I’ve now been working at Bol.com (basically the Dutch version of Amazon) for 18 months. In that time I’ve not worked professionally on games. But in my spare time I’ve been tinkering on a game engine Check it out on GitHub!

Working on the back-end systems of an e-tailer is a very different experience than work on games. At our yearly conference, Spaces Summit, I talked to my colleagues about how games work, and what the differences are with the work I do daily. I’m very proud of this talk. I think it was both very informative, technical and relatively easy to follow. Definitely watch it if you’re interested in games, but haven’t worked professionally on them (yet)!

Below you can find the abstract and the actual talk! You can also download the slides from my OneDrive. There was also an interview after the talk, which you can find on Spotify. The intro starts at 3:00, the actually interview starts at 3:50).

Modern game engines render almost photo realistic images 60 times per second on €300,- game consoles. Meanwhile, at bol.com, it takes a €10.000 server a whole second to retrieve a customer’s stored order information. How do game engines do this? It almost sounds like magic!

Though very impressive, I will show you that game engines definitely do not perform magic. But that they accomplish their goal using deceit and trickery. To prove this I will take on the role of the masked magician, using the game engine I created.

At the end of this talk you will have a high-level understanding of the steps and tricks involved in real-time rendering. You will also have a better understanding of the very parallel, pipelined, approach used in real-time rendering, which will make you think differently about the code you write for bol.com.