Systems Architecture & Distributed Systems Topics
Large-scale distributed system design, service architecture, microservices patterns, global distribution strategies, scalability, and fault tolerance at the service/application layer. Covers microservices decomposition, caching strategies, API design, eventual consistency, multi-region systems, and architectural resilience patterns. Excludes storage and database optimization (see Database Engineering & Data Systems), data pipeline infrastructure (see Data Engineering & Analytics Infrastructure), and infrastructure platform design (see Cloud & Infrastructure).
Multiplayer Functionality and Networking Basics
Conceptual understanding of multiplayer game architecture (client-server, peer-to-peer). Knowledge of latency, synchronization challenges, and how state is managed in multiplayer games. Familiarity with concepts like interest management and authoritative servers. Awareness of common multiplayer pitfalls (desync, cheating vulnerability).
Data Consistency and Reliability
Assesses understanding of data consistency models and techniques for building reliable systems. Topics include the CAP theorem and practical implications, strong versus eventual consistency, transactional guarantees and isolation levels, distributed consensus and quorum protocols, replication strategies, idempotency and safe retry semantics, failure modes and recovery strategies, and monitoring and testing approaches that surface consistency issues. Candidates should explain trade offs among correctness, availability, and latency and describe patterns used to maintain data integrity under real world failures.
Scene Management and Prefabs
Game development and engine related topic covering scene organization, prefab design patterns, streaming large worlds, loading and unloading performance, prefab variants, and best practices for maintaining complex scene hierarchies. Candidates should describe trade offs for memory and load times, tools or editor workflows for prefab composition, and strategies for scaling large interactive worlds.
Entity Component System Design
Focused on the entity component system architectural pattern used primarily in game engines and simulations. Key concepts include the separation of entities, components, and systems; component composition versus inheritance; data oriented design principles; memory layout and cache friendliness; vectorization and single instruction multiple data considerations; serialization and networking of components; lifecycle and dependency management for systems; and trade offs when adopting ECS versus traditional object oriented hierarchies. Candidates should demonstrate understanding of performance implications, concurrency models, and typical use cases for ECS.
Game Feature Implementation Gameplay Systems
Practical knowledge of implementing common gameplay systems: inventory management, equipment/loadout systems, ability/skill systems, quest or progression systems, scoring/leaderboard systems, achievement tracking. Understanding the components involved, how data flows through the system, and how it integrates with UI and data persistence.
Long Term Sustainability and Scalability of Solutions
Designing infrastructure that will remain maintainable and effective over 3-5 years. Considering technical debt, documentation, knowledge transfer, and how solutions will evolve. Discussion of reducing operational burden and building systems that scale gracefully as demands grow.
Trade Off Analysis and Decision Frameworks
Covers the practice of structured trade off evaluation and repeatable decision processes across product and technical domains. Topics include enumerating alternatives, defining evaluation criteria such as cost risk time to market and user impact, building scoring matrices and weighted models, running sensitivity or scenario analysis, documenting assumptions, surfacing constraints, and communicating clear recommendations with mitigation plans. Interviewers will assess the candidate's ability to justify choices logically, quantify impacts when possible, and explain governance or escalation mechanisms used to make consistent decisions.
Complex Game System Design and Implementation
Design and implement non-trivial game systems from requirements. Systems might include: inventory management (add/remove items, weight/capacity constraints, sorting), save/load systems (serialization, data validation, versioning), progression systems (experience, leveling, unlocks), economy systems (currency, pricing, transactions), or game mechanics (health/damage, status effects, buffs/debuffs). Your solution should handle edge cases, be thread-safe where applicable, and account for data persistence or networking.
Scalability and Edge Case Handling
Evaluate the candidate's ability to anticipate and design for edge cases and growth in game systems. Areas covered include identifying and handling unusual inputs or state such as empty inventories and maximum limits, managing concurrent events and race conditions, designing for feature growth and increased load, reasoning about performance bottlenecks and failure modes, graceful degradation and fallback strategies, and approaches to testing, monitoring, and validating behavior under stress. Candidates should justify trade offs between complexity, robustness, and performance.