Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs - Episode 296: Working in the Video Game Industry

Episode Date: July 24, 2026

In this episode, Conor and Ben chat about video games, working in the video game industry and more!Link to Episode 296 on WebsiteDiscuss this episode, leave a comment, or ask a question (on GitHub)SocialsADSP: The Podcast: TwitterConor Hoekstra: LinkTree / BioBen Deane: Twitter | BlueSkyShow NotesDate Recorded: 2026-07-22Date Released: 2026-07-24videogamedunkeyCppCastThe WitnessThe Witness - A Great Game That You Shouldn't PlayJonathan Blow on Bad Video Game CriticismIntro Song InfoMiss You by Sarah Jansen https://soundcloud.com/sarahjansenmusicCreative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0Free Download / Stream: http://bit.ly/l-miss-youMusic promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/iYYxnasvfx8

Working in games is interesting because there are all kinds of things that go into programming a game. You know, there are lots and lots of different aspects. There are lots of, you're not just working in one place. Or at least if you're in a big studio, there are lots of different kinds of engineers who specialize in maybe different things. You know, there's to just run through a very small sample, there's specialization in, well, graphics is obviously one. And that subdivides. animation is sort of a separate subfield of that networking physics AI AI as it's called in games gameplay UI audio you know I could go on and on but there are lots of specializations available

welcome to ADSP the podcast episode 296 recorded on July 22nd 2020s my name is Connor and today with my co-host Ben we chat about video games working in the video game industry and more Have things with you, Ben. Oh, you know. Same old, same old. It's summer. It's hot. I'm actually off work at the moment this week.

Spending some time with the family. Just doing summer things. We went to the local, like, play place to do all the mini golf and go-karting and bowling and stuff like that. Oh, that's fun. Are you a big mini-golf fan? I like mini-golf. it's fun. I wouldn't say I'm a big fan.

I don't like do it every weekend. But I'm a good enough fan. I'll always do the mini golf. For some reason, I, you know, I'm not a big sports player, but I like the sports video games as well. There's something about sports video games that make them better than the actual sport,

especially when it comes to golf. Interesting. Watching golf on TV? No, not for me. attending, even playing golf? I've played a bit of golf in my time, but no, it's a good walk spoiled. But golf video games are surprisingly

compelling. Which is your favorite? We golf? Back in the day? Well, let me tell you, the best golf video game ever made is Mario Golf on the Game Boy Color. But that is now quite old. The golf games are, there are a lot of golf games out there.

Everybody's golf is pretty good. I haven't played any of these. I'm going to have to find a way. I'm sure I can get some emulated to play a GameCube game, no? Yeah, yeah, or a Game Boy game even. Did I say GameCube? I meant to say, no, I said Game Boy color, I think. Okay.

Yeah. This is, I'm losing on my nerd cred, because I never had a Game Boy. I never had a Game Cube. So I just, I hear game and I just, my brain was like, eh, you know, one and the same, which I do know that they're different. One's purple, I think, classically. The GameCube was purple, yeah. Yeah, and then the Game Boy is, they come in a bunch of different colors.

I do know folks. I did see people on the playground. That had them, okay? I just never did. Well, I'm getting to the age where I don't know games these days. The only games I remember now are games from, let's say, 20 years ago and previous. I don't keep up with games very much these days. So, you know, with golf games, it's really about do you want, well, with a lot of sports games,

is do you want hyper-realism? Sports games are pretty much the only games these days, I think, that are still pushing the realism aspect. games in general or like across all video games? I was talking last night to Ava about this and it's like, you know, the stage we're at with video games is almost like we've reached a plateau. I think, you know, it's been a thing for many years now that pushing realism is not really what games are about, right? The games that stand the test of time are the ones that,

not necessarily the ones that try to be high. hyper realistic in graphics or any other thing, but they have a proper direction. They have an art style. They have a, you know, a proper design. And for a while, you know, the games that were really pushing the cutting edge were things like the FPSs with their hyper focus on graphics. And I think the sports games, because the sports games do have this kind of hyper realism focus.

