What are the typical day-to-day tasks of an entry level games programmer?

What I would like to know is: What are the daily duties of a graduate programmer in the games industry workplace? Is it mostly coding, analysing, designing, or what?

Thank you.

P.S. I am in my second year of University at the moment and am working towards specialising in games programming, specifically gameplay, tools or UI programming.

Answer

Based on my experience (in the United States, hired out of college onto a project that had just gotten out of prototyping and was a team of about 50, was then cancelled, then we went on to make two more games over the four years I was there with a total developer base of about 200),

• You'll probably spend about 50-70% of your time programming. In this time, I'm including the 'fun stuff' like getting to make a really clever feature, as well as the times you're staring at a memory dump for 8 hours straight trying to figure out what crashed. Maybe 25-50% of that is actual sit-down-at-your-keyboard-and-get-in-the-zone long-form programming.


• Another 15-25% in meetings and administrative tasks, like bug triage, meetings about bug triage, scheduling, high-level documentation for other programmers and producers, email, whole project/company status updates, and so on. This depends on how much autonomy you have - if you have no autonomy, then you'll get to spend more time programming, because you'll spend less time setting your own schedule. If you take more control of your schedule, you might get to work on more interesting things, but then you need to spend time doing this stuff.



• Another 15-25% helping designers/artists, attending creative meetings actually about the game, keeping up to date with game design documents, and so on.

As you go up in pay grade, the time you spend programming is probably going to go down. You're going to have to make more administrative decisions, be called upon to help less experienced people on the team, and spend more time doing documentation and code / architecture review. On the plus side, the quality of the programming will probably go up; you'll get to work on more interesting features (and more frustrating bugs).

Whether the time you spend in helping designers and artists goes up, down, or doesn't really change, depends on the area you want to work in. If you want to work on UI, tools, and gameplay, expect that time to increase to upwards of 50% as you gain more experience. You'll be sitting down with senior designers to plan and demo new tools and see how they use the existing ones. Unfortunately, this time also comes out of your programming schedule.