What It’s All About
You look at massively multiplayer online games as a collection of systems and code. You love watching players encounter the new features and systems you’ve written, allowing them to interact with the world and perhaps even create new things within it. Item creation, guild systems, spells and abilities – anything the players can interact with is in your purview. During the design process you’re all about prototyping game systems, and both before and after release you want to make sure the logic on the server that governs these systems is sound. Building upon the fundamental server architecture, you and the other gameplay programmers code the systems players will utilize over and over again.

A Typical Day
You spend your morning working with the design team going over a prototype for a player character inventory management system. It’s important you determine what underlying technology is necessary if you’re going to make the system work. After coming up with a basic plan you meet with the server and AI engineers to make certain the technology groundwork exists to implement the feature. You outline a basic specification and the wiki and pass it around for input. While you are waiting on feedback, you hit the bug database and knock off the last remaining issues with the last system you implemented.

Who You Work With the Most
You collaborate with the other programmers before implementing any new features or procedural changes, trying to get the best idea on how to tackle any issue. You also spend a lot of time working with the design team. You’re part game designer yourself, but with your programming knowledge you’re able to ask questions and steer the game designers toward feature solutions that take advantage of your existing code and technology. When they propose a feature, you can come back with mechanical solution suggestions that make sense, both to the programmers and the designers.

What You’ve Done Before
3-5+ years C/C++ programming experience
5+ years game development experience
Experience working closely with designers
Excellent and self-driven optimizer
Passion for games

This job listing originated on Gamasutra.com, the game industry's leader.