And part of the way they succeed in that is because they are, you know, in many cases, and they can bring out new rosters and they can bring out incremental updates to realism, effectively. But even there, you know, going back to golf games, you know, this is something I was saying. The important thing about a sports game, I think, is not, in fact, the graphics, but, you know, how well it plays. Sort of sounds simple to say, right? But there's a lot that goes into the feel and the touch of sports games in whatever sports. which is why I say that, you know, Mario Golf on the Game Boy Color

is one of the best golf games ever made. You know, you wouldn't think the Game Boy was capable, but the amount of feel they put into that game is pretty amazing. Well, this is awesome. We can have, like, a mini video games episode. Maybe we could do part one where we talk about just video games from a playing point of view,

but then also, too, I mean, I imagine most of our listeners know, but you worked in the games industry. About 23 years, yeah. Yeah, I worked for Electronic Arts. I worked for Blizzard, you know, so I worked for some... I didn't know you worked for EA. That's where I started. Well, I, you know, I worked at Bullfrog back in a day when they had been bought by EA.

Oh, did you ever go to the Vancouver campus or Burnaby campus? I did. Yeah, I visited Vancouver, I think, once. Wow. That's crazy. Yeah, so, I mean, I imagine most of our listeners know EA, big sports brand, but they don't know, is that I got to tour that place three different times because very randomly, I went to the National Science Fair three times in high school and you represent BC at the national level because that's where I lived.

And as a thank you for representing BC, half a year later in October, because the fair would be in like May, they would fly, well, everyone would go to Vancouver. If you didn't happen to live in Vancouver, they would fly you there. They would set you up in a fancy hotel and then they like take you all these tech companies. Like, I think one of the companies they took us to one time was SAP. And I was like, why are they taking us here? But the highlight was always going to EA, because EA was like in terms of like corporations. It's like a little mini Disneyland because it's got outdoor courts and they would show,

they would bring you by obviously the people that are testing games. Like that's their job. They like eight hours a day. They're just like. And then it's kind of funny is because as a kid in high school, you're like, wow, that's the dream job. But every some time you talk to these people, they're like, well, you got to understand. I'm playing the same level over and over and over again.

It's not like I'm playing the game and just like having fun. It's like, no, I'm doing it in this very odd way. Anyways, I have fond memories of going to the EA campus. And were you there just for some kind of like annual thing or just every once in a while work would necessitate you going out there? I don't remember why I visited Vancouver. I know that I did once. I don't remember what it was for us.

It was some get-together of engineers for some. something, I'm sure. But yeah, back then, that was where they did a bunch of sports titles, like you said, right? They did, was it FIFA there at the time? And was it Madden NFL? Yep, they definitely had FIFA. In fact, that's probably my, well, what are my fondest memories? I had a PS2. I convinced my parents to let me have a PS2 at the tail end of high school. And I had FIFA 2006. And I don't know what year they switched from the six or eight directional movements. So you're going to have to like give me the right terminology if you know it or help me

where you can. But I remember in FIFA at a certain point and 2006 was one of them, you would move with like the little joystick and it had eight different directions. And so you could very precisely like choose when you wanted to switch what is that 45 degrees. But then at a certain point they switched to what was called like omnidirectional. And so they had like all like whatever degrees of the 360 degrees. thing. And that made it much more difficult because, like, I could be running straight and then I would just switch and I'd be going 45 degrees. And anyways, I have very fond memories of FIFA 2006.

And that was definitely back then an EA label. But I know now that they lost it and they have something called. Yeah. I don't know exactly. But yeah, they lost the FIFA. They had the FIFA license for years and years and then they lost it probably a while ago now. Yeah. Now there's something called, I know it was like pro evolution soccer PES at one point in time. So that was a different franchise. As far as I know, that wasn't EA. That was a sort of competitor when EA had FIFA. Yeah.

So now they, now I can't, anyways, I don't really, I haven't, I never game seriously. But I had a PS2 at one point and I had an Xbox something at one point. And I've played a bit of computer games. But anyway, so you used to work at EA and then you worked at, was it Blizzard from there? I worked at EA in the UK for a while. That was where I started. Well, Bullfrog was the studio. But when I joined there in mid-95, it was already a wholly owned subsidiary of EA.

And over the next five, six years, you know, EA started to manage more and more. Then I worked for a company, a little British company called Kooju for a couple of years. back in the day they did a few things they did Microsoft train simulator I think okay those those games are actually huge driving simulators and flight simulators they're yeah oh yeah the rigs that you can see on

Instagram that people set up they get home from their driving job and then they go drive more well I put in my hours on things like Euro truck simulator it's it's highly addictive even though you'd think like what you know you're just driving around but it's like

I don't know it's a very addictive of a type of game. Yeah, yeah, it can be. Then I moved to EA, Los Angeles. Worked there for, I don't know, five years. Yeah, about five years. Then I moved to Blizzard. I worked for Blizzard for pretty much 10 years.

