Question: do you think that you could program a video game if you switched jobs to game development

Jonny Brooks-Bartlett answered on 13 Jun 2015:

I think I could program a simple video game if I switched jobs. But I probably couldn’t do something as complicated as a game for the Xbox or PlayStation. Games that big require huge teams of people but I could probably work on a single aspect of a game.

For example games usually need a physics engine. Fifa needs one to control how the ball will moved when it’s kicked or hits the ground. Even animated movies like Despicable Me needs them to control how hair and clothes move in the wind. I wouldn’t mind doing something like that.

Writing the code is just a formal thing you have to do to achieve what you want to do. The hardest and most important part is working out what it is you want to achieve.
For example my most recent program included a part where I made a plot with lots of arrows that need to join up. The hardest part was working out the maths for the position and sizes of the arrows. Then the code was just translating the maths into code. It’s like knowing what you want to say in English and needing to write it in French. If you know French, then the translation is easy.
Here’s a link to the plot I was talking about: https://github.com/JonnyCBB/StructureFactorCorrelations/blob/master/test/reflectionplot12_hkl-0-2-0.pdf