Stopping by today to offer us an insight into his world is lead core programmer on Lords of Football Domenico. We've been able to pull him away from all the 1's and 0's to tell us how he got started in the gaming world and more...

Tell us a bit about yourself and how you got into the games industry?
Games have always been a part of my life. (Not so) long time ago, when I was a kid, I visited a friend of mine who just received a gift for his birthday: a Commodore 64. That day I discovered a brand new world made of pixelated characters and synthesized sounds and my life had a new goal: writing computer games. At the beginning of the 90s my friends and I  decided to start developing our own game, and since we read in a magazine that games were made with this magic "thing" called C++, we went to a computer shop to buy it. “Hi, we would like to buy the C++”. Laughs. Ok, not a nice start :)

A few years later, after I managed to find a decent compiler, I started programming and joined the Computer Science Engineering faculty of the Polytechnic of Turin. At that time I got my first job in the games industry at Impressionware, a small start-up company which developed games for mobile devices. The company  always had many projects in production at once and a small team dedicated to each one. We were supporting 30+ different families of devices ranging from very low level hardware to smartphones, which was very useful for learning some dark secrets about optimization. The most valuable lesson I learned there, however, was how to produce a full game starting from scratch and that when the gameplay is completely up and running you are not even remotely close to the end.

Describe what happens in a typical day for you?
Wake up (late) in the morning, a bit of workout, breakfast and then Geniaware. The first thing I do every day is to check the nightly builds and bother anyone who broke something, then I check activities of the other developers and finally I start coding or fixing stuff. Generally I spend half of my time jumping here and there in the office supporting gameplay developers or discussing with the other core people about our activities. At night time I leave the office and sometimes I go running with a couple of teammates.

You're the Lead Core programmer, what does this mean and what part of the game do you actually work on?
The Core department is responsible for a number of low-level modules in the game. My duties consist in managing the development of our game engine, coordinating the efforts of the other Core developers, giving support to the gameplay department and porting the game on X360. I have been here since the very first day of development, which allowed me to face many of the challenges that lie behind the production of a modern game like rendering, physics, multi-threading, memory management, I/O management and 3rd party tech integration. We are also responsible for all the tools which are part of our internal production pipeline.

The ultimate goal of the Core department is to write the technology that allows artists and gameplay developers to express their creativity and deliver a great game. Being a lead for me is nothing more than having a clear vision of how things are architectured in a project and being the first source of aid to the other developers. Management-wise instead I try to involve as much as possible the other members of the Core group, as all of them are very skilled programmers and together we can usually face new challenges better and faster.

For you what is the best thing about working in the games industry (apart from the obvious)?
Besides all obvious aspects, the challenge is  for sure one of the best things. Creating complex games is not easy especially today as users are always expecting stunning graphics, deep gaming experiences and so forth. A modern game has to push millions of triangles per second on the video cards, perform a number of operations and be highly responsive at the same time, which is something requiring attention in every detail of your code.

What is your all time favorite game and why?
There are a number of games I like, but the one I prefer is Final Fantasy VII for sure. That was the very first time in which I experienced that level of immersion for a game. I do believe that a good game should be able to deliver emotions to its players and Final Fantasy VII was indeed able to do it. Its story had everything: adventure, drama, friendship, love, comedy. Its characters were so well shaped that it was impossible to have a favorite party and then not care about their back stories. Moreover its battle system, the huge amount of items you could find and all the side quests were pushing me to addiction: I had to complete the game three times, getting all the possible items and beating all the secret bosses before saying “enough”.   

You maybe the healthiest person in the office, what is your fitness regime like?
Ok mate, you need some glasses :)
Let's say that I try to keep my weight under control.. I do some workout every now and then and I go running twice per week. Running has a kind of philosophic meaning for me: it is just you and the road and you end up in forgetting about everything else. It is that kind of “pause” from the real world that everybody needs to get rid of all the bad stuff accumulated day by day. Finally, every Wednesday we play football in the Genia Championship. Honestly, I pretend to be playing, you can consider me much more as an obstacle for other players than a good footballer...

So is this how you advise the gameplay team?

Thanks Domenico for taking the time to answer our questions.