Finish large project or not?

I was working on a very large project 2d RPG / game engine written in JAVA/ libGDX / OpenGL GLSL / JSON. and some other small projects It is not done but I can have it done with some removed features in two months full time working on it ? Would having a very large project like this in my portfolio look really good to employers? Or would the time be better spent working on other smaller projects using things like the LAMP stack or things involving databases / web / standard android Activities/ Fragments UI Be a better use of my time since this project doesn’t use those. It does use JSON serialization / abstraction / Inheritance / Interfaces/ LOADS of other OOP concepts/ File Writing / Reading Using OpenGL / and lots of algorithms AStar, Bitmasking, ect. I have no degree I’m trying to land any developer job I can for the first one and work up from there. I have some smaller projects on my git hub but nothing with 50k lines of code. Would the fact that some of the code is poorly written / documented matter?

No one is going to go over every line of your code on your github so don’t worry to much about the quality. Being at least aware of the quality is all you need. Now which project you should focus on should be related to what kind of job you want to get. Sounds like a large game project is impressive regardless of what sort of job your focusing on, but having relevant experience in the field you are applying usually helps the most. So if your trying to get web dev jobs, but your game uses 0 web dev technologies, then time might be better spent on smaller more relevant projects. Same could be said if your applying to web-game-dev jobs, but are only focusing on normal web dev stuff.

Overall tho, experience is experience, so just having your projects on github, hosted online/somewhere so you can show it off to employers is probably the best thing. Most people interviewing, finding candidates don’t know much about tech so the technical aspect of things doesn’t matter that much in some cases. Being able to show you have relevant experience, the ability to learn and the passion to learn is the most important.

So to answer your question as to if you are to finish the large project really goes back to what I said first, focus on your time on what you want to get a job for. If you can throw out some features and get the game at least to a partially working phase so you can show it off is great to display, but if its totally irrelevant to the jobs your applying to, I’d focus on making smaller project(s) that show more relevant experience :smiley:

PS.
The LAMP stack has fallen out of favor today due to the rise of SPA, and front-end frameworks like React, Angular and Vue, your welcome to learn it, but it isn’t as popular as newer stacks like MEAN or MERN or JAM stacks (google them if you are curious). Learning Linux in general is usually a great “nice to have” and is marked as such on a lot of resumes.

Don’t mention your game is written in “JSON”, since its not a language/library, its just a format. It’s like saying “My game was written in CSV! (comma separated value)”. Focus on the general architecture, technologies used (LibGDX, OpenGL), data-structures, and algorithms (a-star, bitmasking) when talking about your projects and you should be fine, since anyone with any tech knowledge will understand more or less what you did :smiley: Just be careful to not throw around buzzwords for the sake of throwing around buzzwords :slight_smile:

The actual game part of the the game is actually written in JSON format. Every Object in the game (Sword, Fighter Potion, Tree, Map Tile ECT.) is saved to JSON file and then read from when the saved game is reloaded. The initial game is loaded from JSON too. Though I guess stored in JSON format would be the correct term.

Coding is coding to me. As long I’m not coding in python (can’t stand white space being used for code blocks and functions), I don’t care what I’m coding. What jobs areas have the highest rate hiring candidates with out a degree ? What are the highest paying? I learned Java because The University I went to for Electrical Engineering was switching all of the CS courses over from C++ to Java. But that was 15 years ago. I love coding in java but it seems most of the java jobs are enterprise jobs where the large companies expect you have a CS degree (or at least HR does).