[Recruiting] Web Applications Developers in Cape Town
Hi All,
8Frag is hiring Web Application Developers with expertise in the following: C#,JAVA, PHP languages as well as familiarity with MSSQL and MYSQL database driven systems.
Advantageous: Experience with Jscripts, HTML 5 (including CSS), C++, love of video games, active and healthy, strong team player and able to begin with short notice
Applicants must be based in Cape Town.
If you're interested please send me your CV!
Thanks
-Cody
8Frag is hiring Web Application Developers with expertise in the following: C#,JAVA, PHP languages as well as familiarity with MSSQL and MYSQL database driven systems.
Advantageous: Experience with Jscripts, HTML 5 (including CSS), C++, love of video games, active and healthy, strong team player and able to begin with short notice
Applicants must be based in Cape Town.
If you're interested please send me your CV!
Thanks
-Cody
Comments
@hermantulleken: You can check out our Facebook page for more information. Unfortunately I can't disclose many details before our official launch
8Frag developers utilize agile methodologies to rapidly iterate, build and expand on existing and or new technologies relating to key business requirements including but not limited to the development of video games and related systems and are exposed to server side and web based application technologies, many of which are built from scratch.
"Is this a job to actually make games?"
"No."
Further information can only be disclosed under NDA which I'm sure you understand as we have yet to open for public use. If you are keen on the position please feel free to give me a shout.
NDAs are worthless and pretty-much only used to hide vaporware. You're not even offering a baseline salary... It's almost like you don't understand that those skills are in demand at high paying non-games jobs, so you either have to pay well enough to make people accept the loss or you have to make the projects people will be working on sound incredibly awesome. Currently you're doing neither.
Here, let me help you with that: "9Kill is a newly started company that's going to be making hamster racing RPG games for social networks, you'd be working with a team of amazing artists (link to showcase) under a lead responsible for projects like this one (more links to awesome game). Starting salary is R15K a month for the basic skillset outlined above, negotiable based on suitability."
Otherwise I'm going to have to edit my previous translation to:
"Is this actually a job?"
"No. I'm just spouting jargon. Synergy."
Also, loosen up. Game dev people tend to be casual sorts, not corporate. The NDA thing is not great either... it sounds like you think what you are doing is somehow special/unique, which I'm pretty sure it's not. And even if so, it's easiest to just link to what you have done.
Or - are you worried that if you tell people what you do they would not express interest, i.e. online gambling apps, Flappy Bird clones?
Thanks for the feedback guys :)
Just to clarify a few things:
Personally I have many non disclosure agreements with many names in the industry including organizations such as IDV, BWT, Autodesk and EPIC Games to name a few. While the main objective of making games always remains to make it as fun as possible for the end user there is also a legal/business aspect to it which cannot be side stepped. The video games industry is after all an industry, otherwise we wouldn't be offering a salary right?
So what is the salary on offer? Simply put, it largely depends on the candidates experience and value to the company weighted against their own "real world" personal salary expectations. We also don't want to deter juniors who might be intimidated by large numbers and hundreds of lines of job requirements, potentially loose out on a prodigy in the making!
As far as what games we are building - well as a games development company that's rather hard to pin down wouldn't you agree?
Maybe we'll create a crazy 3d rendition about mermaids in outer space today followed by an equally zany title based on space invaders the next day. On another day the company may require a business application in support of some feature that we want to offer our customers. That is the nature of Agile development.
The point is that you'll either know about the project because we made a decision to make the information public or because you're internally involved with the project. The job is not a one time project offer but rather the opportunity to work with many projects on a permanent basis meaning that what "game you may need to develop today" is not relevant to the offer at hand.
If anyone has specific technical questions please send us a PM.
Kind regards J :)
Your biggest issue is being open to other forms of development. Games are ridiculously hard to make, much harder than random business applications. Games also tend to pay poorly compared to random business applications. This means that any company that tries to balance business application clients against game development clients will tend to end up focusing only on the biz app stuff. It'll be a gradual thing and the intent will always be to "just finish this one contract and then we'll get to the games, honest" but it'll never happen. This has been the case with every single local game development studio that has done the moonlighting approach instead of having a dedicated games focus. You know why, besides all the stuff I mentioned above? Clients. Your biz app clients will net you more biz app clients, not game clients. You simply won't have game-shaped work coming in if you're not already doing game-shaped work...
Full disclosure: QCF pivoted from a bespoke game design company that built games for individual clients to being an own-IP studio that built games to sell directly to players. We did that partly through a huge contract we did for a government department that literally fell into our laps on a deadline tighter than a really, really tight thing. Doing that and NOT accepting future work in the same vein, while still turning down our regular client referral work to make more custom games and specifically focus on our own game project was incredibly difficult. If we weren't fucking batshit insane idealists we'd never have made it to where we are now. Even after years of established game industry work, 1 non-game project was nearly enough to start us on that spiral towards not making any games ever again. Again, this points to a lack of understanding of how games are developed. Any successful studio is going to produce multiple games, but even when you're working on games for clients, doing multiple projects at the same time is really tricky to pull off. The only studio I know that does that with any reasonable success in Cape Town is Tasty Poison - they can do that thanks to the insane levels of experience that Steve has when it comes to both production and landing new clients. If you're not at his level of epicness or beyond, you're going to take months and months on single projects, yes, even the small ones will cost too much and earn you too little.
And those projects are going to be for who, exactly? Networking and establishing leads requires demonstrable game work, you have to have that before you can sell your game-creating skills. Bottom line here is any local studio head will be able to tell you exactly what they're working on, even if they're not working on a specific game right now, even if they're simply prototyping and looking for neat concepts, they'll be able to tell you what they're exploring. It also seriously helps to focus down on a specific set of skills and/or deliverable areas: People in CT will tell you that they're a Unity-focused studio, or they specialise in mobile, or they do in-place marketing games, or they're boardgame designers, or they're educational game design specialists, etc. All games are not created equal and the skills that build each of them are as different as a biz app company that specialises in custom SAP interfaces trying to get into the embedded hardware C coding business.
...
Finally, be aware that you're answering these questions not just here on this forum, but you're also being stacked up against every other person that's done the same thing: Tried to start a nebulously defined game company with no visible experience. Your answers are, so far, totally in line with the established pattern of how these things go down. In fact, according to the pattern, your next move is most likely going to be that you get pissed off with this thread and the questions people are asking you, causing you to feel like their advice is attacking you as a person and there will be much shouting and wailing and gnashing of teeth about how mean everyone is, how they should give people a chance, how this lack of "support" is damning and all that jazz.
So please, be aware of those past footsteps you're walking along and realise that we're pointing out a different path, the one that got us to where we are - employing people and running our own companies and making games for a living. So, buck the trend! Come to the meetups, chat about crap with us all, we can help :)
(The flip-side is, of course, if you don't actually want to make games as a company and really just want eager young developers for a position doing random web development. In which case: Good luck, maybe looking for devs here is a bad idea unless you, y'know, like sarcasm)