Agreed, and I kind of wish CS and game dev weren’t considered so similar. They both program, sure, and those skills can be moved.
Go ask a Microsoft dev to explain game theory, hotkey availability, and UX. Then, ask a game dev the same questions. You’ll get wildly different answers because they wildly different goals
This is why the tradeification of engineering should be viewed with skepticism. An engineering degree should give you a strong technical background in computing, physics, math, and software without over-specializing. You are meant to learn specific tradecraft on the job.
Having over a 25 year career done development in all kinds of areas including gamedev, there is quite a big difference in way of thinking and doing stuff between anything with user interaction and server-side stuff, and gamedev specifically also differs a lot from the rest of areas of user-facing software because it’s very performance oriented, way closer to the bare metal than the rest (in smartphone apps you’re working on top of libraries on top of libraries on top of libraries, in gamedev you make GPU shaders in a variant of C which very tightly tied to the specifics of how that hardware works), and each game is pretty much a unique user interface in programming terms (i.e. there much less reusability, especially of assets, than in say web or smartapp development).
(I mean, in server-side stuff you’re for example worrying about transactional integrity during database access, system design for balanced distributed handling of requests or networked access to APIs exposed via REST interfaces, whilst in in gamedev you’re for example doing vector maths to project a user click on the screen onto a game plane in the 3D universe, moving the bones in 3D models to animate them and writting shaders to produce effects like a 3D model being consumed from the point of impact when hit by a shot.
Mind you, for me personally all of them are cool challenges (which is probably why I’m one of those unusal developers who is generic to the point of sillyness) but they’re definitelly very different, even in the kinds of architectural approaches used for the software being developed.
I’ve spent more of my career doing server-side stuff than other areas and it’s like night and day when it comes to IT security between server-side dev and gamedev, probably because server-side is networked and generally is done for much more important targets (valuable data and even actual financial assets of big companies, rather than an individual’s game state or machine) so there a big expectation that the best external attackers (and a veritable army of script kiddies) will be hammering at anything a server-side component exposes via a network interface, trying to hack it.
Mind you, I still bitched and moaned at the lack of IT Security awareness of some of my colleagues when I was doing server side stuff :)
And that’s exactly the thing, the threat model is so different. In gamedev, they’re thinking about those networking issues for sure but man oh man are they WAY more worried about RCE in those drivers you mentioned earlier.
Why? For the same reason Emacs is a text editor, internet browser, and Spotify client. For the same reason that “will it run doom” is even a question. Because their game got hacked before they even opened the first text file to make the game
Agreed, and I kind of wish CS and game dev weren’t considered so similar. They both program, sure, and those skills can be moved.
Go ask a Microsoft dev to explain game theory, hotkey availability, and UX. Then, ask a game dev the same questions. You’ll get wildly different answers because they wildly different goals
This is why the tradeification of engineering should be viewed with skepticism. An engineering degree should give you a strong technical background in computing, physics, math, and software without over-specializing. You are meant to learn specific tradecraft on the job.
Having over a 25 year career done development in all kinds of areas including gamedev, there is quite a big difference in way of thinking and doing stuff between anything with user interaction and server-side stuff, and gamedev specifically also differs a lot from the rest of areas of user-facing software because it’s very performance oriented, way closer to the bare metal than the rest (in smartphone apps you’re working on top of libraries on top of libraries on top of libraries, in gamedev you make GPU shaders in a variant of C which very tightly tied to the specifics of how that hardware works), and each game is pretty much a unique user interface in programming terms (i.e. there much less reusability, especially of assets, than in say web or smartapp development).
(I mean, in server-side stuff you’re for example worrying about transactional integrity during database access, system design for balanced distributed handling of requests or networked access to APIs exposed via REST interfaces, whilst in in gamedev you’re for example doing vector maths to project a user click on the screen onto a game plane in the 3D universe, moving the bones in 3D models to animate them and writting shaders to produce effects like a 3D model being consumed from the point of impact when hit by a shot.
Mind you, for me personally all of them are cool challenges (which is probably why I’m one of those unusal developers who is generic to the point of sillyness) but they’re definitelly very different, even in the kinds of architectural approaches used for the software being developed.
And that’s not even to mention security. I’m in a CS course right now, and sure we talk about cyber security and social networking and blah blah blah.
Go ask a game dev about their security patches and you’ll see the WORLD of difference in the two spaces
Oh, man, yes.
I’ve spent more of my career doing server-side stuff than other areas and it’s like night and day when it comes to IT security between server-side dev and gamedev, probably because server-side is networked and generally is done for much more important targets (valuable data and even actual financial assets of big companies, rather than an individual’s game state or machine) so there a big expectation that the best external attackers (and a veritable army of script kiddies) will be hammering at anything a server-side component exposes via a network interface, trying to hack it.
Mind you, I still bitched and moaned at the lack of IT Security awareness of some of my colleagues when I was doing server side stuff :)
And that’s exactly the thing, the threat model is so different. In gamedev, they’re thinking about those networking issues for sure but man oh man are they WAY more worried about RCE in those drivers you mentioned earlier.
Why? For the same reason Emacs is a text editor, internet browser, and Spotify client. For the same reason that “will it run doom” is even a question. Because their game got hacked before they even opened the first text file to make the game