Plaidophile

Wish me luck.

4:55 EDT Back at the hotel room.

The interview lasted only a bit over an hour. It was more a back-and-forth, with them explaining what they needed and me asking questions about the company, the job, and explaining how my interests are relevant to the particular position stuff.

They need someone to specialize in implementing stuff on the Nintendo DS — not just graphics, but AI and resource management and so on.

They didn't ask me about technical issues (or want to see my standard SOLACE presentation); they considered my responses to the programming test to be enough evidence of my ability, though they did ask me what I thought about the test. I said that the problems were interesting, since they were simple but had enough of a twist to make them require a bit of thought.

The first title they want to do is a dating sim (which has been very big in Japan in the past, but there haven't been any for an American market yet). They have a prototype of it running on Symbian. It was rather fun to play. The next game is to be a Football game, but not in the traditional "control the players directly" sense, but from a management perspective — keeping the players happy, shouting directions to them from the sidelines, and so on. It sounds like a very interesting twist on the genre, and also something which can suit itself very well to the pen input on the DS (which I mentioned, and the interviewer's eyes lit up as if he hadn't actually considered that before).

Their management is very French-style. They totally believe in people having a life outside of work, and not requiring people to work more than 40 hours a week, except begrudgingly when deadlines are coming up.

I honestly don't know if I got the job or not. I got some mixed messages; they didn't seem terribly excited at the end, but then again, they were also very French. They do want me to come back tomorrow afternoon at about 3 to hear their decision, though, which is pretty promising — I don't think they'd want me to come in person to reject me. But on the other hand, it could just be that they want to give all decisions in person if possible. One promising thing is that they said that the original job I'd applied for (on Monster) was already filled but that they were waffling on the second position (the one which the lead programmer sent me instead) and weren't sure if they wanted to actually fill it, unless they got an interesting enough candidate. Which would ostensibly be me. Though they also said they still had a few other applications to go through. (But if they're still going through those applications and still giving me a decision tomorrow, well... I guess I need to stop trying to anayze every possible "clue" and just wait.)

One interesting thing is that most of the programmers have a master's degree — only one has just a bachelor's, and that one was from Digipen.

Another interesting thing is the NDA/noncompete — they don't believe in having any sort of All Your Code Are Belong To Us thing. The only things are that vendor NDAs need to be respected (obviously) and that proprietary UbiSoft/Gameloft/Guillemot/whatever information needs to stay within the company. Also, if I leave, I can't work for another game company for 6 months. But my own code (done on my own time) and thoughts remain my own. That is very refreshing. That and the benefits package make up for the relatively low salary (and the performance-based bonus does make the salary not quite as crappy, but it's still bottom 25th percentile at best.)

Also, there is at least one comic I have to do about the interview, or more specifically about a side-effect of me rushing to get dressed. (I actually forgot to bring my belt, so I had to stop at Burlington Coat Factory on the way. Fortunately it was only two blocks from the office. But that's not what the comic is about.)

Anyway. I need to stop thinking about this now. Maybe I'll try getting in touch with Joel again. Whee.