And then I left the games industry. So, yeah, I mean, we're talking about golf games. Should we talk about your other types of favorite games? I mean, Bryce every once in a while mentions his mud, whatever things. And I always think, man, that's the only game you ever bring up. is your mud thing well you know yeah I played a mud in college

of course like many of us did I like a bunch of different games you know funnily enough I've seldom worked on games that I normally played at the time but like I said I'm not a fan of golf in real life but golf video games are strangely compelling interesting

but you know games games are interesting because they you know to bring it to the topic of the podcast maybe working in games games is interesting because there are all kinds of things that go into programming a game. You know, there are lots and lots of different aspects. There are lots of, you're not just working in one place, or at least if you're in a big studio, there are lots of different kinds of engineers who specialize in maybe different things. You know, there's, to just run through

a very small sample, there's specialization in, well, graphics is obviously one, and that subdivides. animation is sort of a separate subfield of that. Networking, physics, AI, AI as it's called in games, gameplay, UI, audio, you know, I could go on and on. But there are lots of specializations available and lots of different problems, lots of interesting problems, you know. I spent most of my career as a, one of my specialities was network programming. Is that what you spent across the different companies that you worked at? That's typically what you were working on? A lot of the time, yes, especially in my early career. It was sort of lucky that the first game I worked on, they said, hey, we need someone to do the networking and I worked on it. And of course,

once you've done it once, then the next title, you kind of have the experience, so you get picked again. And it turned out that, of course, and this was back in like 1995, Bullfrog was a pretty forward-looking company because they did make their games to be multiplayer. And then, of course, when the internet came along and people got internet at home and it took off massively, then every game basically became a network game and it became sort of very good for my career that I was experienced in that. I mean, yeah, I mean, where should we take? I feel like I should just like, because I have very little experience or, you know, some

might say zero experience when it comes to the games industry. So I don't even know necessarily what are the right questions to ask here. But like, well, first I'll pause. Are there things that, you know, if you want to guide this, conversation. Maybe we'll just start there. We could talk about, we could talk about how different hard. The other thing about the games industry is like the hardware has been changing continually and a lot, you know, whether it's the console cycle or PC upgrades for a while, for the last three decades at least. Plus. But you know, as far as, as like algorithms or, you know,

or things like that that actually make a game work. Again, there are lots of things under the hood. You know, for example, path-finding algorithms, algorithms for just arranging the world, you know, algorithms for, and data structures for representing the world, whether it be three-dimensional or two-dimensional or what have you, for doing collision and physics.

You know, and then there's, like I was saying, all those specialities, like audio programs, for games is it whole whole whole whole whole whole speciality and that's sort of very very sort of low level concerns you know because the human eye is really really forgiving you know you can that's why television works at such a pitifully low frame rate right you can watch something at 30 frames a second like a more a movie at 24 frames a second historically right and your eyes just fine with that you you don't think there's anything wrong i was watching something last night and it was I don't know what you call it, but like stuttering a bit.

Like, I swear to God, the frame rate was like speeding up and slowing down. Admittedly, we were running this on a 15-year-old MacBook Pro. This MacBook Pro has got to go. It's, you know, it's losing Wi-Fi. It's got a bunch of issues. But, like, I was like, do you notice that? I was asking him my wife. I was like, do you notice that?

And she's like, notice what? And I was like, it kind of seems like it's, I don't know, the frame rate seems messed up. She's like, looks fine to me. And, I mean, that proves your point. Maybe I'm hallucinating stuff. Yeah, and certainly you can sort of tell the difference between, you know, 30 FPS and 60 FPS and higher. But in general, my point is that, you know, the human eye is way, way more forgiving than the ear. Yeah, that is true.

You can hear glitches that are absolutely, you know, minuscule compared to what your eye would tolerate. So audio programming is a special kind of real-time sensitive domain. Yeah, that, I mean, Timor, he works in the audio space, right? Yeah, he's done a lot of audio programming in his career. Yeah, I know, I think he's currently the co-host of CPPCast, right? That podcast. I think you have Matt Rappair. Oh, that's right.

