The way I see it, to be a professional games developer means to live and breathe games programming, no day job. We all know how difficult it is to come home from work and try write some code (esp. if your day job involves programming).

Now, unless you're Carmack, you can't work alone. Take a look at the 2003 off the shelf titles and see if you have the time (to say the least) to write half of any popular game. Of course there are exceptions like GameBoy where you can probably do most of the work by yourself (excluding the artwork).



Sure, as I said there are exceptions. As for myself, I have written games that were published in popular magazines in the mid to late 80s   , at a time were you could do everything by yourself (does anyone remember Uridium, by Andrew Braybrook?)

UPDATE: Is there any trick involved for the quote thing to work?

I'm just curious. Has any of you here ever worked for a games studio? Some of the posts are very professional with great depth in games programming, so I just had to ask
Any C64/ZX Spectrum veterans maybe? Tell us who you are

I need your experience on this one.  

What would be faster, drawing Java primitives or drawing Images? For example, in a PacMan game would it be faster to use oval or rectangle primitives (for the dots) or draw the equivalent Images? Or a ship's protective shield, would it draw faster with a primitive oval or with a circular image around the ship? Also the stafield...

Again is it faster to draw Java text or use a bitmap character set? For example, messages like Score or High Score and the actual scores. (BTW is there any optimized algorithm for an int2digits translation? I realize that division by 10 cannot be optimized but you never know...)

Thank you.