin Web Summit, anyone else going? So it will be a busy summer though an extremely interesting and great learning experience, working at Ericsson in a proper software development team.

Why so Busy?

The games development industry is the most competitive sector in the technology industry. You have to work hard, day and night, eat, sleep and drink this stuff. Luckily for me its what my life revolves around, programming and creating amazing things, such as games. So I have to keep busy, getting experience, working on demos, going to events and just generally been engaged in the industry. It doesn’t even feel like work because I love it. If you read #altDevBlogaDay (which I strongly recommend you do) then you can hear this kind of thing from the horse’s mouth, as they say. Games developers working in industry telling it like it is. A great read from Jaymin Kessler is an article on essentially getting a Job in the games development Industry .

Game Industry Internship

You may have noticed me mention a 6 month games industry internship, which I must acquire for the third year of my course. So that’s another reason why I am keeping myself busy this summer, trying to build up my portfolio of work. So over the next month or so, I will be focusing on building myself a nice website to frame my personal programming/game development projects, college assignments and commercial work which I have done over the last 5 years or so. Again being a regular reader of #altDevBlogaDay I know Quality, Polished and Finished demos are key. It’s all well and good that you have a piece of paper that says you can do it, but if you don’t have the motivation and the passion to create things for the love of it, I think you’re in the wrong career. Again another great read is The Difference Between a Degree and an Education by Gavan Woolery and yes, it’s another #altDevBlogaDay post. It’s just such a god damn good blog, real game developers talking about their work and the industry, how much better can you get. Hopefully one day you will read an article of mine on altDevBlogaDay.

Conclusion

I best be off, just took a break to write this post, summing up the college year, the agenda for the summer. I have to get back to brushing up on my Java and GWT for work, as working with C++ for the whole year, has made me extremely wary of the new keyword, and continuously thinking about self-destruction or making sure I have virtual destructor for hierarchies. So I’m off now to a land of not worrying about shallow copies all the time, although I could go for some Battlefield Bad Company 2 right now. Hmm, the life of a game dev, making and playing games, it’s pretty EPIC.

Follow me on twitter @C_McCann to keep up with what I’m doing and to find out when my next “Diary of an Irish student Game Developer” is published. Thanks for reading my post and please do leave a comment, I always like to hear what people have to say.