So I'm a Professional Game Developer!

I love writing games as a hobby, but I never thought that I would enter the industry. After all, one hears these horror stories about overworked and underpaid game devs working on grossly mismanaged projects who toil away for little more than the satisfaction of making games for a living. So my post-graduation job search wasn't looking for game-related positions at all. Then, through an unlikely and serendipitous sequence of events, I got connected (through my gf's Mechanical Engineering prof) with two guys at a small startup called ROBLOX who were looking to hire a fourth engineer. I just accepted a job offer there and I start on Tuesday. It's going to be totally sweet! This position at ROBLOX seems like a ridiculously good fit for me. They are building online games that involve worlds made out of virtual Lego blocks (by which I mean "generic toy building blocks"). Players enter game environments where everything is made out of small bricks and every brick is physically simulated - meaning the entire world is destructible. There's an alpha version of the ROBLOX game client on the company website, which I've been having some fun with today. Currently the game has two modes. You can visit the sandbox environments that other players have made, or you can enter the experimental multiplayer third person shooter game and run around a large level lobbing rockets at other people (the build was a little unstable today, but it's getting fixed). I made a ten minute visit to "arkitect's Place" and took some screenshots. This office building is made out of 2500 individual bricks (!!!) Being an intrepid explorer, I enter the building and start climbing up the stairs Eventually, I make it to the top of the building From where I am standing, I use my rocket launcher to fire a rocket at the roof. This causes pieces to fly everywhere. One hits me and I fall off! Playing with the rocket launcher is a lot of fun. I just blasted the front of the office building. The ROBLOX engine does an incredible job with the game physics. I'm running on a cruddy 4-year old laptop and I get a reasonable framerate in this level. Anyone who has any experience with physics engines such as ODE or Tokamak will appreciate how hard it is to simulate a stack of bricks, let alone an entire office building. 2500 rigid bodies is a lot for my machine - in some of my other projects Tokamak and ODE both top out at around 400 for realtime simulation. Even more incredible is how well ROBLOX handles physics in multi-user environments. My friend behind me lost his arm somewhere. Whoops. I decide to go exploring in the rubble of the office building. I can't quite get up the stairs. I try to blast the debris out of my way, but it doesn't work out like I had planned. Woot! Life is awesome.