[Hiring] Seeking Game Developers in Cape Town

fireworkx

Fireworkx ( a Rondebosch, Cape Town based software development house ) is looking for game developers to work in the development of 2D based games for the gambling industry. Developers will work in a scripting based development environment for games that will be deployed across multiple platforms and devices, using a sophisticated game development SDK. Ideally the developers will have some experience developing games in ActionScript or Javascript and a knowledge of Flash would be advantageous. They should understand the importance of software quality and performance in game development, OOP, design patterns and test driven development. The following skills would be useful but not all are mandatory

- Industry experience in developing games for mobile and web
- Experience in either Lua, ActionScript (AS3), Objective-C or Javascript
- Be comfortable in switching between scripting and programming languages
- Experience in Eclipse
- Understand the challenges that arise from developing for multiple platforms such as performance considerations and variations in screen size

Contact Vince on 082 887 7777 or via email vincent@fireworkx.co.za

francoisvn

I'm curious: how do you intend to do test driven development (TDD) for games? If it's only intended to be used for the gambling backend I can see that working, but I'm struggling to see how you would do TDD for a complete vertical slice.

What "game development SDK" are you using? Something in-house?

Instead of ActionScript, have you considered looking at Haxe (http://haxe.org/) and OpenFL (http://www.openfl.org/)? It can compile to SWF, has similar syntax to ActionScript, and it isn't slowly dying out.

bischonator

I read that Unity has a massive Gaming following. I believe that devs need to get special permission and pay a special license fee if they intend to use Unity for gambling software purposes.

http://unity3d.com/company/gambling

fireworkx

We are not using ActionScript we are using Lua, but since Lua devs are relatively rare we would like to find people who have some experience with Flash hence the Actionscript mention. We use a custom framework for game development. We have a testing framework in place that automates a large part of the testing cycle.

AngryMoose

bischonator said:

I read that Unity has a massive Gaming following. I believe that devs need to get special permission and pay a special license fee if they intend to use Unity for gambling software purposes.

Unity licenses for Gambling products can fall into hundreds of thousands of Rands, plus large royalty percentages. Unless you're Derivco or Inspired or another top player, it's pretty much not an option.

mattbenic

I suspect this work may be in LoomSDK, given the combination of skills being asked for. Am I right @fireworkx? ;)

bischonator said:

I read that Unity has a massive Gaming following. I believe that devs need to get special permission and pay a special license fee if they intend to use Unity for gambling software purposes.

Yup. The virtual racing product we work on at Luma Animation is built on Unity, and thanks to that new clause introduced in Unity 4's EULA (basically massive fees/royalties) we're stuck on Unity 3.x.

francoisvn said:

I'm curious: how do you intend to do test driven development (TDD) for games? If it's only intended to be used for the gambling backend I can see that working, but I'm struggling to see how you would do TDD for a complete vertical slice.

This is actually an area I'm really interested in as well. There's a fair amount of stuff out there on TDD in games, but it does have it's challenges. With some ingenuity it's even possible to test playthroughs of games (eg if your input is provided through an interface, you could inject a mock implementation that plays back pre-recorded keypresses) though this would be more of an integration test I suppose.
Unity's done a couple of posts on their blog about TDD in Unity and the testing framework they built specifically for testing Unity is available on the asset store. We're using a separate framework because Unity's isn't compatible with 3.x. At this stage my biggest challenge is figuring out what should be tested :)