Business apps are a piece of cake compared to games. I could rip out 2 or 3 business apps in the time it would take to write one good game. I guess that's an advantage. One disadvantage is that you're controlled by your users a lot more than in the gaming community.

I work for a company out on the West Coast (come to #gamedev if you want to know what it is ).

I like my job (application coding), and it's a lot more difficult than some of the game-related code I've had to write, namely because I have to write code that is compatible with a very very large group of devs, even though my specific product only has about 5 devs working on it right now.

But even though my job is fun, nothing beats creating something completely on your own initiative. Like a lot of ppl here, I've been bitten by the 3d graphics bug, and am currently developing a scene-graph API on my own. What will happen, I'm not too sure.

I'm 22, been programing and designing games since I was in first grade. Started with an Apple IIe, moved to a 386 with Turbo C++, 486 with Borland C++ 3.0, Pentium with VC++ 2.0 (and the first version of DX), and now finally a PII with VC++ 6 and DX7.

Think DX is rough? The Apple IIe had a color palette of 4 colors - purple, green, blue, and this sick magenta/orangish looking color. If you tried to put purple too close to blue, or green next to orange, you'd get big blocks of bleeding color around the pixels.

Also, if your program got too big, it would overflow into gfx memory, and you'd see all these weird dots on the screen... and if you cleared the screen, you lost code.

Mason McCuskey
Spin Studios
www.spin-studios.com