eyao

San Mateo, CA (no telecommute)

The Playforge is hiring software engineers!

We make mobile social freemium games currently focused on the iOS platform. Our first game, Zombie Farm, was Apple's top grossing freemium game of 2010 and continues to remain on the top grossing charts to this day.

In this role you will help us design and develop the server infrastructure and game APIs to support the over 15 million players on our social games.

Candidates should feel comfortable with PHP, MySQL, and some javascript/css. We will be integrating Redis into our stack soon.

http://theplayforge.com/jobs.html contact: [email protected]

Judging from his current app up right now on Touch Arcade, it looks like it goes straight to iTunes (probably hits his server first to record where it came from).

it has become a gaming platform, but its games are nowhere near the quality of DS games.

Sorry if there was some misunderstanding - what I meant by a 'core' gamer (and I hate this term) is one who doesn't play hardcore, but someone who is familiar with and plays in the more traditional gaming industry (which is our target market). Whether they be a casual gamer or not, I don't care, but if they can discuss all those things you just did in that huge paragraph and carry a conversation with me about them then that's what I'm looking for.

The problem is, trying to talk to someone who's only knowledge of gaming is Wii and iPhone about traditional gaming tends to go nowhere in my experience, whereas talking to a traditional gamer about the Wii and iPhone still leads to interesting conversation and ideas as those "casual" games are pretty much small extensions of traditional gaming.

Here's my personal advice. While there are plenty of companies hiring strategies to look at to get ideas on how to accomplish getting the "best person" I would first take a step back and evaluate on what's important to you and your team and then filter based off that - be creative if you have to in order to get what you want.

While Frocer touched upon a majority of what we did, I'll throw in my interviewing experiences. We are partly in the video game industry so my #1 requirement was the applicant MUST have video game playing experience (of the 'core' variety) and the more the better. I just couldn't see anyone who only played Wii Sports or Bejeweled on the iPhone could comprehend what we do and therefore unable to help the team in any sort of discussion beyond the technical. So that was what was most important to me and that was what I filtered on and not surprisingly, I had a good feeling immediately after each interview on whether or not I wanted them.

My interview consisted of no stupid puzzles or whatever cause it was of no use to me. Show me you are technically proficient (of which a lot were, otherwise why waste time applying for the job) and then show me you understand video games by carrying an intelligent conversation with me about let's say your favorite xbox 360 game, which smash bros was the best, or why world of warcraft is both the greatest and worst game ever, etc. You'd be surprised on how many people couldn't do that.

Also I'm seconding the reference/portfolio thing. The more you can find about their past, the better the idea you will have about their future.

I am with MyGameMug and we are definitely moving out there. Can't be in the gaming industry without being near the big game publishers/developers!

I'm with this start up as well, and I want to resonate that this has been a huge problem for us. We have been getting a ton of bounced emails so if anyone has recommendations on what to do with those (the ones that actually look legit) then please let us know!