I will be graduating from University of Kansas with a bachelor's degree in Computer Science and I have decided that I want to get involved in the game industry. Unfortunately the University which I attend didn't offer much in the game programming field. So I have been looking for entry level positions at any game company I could find and I have applied for two positions at Cryptic Studios, one being an inter and the other being a Jr programmer. Cryptic studio has sent me two emails regarding both possible jobs and have told me that I need to take this pre-screen test in order to be eligible for the job. I just wanted to know if anyone has any suggestions about what I might see on these pre-screen tests and what material I should review before taking them. Thanks for any suggestions and any help, I truly will appreciate it.

I don't work in the game industry and I just "applied" to Cryptic Studios to see what the process is like and now I have an email telling me I need to take an online timed C test. They prefer tests completed in 3-4 hours but should schedule 5 hours??

Can't wait to give it a shot.

As far as content, I am not sure. I don't see any reference to C++ which would lead me to believe this is just based on C. I have a feeling that there is not much you could do to prepare for this test if you didn't already have a good handle on the C language. But than again, maybe it isn't as bad as it sounds.

What I would definitely review would be C based memory allocation and pointer arithmetic. I would guess that there might be "find what is wrong with this code" type questions in which case make sure if they are working with strings that they are null-terminating them correctly, not going out of bounds on any arrays etc..

I'm just rambling a few things that comes to the top of my head so take it with grain of salt.

Good luck!

I just posted about this 2 weeks ago.

LINK

Good luck. I consider myself a very good programmer for coming out of college, and it was hard. My advice is to design for a while before coding. Their question itself sucks format-wise. It's gonna take you like 15mins to figure out what is actually supposed to happen in the second question.

There is no real prep you can do. Either your good with pointers and STL, or you aren't. If you don't consider yourself an amazing coder, then your probably not going to get it done.

What position did you apply for dpadam450? Thanks for the comments from both of you I appreciate it.

I dont recall. All software engineering jobs are going to be the same though. It was whatever non-senior engineering positions they posted for. It's going to be the same test. As stated in my post, they are spamming job boards, so either people are finishing the test and they just dont like them personally, or nobody is finishing the test. Because again, today, a repost for their company and the same positions, are up again.

Quote: I attend didn't offer much in the game programming field

The questions werent game specific at all. Its more of a school c/c++ programming assignment.

Again, I just tried and had to stop because it was going to take too much longer to finish and since they are complaining about how fast you can code, I quit. Dont beat yourself up if the same happens. Send me a PM after you take it, I'm just curious to see if you finish it and in how much time.

Quote: Original post by dpadam450

Quote: I attend didn't offer much in the game programming field

The questions werent game specific at all. Its more of a school c/c++ programming assignment.

that is no surprising. They're not hiring you to develop them whole mmorpg game engine (which you never could on your own anyway unless you're truly uber programmer) or to develop tiny games, they're hiring you to do coding of some small piece for mmorpg, which most likely wont in the slightest bit be what you'd call 'game related'.