How to find a job at a European game studio

I need advice

Gimlycpp said:
I'm currently learning C++ … I'm in Russia... Are there any options for remote work at a European game studio? I have no commercial experience.

It's going to be tough getting remote work as a beginner, and with the Ukraine war going on, Russia is under sanctions (and not popular with Europeans). Your best bet is to volunteer for some hobby projects, get your name in the credits of some finished/released hobby/amateur games. Working on some hobby games will give you some useful exposure to game dev culture and build you some contacts. Browse our forums (use the Browse tab in the Forums page) to find our Hobby Project Classifieds community.

Thanks for help

How old are you? Are you still a school student? Then you are in the lucky position where you have lots of free time to learn without having to work a job simultaneously. The best way to get a job in game dev is to have a portfolio of high quality hobby projects under your belt. If you are already an adult, it will be harder to acquire enough expertise to get a job as an engine developer, as the number one thing required is practice. It is still possible, though, even for an adult, but it will take much longer, as adults have less time. Or if you are a university student and got time to waste, that is also a great time for personal skill development.

I think you should look up Casey Muratori ("Molly Rocket") and watch his talks. Also for doing engine development, look into data oriented design (Mike Acton's talks are great, and there's also a free book). Learning about memory layout, cachelines, prefetch patterns, etc. is important and can easily make a 10x performance difference in a program. Additionally, I recommend studying OpenGL in depth. This interactive diagram helped me a lot in finally penetrating the confusing documentation on how OpenGL works. OpenGL is still the lingua franca of graphics (it runs everywhere), and also the most approachable for beginners. Especially OpenGL ES 2.0 (WebGL) and 3.0 (WebGL 2) are highly relevant for GPU-accelerated graphics in the browser. Once you mastered those, you can branch off into DirectX, WebGPU, and Vulkan, if you want.

You should also learn a bit of assembly in order to understand what exactly the CPU does when you give it C++ code. You don't have to become an ASM expert, but you need a good grasp on what the CPU does, and what actions on the CPU have which performance characteristics (latency vs. throughput — such as being able to issue multiple memory loads in parallel, while each memory load can easily take dozens of computations worth of time to finish) in order to know exactly what C++ code you need to write to get the machine to do exactly what you want it to do in the most performant way. For looking up the CPU performance characteristics, uops.info is a great site. It lets you look up the latency, throughput, and port usage of various x86 instructions on various CPU generations. It helps you get a general grasp on what generelly is a performant program and what isn't.

I personally use glfw and OpenGL whenever I do graphics programming. I recommend starting with OpenGL 1.1, then going to OpenGL 2, and finally OpenGL 3. That is a nice progression of complexity over time, with fast early results. Going straight to modern OpenGL with no prior knowledge can be a bit daunting.

Finally, there's also audio programming, for that I would recommend looking into OpenAL-soft. It's a very simple to use audio library that lets you experiment with outputting audio waveforms directly to the speakers.

There are many specialised fields of engine design, from graphics to audio, to controls, asset handling, tooling, and many more. Programming-wise, you need to be able to write robust, highly performant code, regardless of what field you want to specialise in. Also, don't try to build another Unity or Unreal engine. Come up with a small game idea and build an engine that fulfills exactly that game's needs and nothing more. General-purpose game engines are completely different from single-purpose engines that are made for a specific game. If you don't know what your game needs, you can't write a good engine for that game.

Edit: had a typo, accidentally wrote “performance” where it should have read “latency”…