About 6 months ago, I was contacted by a fellow in Austria. I had apparently impressed him with some programming work I did for a Quake-like game I created with 3D Gamestudio, and, since he was writing a small shooter of his own, he wanted to hire me as a programmer.

The man, as it turns out, happens to own a small game company known as Icevalk Entertainment. He has already designed and published some good budget games, as you can see. So this guy isn't some 12 year old lamer who thinks he's a CEO of some make-believe game company. (Who hasn't seen this before?)

Needless to say, I accepted the job. And, after many long weeks of programming far into the night, I've finally finished programming the entire game in only 6 months.

I know what you're thinking: "The game can't be anything big if it only took one guy 6 months to write it.." But really, the programming is only a small fraction of the game. The design is being done by somebody else. And remember: back in the days when games weren't a billion dollar industry, it took only months to write a solid game. Even Wolfenstein was written in only 6 months.

Now the one thing that kind of bugs me is that when he hired me, we agreed that by the time the job was done I would have been paid a total of $200. Now that I look back at it, that's very, very little. I should've asked for more, but at the time I don't think I realized what kind of a job I was undertaking. Besides, I don't like selling my abilities for a higher price than I think they're worth.

All in all though, working for this guy was a great experience for me. As my first serious job as a game programmer, it taught me a lot about responsibility and working with others. Also, since the game is not being produced by a professional game company, I got a lot of extra wiggle room. There wasn't really any deadlines; if I got caught up in school/life for a week, I could forget about my job until I had free time again.

So, there you go. I'm pretty happy right now.

Awesome!
What was the game?

The game's still heavy in development, but I believe the game's working title is Veritas (Latin for Vice).

When I signed on to be a programmer, I didn't really become a part of any team. The work was simply outsourced to me. I did get a very early alpha of the game to help me along, though, and it happened to include several levels. It all looks very good, I can tell you that.

BTW, I just realized that it's already June, so I guess I've been working on it for 9 months.

Sorry for the unnecessary specification, but "Veritas" means "Truth" in latin.

Ah, that's right. Veritas does mean truth. I thought that verus meant truth, but I did a search and it seems that it means verify.

Lol, 3 years of Latin and I didn't get any of those words right. I'm completely out of practice. Oh well, I don't care anyway.

That's awesome! Hopefully, one day, I will be able to do something similar.