Okay, I'll admit, I'm sometimes a little hard on articles on Game Career Guide. Which is funny because I've had two articles posted there
myself. So, I thought it only fair that I point out that this article on creating a game programming portfolio is actually very good. Also, since I think most of my readership is programmers, and interestingly a good number of student programmers, I thought I'd point you to it.
I do have two very minor criticisms of the article though. First, I think a lot of really good demos can take the place of one complicated game. Certainly I always want to see a complete game, but some of the examples he puts down are actually fairly complicated. Asteroids or Breakout, so long as it's complete, is fine. I'd rather see something original, but it's not necessary. If you have a lack of good demos, though, you should go for something more complicated in your full game.
Second, I don't think he puts enough emphasis on how important providing good, clean source code is. It doesn't have to be perfect, but even if your Breakout game works, if it's complete spaghetti code it won't earn you any points in my book. Make sure the code you provide shows a good mind for organization and good software engineering principles. That's what I'm more interested in anyway.
Any professional game programmers have additional insight for my student readers?
Code structuring is very important.. specially when it comes to debugging and bug finding.
if you manage the structure of your code and organise your classes in an orderly fashion the maintanence is made 1000 times easier.
I’ve seen code from other programmers (mainly C , C++ and C#) that has not been structured (bedroom programmed I call it) and it is a complete nightmare when it needs updating…