Well, so wait, who are the current hosts? Matt and Jason. Jason came back. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Timor and Phil were hosting it for a while. That's what you're doing. Yeah, yeah, well, because it's gone through.

Were they the second? set of hosts? So Rob started it. Jason joined him at like episode three or something. So they were the first set. And then it went on the hayt us after Rob and Jason retired for a while.

And then Phil and Timor picked it up. And then they were doing it for a while. I think they were, I think they'd come to a point but they weren't doing it regularly anymore. And then Jason picked it back up and Matt joined him. Right, right.

So now we're on three editions. And technically, yeah, Phil has been on like four different, because I've listened to all of them. He's been on four different podcasts. There was CPP chat. He was on CPPCAST. He also had no diagnostic required.

And I swear he has like another fourth podcast out there. NDR. You never listen to that one? No, no. The podcast world is so saturated. I don't have time to listen to everything. Yeah, that's true. I think there was only like 10 episodes or something.

It was fleeting in its existence. Anyways, you were saying that audio is much less forgiving than video. because yeah anytime you ever hear any kind of hiccup or you're like it it's it's literally jarring it can like ruin yeah you you hear clicks and pops yeah that might last last only you know a matter of microseconds yeah and you're able to hear that but your eye your eye is fine with you know pretending like it's fluid motion when you're only seeing 30 images a second something yeah i wonder what the i'm not sure if we if we know the answer that question. Why is that? Is it? Are I, like, processing, video, like your brain's image processing

is much less equipped than, like, audio, and therefore it can only take in so much, whereas the... Maybe. I don't know. We'd have to ask... Some biologist or neuroscientist. Maybe an evolutionary biologist slash neuroscientist, yes. Anyway, so, I mean, so you spent most of your time in the networking space, but there's all these different algorithms within games programming, and correct me if I'm wrong, you were doing C++ plus basically the entire time, correct? Yes, yeah. Although later in my career, you know, my career in games really finished before,

I would say before the large-scale commoditization of engines, right? Or just when that was coming about. So in other words, we had Unreal, we had Unity, but there was still a lot of, and especially at Blizzard, there was still a lot of in-house engine work, right? And so in particular, I'm thinking of Unity, which basically means that games are written in C-sharp now, if you're using Unity a lot of the time. But, you know, there's still a lot of C++ that goes on in the performance-ensitive parts, in graphics, I think, in various parts of games. But yes, and I, and I, although you say I did networking for most of my career, it's more true to say that I divert the speciality in networking.

Later in my career, I moved more into a lead programmer role where I was sort of doing everything. And by the time I'd spent 20 plus years in the industry, I'd done most of the programming jobs that are in games. Was there any part of that stack of work that you found the most interesting or rewarding to work on? Or they all have their different pros and maybe all pros, no cons or pros and cons? You know, they're all, I just liked, I've always just liked programming, making things work, building things. The good feeling you get when something is working well like it should. And, you know, in games, that feeling is available because you have a very direct measure of what working well means. It means fitting in the frame time.

You know, it means it means not having any visible artifacts. And a lot of times, yeah, it means so there's a lot of kind of optimization that occurs to make sure, you know, because because you're trying to run what is supposed to be a real time simulation many times or present that illusion, right? And there are things you have to do and you have to fit within the 16.6 milliseconds. or whatever it is, you know. The frame time, back in the day, it used to be 60 hertz. These days, consoles can run at variable frame rates above 60, you know. And so it's almost like in the old days, it was very much, actually, in the bad old days, you might say, it was just, you know,

very much kind of lockstep rendering and simulation. But, you know, over the years, as hardware got more powerful, as systems got more decoupled, and as we got a, better handle on things. Now, you know, you don't, or I should say now, I mean for the last 20 years, probably when I say now, you know, you don't, you don't run everything at the fixed cadence. You run things at variable cadences and the touch points where they intersect are well defined, you know, so you, for instance, you don't run, you know, take a very, very simple example. If you're running some kind of AI, say path finding, right, you don't, you don't need to be necessarily,

or enemy smarts, enemy AI, right? You don't need to be updating that every, every frame, right? You run that on a typically on a much lower cadence than the rendering, right? The other thing to know is going back to realism, you know, I think, I think, like we were saying, sports games were one of the few genres that were absolutely pushing the realism. FPS to some extent in rendering was pushing realism. But, you know, very early on in my career, I was disabreact. of the notion that games are about making things try to be real.

