Oculus VR is known for its groundbreaking hardware, but 泰德DiNola 是在帮助公司在软件方面取得进步吗. 作为开发者关系工程师, Ted consults one-on-one with Oculus VR game developers by jumping into their code bases 和 providing high-end technical 和 design feedback. Ted got here by parlaying his foundational knowledge from 满帆 和 his prior job experiences into positions that utilize both his skills 和 his passion for video games.

Ted fell in love with video games when he started playing the sci-fi adventure game 家园 13岁时. He realized he could use Lua, a scripting language, to modify all of the game levels. "It is one of the first [games] that got me interested in underst和ing how games were made,他说.

Ted made his own small Java 和 Flash games throughout his teens. He pursued a college degree in physics, but the field didn't speak to him the way games did. 泰德开始玩一种叫做 星之剑 和 met the game's creator, Martin Cirulis, through gameplay.

“做一个认真而有抱负的孩子, 我联系了他, 我说, “嘿,马丁, I think I'd like to get into making games professionally, 你们需要实习生吗?’，”泰德回忆道.

马丁响亮地答应了, 和 Ted flew up to Vancouver for three months to help Kerberos Productions launch their 星之剑 扩张. The experience in that studio gave Ted a taste of what a career in the game industry could be like.

“他们让我做每件事的一点点，”他说. "I was doing a little bit of scripting to try 和 help automate some of their design stuff. I was doing a little bit of debugging… I was fixing some of their models. I was also making [Martin's] tea in the morning," Ted laughs.

When Ted returned to the US, he was determined to find a new undergraduate program focused on gaming. 满帆的 游戏开发学士 符合要求. The school's skills-based learning immediately started setting him up for success.

"The cool lessons about how to think constructively about your systems, 关于设计, 如何让你的代码真正优秀和灵活, 在数学方面, 通过算法, 诸如此类的东西 ... those are key fundamentals that will stick with you forever,泰德说.

Ted graduated from 满帆 in the midst of the Great Recession, but he used his new game development skills to build his own projects. He leveraged one of those games into a job as a Development Director for game studio Trendy Entertainment, then helped create 3D virtual patients for Shadow Health. From there, he hopped over to the Bay Area 和 worked on mobile games for Zynga 和 PLAYSTUDIOS.

在那之后, he reached the point in his career where he had more freedom to make choices about the types of games he created.

他说道:“我并不喜欢社交手机游戏. “这是一个问题, ‘嘿, there's a morality to game design'… You're trying to keep people playing, 和 spending their money 和 spending their time… Once you're settled, 你的选择也变多了, think about what's really important to you as a developer."

Ted left the world of social mobile games 和 went independent for a few years. He parlayed his experiences from that time into an exciting position as a Senior Engineer at Funomena在美国，他曾与业内知名人士一起工作 罗宾Hunicke 和 凯塔高桥. 在Funomena工作了一年之后, 脸谱网 came knocking 和 pursued him for his current job as a Developer Relations Engineer at Oculus VR.

“我得到了这份我甚至都不知道存在的工作 ... they reached out to me because I had been working in the industry, 尽我最大的努力,泰德说. "Now I have a job where, rather than working on one game for a year or two, I'm working on 10 games. 我在帮助我们的内部团队, 努力让我们的开发者拥有更美好的时光.

"This is a really good games-adjacent change of pace," he continues. “我仍然沉浸在游戏产业中, 但也得到了很好的支持, 在我可以加速的位置."

Taking advantage of 满帆的 learning environment prepared Ted for the first few years of his career, when he was still figuring out how he fit into the gaming world. 满帆 students who have their sights set on the industry should do the same.

"You don't have the same constraints that you'll have when you're working at a studio, 你有时间安排吗, 或者预算指导方针, 或者只是说，嘿, 你是大三学生, 所以你在做别人的事,’”他建议道. 所以要充分利用这段时间去探索你所能做的事情, 找出你对游戏感兴趣的地方."