Game Developer Interview Questions

Working fluency in linear algebra and trigonometry, applied rather than proved. The recurring questions are the geometric meaning of dot and cross products with gameplay uses, why quaternions avoid gimbal lock, how to interpolate smoothly, and basic collision and raycast reasoning. You are rarely asked to derive anything, but hesitation on the dot product is a common early elimination because it appears in so much day-to-day gameplay code.

Platform and performance detail. State the platforms you shipped on, the target frame rate and hardware, and at least one concrete optimisation with before and after numbers — "cut frame time from 22ms to 14ms on Switch by batching draw calls and pooling projectiles" tells a studio more than a list of engines. Also name the systems you personally owned, since team credits are otherwise ambiguous, and include a playable link or repository where you can.

Both, in different segments. Unity dominates mobile, indie and much of the mid-size market and uses C#. Unreal dominates AAA, and its C++ requirement raises the technical bar in ways that transfer well to general engineering. Pick based on the studios you want: mobile and indie leans Unity, console and AAA leans Unreal. Deep knowledge of one plus the underlying fundamentals — memory, rendering, maths — matters far more than surface exposure to both.

It helps substantially but it is not the only route. A finished, polished small game demonstrates more than an unfinished ambitious one, because shipping is itself the skill studios are checking for. Game jams, mods, and a technical demo that solves a genuinely hard problem — a custom renderer feature, a networked prototype, a performance-constrained port — all work. What does not work is a portfolio of tutorial-following projects, which reads as coursework rather than capability.