2026 update
A few things have changed in 2026. AI is now allowed in coding rounds at Canva and Meta, detection has improved at companies that still ban it, pay has split at staff+, and the post-onsite wait got longer. Read what changed in 2026 →
What you'll be expected to do
What they're grading- Implement gameplay features end-to-end in the studio's engine: input, state, animation hooks, UI, telemetry
- Own a slice of the frame budget: profile, find the spike, fix it without breaking the feel
- Work inside a large, long-lived codebase, much of it in-house, and improve it as you go
- Pair daily with a designer on how a mechanic should feel, and with QA on how it breaks
- Ship on a live cadence: feature flags, staged rollouts, crash and ANR triage on real devices
- Review code, and be reviewed, on readability and correctness before cleverness
What does the interview loop look like?
6 rounds · 3–6 weeksMost companies follow a similar pattern for Game Client Dev interviews. Total calendar time is 3–6 weeks from recruiter screen to offer.
Background, the studio and the game, why games, availability and location. Portfolio or shipped titles come up here
A small game or a feature on an engine the studio provides (King's is a match-3 on a 2D engine that renders sprites and reads the mouse), or a bug hunt and a feature in a given codebase. Graded on readability, structure and correctness, then on polish
Your take-home, line by line: why this structure, what you would change with more time, where it breaks, how it performs. The technical weight of the loop sits here
C++ or C# fundamentals (memory, ownership, the ways a program crashes), the update loop, the frame budget, vectors and transforms, how the engine you know handles the thing you built
A designer, a producer, a technical director: how you work with each craft, how you take feedback on feel, how you ship on a live game
Collaboration, quality, an honest interest in the game and its players
Sample questions you should be ready for
8 of the ones that decide itRepresentative of what companies ask at this level. Every question here can be practised out loud, which is the fastest way to find out whether your answer holds up under follow-ups. Calibrd adds voice practice with coaching on every answer, and a full voice mock interview: a live round with an AI interviewer who has read the role and your CV, then an honest debrief.
- 01“Your take-home: walk me through the structure. If a designer asked for the board to animate cascades one tile at a time, where does that change go, and what does it break?”
- 02“A frame that usually takes 12ms spikes to 40ms every few seconds on a low-end phone. Walk me through finding it: which profiler, what you look at first, and the three most likely causes in a 2D game.”
- 03“Name three ways a C++ program crashes that a unit test would not catch, and how you guard against each in a large codebase.”
- 04“Design the client side of a daily event: the timer, the reward claim, and what happens when the clock on the device is wrong or the app is killed mid-claim.”
- 05“Design the object model for a match-3 board with special pieces that combine. Where does the rule live, and how do you keep it testable without the renderer?”
- 06“Tell me about a feature that felt wrong in playtest even though it worked. What did you change, and how did you and the designer decide?”
- 07“Describe a performance fix you shipped on a live game. What did you measure before and after, and what did you have to leave alone?”
- 08“Tell me about a time you disagreed with a designer or a producer about scope. How did it end?”
These are the general ones. Paste a real posting and Calibrd predicts the questions that company asks for that exact role, then interviews you on them.
Predict my questions →Compensation benchmark
Stockholm · SEK · medianTypical pay for Game Client Dev in Stockholm, headline numbers in SEK. The note under the table puts it against US pay for the same role, and equity varies a lot by who owns the studio.
Stockholm: about SEK 48k a month for a game programmer on Glassdoor, roughly SEK 570k a year. The top of the range sits near SEK 108k a month, and King's Levels.fyi median for software engineers in Greater Stockholm is SEK 743K, base only. Studios owned by Microsoft or EA add equity; independents mostly do not. US studios pay more in cash: $115k to $150k base at mid to senior, and Blizzard software engineers on Levels.fyi run from about $105k to $290k total.
How to prep
5 tactical tipsLead behavioural answers with the STAR method: Situation, Task, Action, Result. The tips below build on that structure for this specific role.
- 01Do the take-home as if it will be read by the strictest reviewer on the team, because it will. Readable names, small functions, a clear separation between rules and rendering, and a short README that says what you would do next
- 02Prepare the code review before it happens: for every structural choice in your take-home, know the alternative you rejected and why. Reviewers ask "why this" more than "what is this"
- 03Drill the fundamentals of your language until they are boring: memory and ownership, value versus reference, the ways a program crashes, what the update loop does per frame. Studios build most of their technology in-house, so the fundamentals are what transfer
- 04Profile something real before the loop: a personal project or an open-source game, with the engine's own profiler, and be able to say what you found and fixed
- 05Play the studio's game for a week, with a notebook. The studio interviews are with people who make it every day, and "I noticed the daily event resets at the wrong time for Europe" is worth more than any credential
Where do Game Client Dev candidates fail?
Spot it in a mock firstA few common mistakes that get Game Client Dev candidates rejected even when they are otherwise strong. Worth catching in a mock interview before they show up in a real one.
Treating the take-home as a demo of features rather than a sample of your code: a lot done, none of it readable.
Why it fails
The take-home is the loop's technical interview, and it is read by an engineer who will maintain code like it for years. A clever, sprawling submission tells them the maintenance cost; a small, clean one tells them you understand the job.
