Your mileage may vary, but I’m more swayed by the quality of someone’s code than by the flashiness of his demo. It’s better to do few things cleanly and well than to try to do everything at once.

As I’ve started to educate myself on the workings of the industry in preparation for my (hopeful) eventual transition into it, I’ve been dismayed to find that many of the engineering practices I’m currently being taught are reversed or ignored completely in current practice. One developer called recursive functions “a neat gimmick you learn in college” which require far more call overhead than they’re worth for common implementation, and now I see your article on Aggregation over Inheritance telling me that Inheritance is soooo 90’s. I don’t want to be obsolete before I even hit the market!

So my open question to you, Kyle, and any other experienced developers who may have an opinion, is this: should I spend my time NOW, as a junior in college looking for some game development experience that will propel me into a career, perusing sites like this one, looking for the bleeding-edge tools and tricks of the trade so I can go into interviews armed with apropos knowledge, but few demonstration pieces? Or should I try to iterate on very simple things I know I can handle without too much hassle, and go from there to build a large portfolio of experience? In concrete terms, as I’m trying to lay out the structure for my current project, I have the simultaneous urges to make the engine thread-based (a concept I’ve never worked with before) and to push my knowledge further while preparing myself for a multiprocessor environment, but also to put most everything in a very simple rendering loop, so I have few surprises and know I can work on it easily, with perhaps a greater chance of success.

So… high-concept or high-polish, on several levels? A novice and wannabe wants to know. Thanks for your patience and help.