They're not about realism. They're about fun. They're about smoke and mirrors a lot of the time. Yeah, like I said, I'm not a big gamer, but I do watch. I've mentioned it on the YouTube or on the podcast, the guy named Dunkie, I don't know, videos. He's like a, I don't know what you call him, YouTube video game comedian. He makes these little 10-minute videos where he reviews video games, but just kind of with, like, comedic banter. and so I've seen a bunch of like different games just because I watch this guy's YouTube channel

and a lot of times these more recent ones like this is so sad because I'm not going to remember any of the names of them but like you're right they don't they almost are going for like this kind of like I don't know if hyper realistic or surreal like look where the grass is like clearly it's flowing in the wind and like the physics engine's really good and it looks really nice but it is not at all like it doesn't actually look like a field of grass but like I've seen a lot of these more recent games

that kind of have one of them was done by Jonathan Blow too it was the his not his most recent one that he's releasing right now but the last one that was like a kind of puzzle game but it was on this island and the water looks really nice and like

it looks beautiful but it doesn't... Witness are you talking about witness witness yes yes yes I don't know how I ended up, did you ever play witness? Yes, I played through witness, yes. Okay, so I mean we're going to have an interesting discussion about witness. I ended up on a deep rabbit hole. I don't exactly know how.

You know, sometimes you're just on YouTube, you click one video, you click another video. And I was watching a bunch. I watched this like one hour review of the game with a bunch of spoilers. And then I watched this other video. And then I watched like Jonathan Blow reacting to that guy's review saying that like people that don't have an understanding of game design, like shouldn't be reviewing. And anyways, the point, the point being, very interesting. Never played it.

I basically know the game, though, and it's got some very interesting aspects to it. And the point being, it's very beautiful. And like the water, you know, kind of has this, like realism to it. It looks very, you know, nice. Is there a word for that? As far as I remember, witness, isn't it, cell shaded? Cell shaded. You'll have to explain to both me and the listener.

It looks like a cartoon. cell. That's the rendering style. Yes. I mean, maybe that's what I've been trying to describe this whole time. Is that like, but the thing is, is that... Think of like, Legend of Zelda Wind Waker, if you know, that game. Yes, yes, yes, yes. That's a cell-shaded game, right? Okay, so this is the word I'm looking for is a lot of the games have this cell-shadedness,

or I guess it's just a, you just described it, it's cell-shaded. And some of it, like, you can see that, like, the physics of the grass and, like, the physics of the... Everything looks really smooth and really nice, but it doesn't look... real, but like the physics look real enough and whatnot. Anyways, and I've just seen a lot of games recently that, like, I don't know if this is a new style and it just became popular because for whatever reason, it's easier to render like smoothly than compared to like, I don't know, what's the cyberpunk 277, that one that had like,

you know, your GTX, et cetera. Maybe you can tell us about self-shading. If you know, like, you know, what are the... I mean, cell shading is just a style, right? it's a style produced by like a shader on the GPU it's just what you're saying I think is that and I agree the graphical style you know like we were saying it's not all about realism realism is one style of graphics

but the graphics that tend to the games that tend to go the distance the games that you go back to and still think look good 10 years later 20 years later are the ones that are properly art directed and usually did not try to go for realism because 20 years ago, we couldn't do realism like we could do today. It just doesn't, it looks great at the time, but when you go back, it doesn't look good, right? Yeah, interesting. And yeah, do you want to do a mini review? A mini review of The Witness? I mean, I think it's a great game that, you know, the Witness is interesting almost not for its graphics, but for the kind of game it is, which is an exploratory, discovery-driven game,

right the great thing about the witnesses like you're you dropped on this island you don't know really what it's about what you're trying to do there are no enemies to kill nothing kind of classical kind of objective you just have to explore and figure out how to progress and that's it's a great kind of discovery driven game in that way it's a puzzle game and at its heart right as as you find out by playing but yeah that that's what makes the witness good I mean, I was entertained just watching the video of people playing it. Be sure to check these show notes, either in your podcast app or at ADSP thepodcast.com, for links to anything we mentioned in today's episode, as well as a link to a get-up discussion

where you can leave thoughts, comments, and questions. Thanks for listening. We hope you enjoyed and have a great day. I am the anti-brice.