Fix
Cut scope until every file reads cleanly, separate the game rules from the rendering so the rules are testable, and write the README as a code review of your own work: what is missing, what you would do next.
Answering the fundamentals round in framework terms ("Unity handles that") instead of in terms of memory, time and the frame.
Why it fails
Studios build most of their technology in-house. An interviewer asking how a C++ program crashes or what happens in an update loop is checking that you can work below the framework, because at their studio there is no framework to hide behind.
Fix
For every mechanism you use daily, be able to explain what it does underneath: how the engine allocates, when the garbage collector runs, what a frame costs and where the time goes. Say the mechanism, then the layer under it.
Describing shipped work as features ("I built the shop") with nothing about the frame, the crash rate, the rollout or the players.
Why it fails
Game studios judge engineers on shipping to players on a live cadence. A feature without a performance number, a crash rate or a rollout story reads as work that never met a device.
Fix
For your top three stories, attach a frame or memory number, a stability number and a rollout detail, and say what you watched in the first week after release.
Recommended resources
No affiliate linksBooks, courses, and tools that come up most often in Game Client Dev prep.
- 01Game Engine Architecture, Jason Gregory →
The canonical reference for what sits under the framework: memory, the game loop, rendering, animation. The fundamentals round is drawn from here.
- 02Game Programming Patterns, Robert Nystrom (free online) →
The patterns interviewers expect you to name when they ask why you structured the take-home that way: command, state, update method, object pool.
- 03Unity Manual and Scripting API →
If the studio's engine is Unity, the profiler, the frame debugger and the scripting lifecycle pages are the ones to know cold.
- 04Unreal Engine documentation →
For Unreal studios: the gameplay framework, Insights profiling, and the memory pages.
- 05GDC Vault →
Free talks from the studios you are interviewing at, on the systems they actually built. Search the studio's name before the loop.
Common scenarios
Situations that come up a lotI'm a backend or web engineer in Stockholm and want to move into a game studio. What does the loop test that I haven't done?
Three things. The take-home: you will be asked to build something playable on an engine you may not know, and it is graded on code quality, so learn Unity or Unreal well enough to ship a small game before you apply, and put it in your portfolio. The fundamentals: memory, the frame budget and the update loop, which web work rarely exercises; Nystrom and Gregory cover it. And the people: the loop is mostly conversations with a designer, a producer and a technical director about how you work, so bring stories about feel, scope and feedback, not only about systems. Your backend depth is an asset for live-ops features; say so.
Which Stockholm studios hire client developers, and how do their loops differ?
King (Candy Crush, part of Microsoft) runs a take-home match-3 on its own 2D engine, a code review with a principal, and studio interviews; EA DICE (Battlefield, Frostbite) hires C++ engineers into a large in-house engine; Paradox (grand strategy), Embark Studios (Unreal, The Finals), Avalanche (Apex engine), Fatshark and Hazelight all run some version of take-home then review then team. The constant is homework and people rather than whiteboards; what differs is the engine and the genre, so play the game and learn the engine before the take-home arrives.
How much should I expect to be paid as a game client developer in Stockholm versus a fintech or big-tech job?
Less in cash, usually. Glassdoor's average for a game programmer in Stockholm is about SEK 48k a month, roughly SEK 570k a year, against a Stockholm software engineer median near SEK 712k on Levels.fyi and Spotify's SEK 1.16M. King, as part of Microsoft, sits higher than the independents (Levels.fyi median SEK 743K, base only). Ask for the range on the recruiter call, and weigh the studio's ownership (equity at the publisher-owned studios, little at independents) rather than base alone.
Frequently asked questions
Is this guide for Unity, Unreal or C++ engineers?
All three. The loop's shape is the same (a take-home, a code review of it, a fundamentals round, then the studio interviews); what changes is the engine the take-home runs on and the language the fundamentals round is asked in. Prepare in the studio's stack, and expect the fundamentals to be asked below the framework either way.
How long should I prep before my Game Client Dev onsite?
The loop runs 3–6 weeks and the take-home is the part worth the most hours. Block a weekend for it, then spend the week before the review rehearsing why you built it the way you did, and a few evenings on fundamentals in your language.
What's the most common mistake candidates make at the Game Client Dev bar?
Preparing LeetCode. Studios rarely ask it; they read your take-home and ask about memory, the frame and how you work with a designer. Hours on algorithms are hours not spent on the code review that decides the loop.
What if my interview process is different from what's listed?
Most variation is at the edges. Major tech companies (FAANG, scale-ups, mid-size SaaS) follow processes within 1–2 rounds of what's described. Smaller startups often run fewer rounds (3–4) but the bar at each round is similar; less-tech-mature companies sometimes skip system design or behavioural rounds entirely. Read the posting and ask the recruiter on the screening call; they'll tell you what's coming.
How does this guide compare to running a free scan?
This guide covers the general bar at Mid to Senior. The free scan reads your specific job description and returns predicted questions for that exact role + company, a pay benchmark matched to the role and, with your CV, a read on your experience gaps and an ATS resume check, emailed as a PDF.
Walk in ready
Walk into your Game Client Dev interview ready.
Paste your actual job and Calibrd shows you exactly what that company asks, where your CV is thin, and what it should pay. Then rehearse the round out loud with honest feedback until you're confident. Any tech role. Free to start.
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