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How Does One Become a Game Designer?
Andreas(R) would like answers to this query: "I imagine that creating PC-games would be an exciting and creative profession. Obviously, it takes a lot of programming skills to put together most advanved games with realtime 3D, AI etc. What is the best way to aquire the neccecary skills to get these kinds of jobs (such as game designer at Westwood, Sierra, Epic)? Is a CS-degree the best way? Does one learn useful things in relation to games (such as programming for Direct 3D, or Direct-Rendering with Linux)? Given how the computing-industry has suffered economically recently; will there still be a demand for programmers/game designers in the future?" If there are any readers out there currently in the gaming industry, how did you get your first break?
To break into the gaming industry, like most IT jobs, one needs experience. Sure, Computer Science degrees will help in the application process, but you may need to focus a bit more on the math and logic side of things. The best thing one can do when trying to obtain a gaming job, is to make your own game. But before going for the 3D-realtime-60fps-shooter, think about starting small. Having the experience that comes from writing a 2D platform game or a couple of 3D demos under your belt will be worth more, to a game company seeking new talent, than any set of degrees.
Having gone to Digipen, I must say that you are completely wrong. In two years, I never once saw a piece of proprietary Nintendo equipment/hardware. Digipen focuses on giving students the most hard core computer science training you could imagine. 8-13 hours a day of MATH and computer science. Any school that has a class about Quaternions is not slepping on math.
Look at all the k-rad 3D games that are boring to play. Look at some games that are behind the technology curve that are fun to play (I'll offer up Starcraft and Counter-Strike as a pair of recent examples, I'm sure you can come up with your own).
The skillset that goes into a modern game is enormous. Art (3D modeling, texture art), Music, Game Design & Balance, Programming (3D, Network, UI), etc. You're lucky if you're good at one of these, much less a few of them. Find an area that you are good at and cultivate it, make yourself the best. The companies you mention often have 20-40 people working on a game, you'll have to find your spot on that team.
gamasutra.com is an excellent resource for professional level game development info.
Chris Cothrun
Curator of Chaos
Bleh!
There are specialized schools for this kind of thing. One that comes to mind is Digipen.
The chief way to get into the gaming industry these days is a combination of modding and schooling. Many of today's "Gaming Gods" (for lack of a less-lame term) got their start doing mods. The TeamFortress people, now working at Valve; Steven Polge, the guy who wrote the first real bot for Quake1, the Reaper Bot, now working for Epic Games; GreenMarine, LeveLord, Stevie Case, and so on. Mods in the gaming industry have become the equivalent of an artist's portfolio. They give you game the creation experience you need to get a game design job.
At the same time, don't forget that schooling is important. Ignore what all the high school drop-outs turned IT bigshot turned homeless bum on the dole say about schooling being useless. It's far from it, if you take the time to apply yourself and actually learn something. Depending on what type or role you want to play, many different majors would be useful. Want to be more involved in the design of a game? Get a business major, with an English minor and an emphasis in a graphic art. Want to be an engine programmer? Take all the math you can. And once you think you have enough math, take some more. A CS degree is also useful, to help teach you proper coding and design discipline and algorithmic analysis. Want to be an artist? Attend a good design school. Want to be a sound engineer? Get a music degree. Your education shouldn't stop with a college degree, but you're that far ahead of those without one (and that gives you a slight edge against those without when applying for a job, which is very nice to have in today's economy).
Above all, though, don't forget to have fun. If you're not having fun, trying to pump out a mod or a tetris clone or whatever because you feel that you have to rather than because you want to, then you're on the wrong track. Take a step back, look at where you're at, and re-evaluate what you want to do with your life.
I've seen many awesome coders who can knock your socks off with projects they've done, but have no formal CS training. And I wouldn't hire most of them. They understand how to write code, but they don't understand why it's necessary to design before implementation, extensively document code, have a process for source review, use a revision control system, implement a unit test strategy, and the like. All of these things are necessary when working on a large project with multiple engineers.
Most games are a huge undertaking. I last worked for a games company, Turbine Entertainment Software, that had dozens of people working on a single project. In addition to the fact that they were all really smart people, if they hadn't followed good programming methodologies nothing would have ever been shipped.
Today, I'm Director of Software Development for a storage software company, and implementing good policies is key to keeping on track. All code is required to be reviewed by another team member before it may be checked into the repository. All modules must have unit test cases. No code may be written until design of the module and its interfaces are complete. This might sound draconian, but it means that we know what we're writing before we start coding it, we know it works when we're done, and we know what it does when we look at it again 3 months from now. Fewer bugs, fewer unexpected surprises, and fewer late nights trying to fix something that has to have been done last month.
Games companies are often hiring; they tend to not pay as much as other computer industry jobs but can also be a lot of fun. If you want to break into the games industry, send a resume to some companies you find interesting. Show that you can write good code, show that you have the creativity to design an interesting game, and show that you understand what's necessary to actually complete a team project.
--Jered
This was posted on PlanetBaldursGate on Monday, April 17 of last year.
Dave's background: There are many more fields in building a computer game than programming alone, Bandit. I would suspect that over three-quarters of the people who work here wouldn't know what to do with a line of code if they were handed one.
Aside from the programmers, we've got artists (besides the computer artists, I know that some of them have backgrounds as comic book artists and graphic design... although it helps to know how to use the graphic editors, it's not always necessary to get hired if the talent is there), animators (most of the animators here have specific animation education backgrounds, I believe) and designers (which includes game designers, writers and scripters... with most of us being a blend of the three).
I, myself, am on the design team as a designer/writer (although I now do some scripting, as well... a bit different from programming as the programmers build the game editors that scripters use to put the game pieces together). I got involved in the business in a strange way, I guess. I used to manage a hotel before I came here... I just had a hobby where I ran a PBM (play-by-mail) RPG that I had designed. Bioware was looking for designers who had designed their own game (and finished it... an important distinction), and a friend of mine who was playing my game happened to work here. He offered my game to Greg and Ray to look at and they asked me to give some writing samples for a job. I had no intention of applying (it was nice, but I had a career in the hotel industry at the time) until the next day (this is where it gets weird) a company came in and bought my hotel and I was given three months severance (they always let the GMs go on a takeover). So I thought, "Well, why not?" and gave Ray and Greg some samples of writing I had done as well as the first few chapters of a book I was writing on the side. They liked it and voila, here I am.
It's true that some companies only promote people to game designers from within, but Bioware works on games that require a lot of design and writing (hey, a million words doesn't come from nowhere) so they have hired people just for these jobs alone. They tend to require people to have scripting skills as well as creative writing skills (instead of learning the scripting as I have), but having talent doesn't hurt. There are a lot of other designers here who write great and learned their scripting skills along the way beside myself.
So there are a lot of different ways to get into the business, I suppose.
The "one million words" may refer to Planescape: Torment, which supposedly had over a million words of dialogue in it.
The produce for Icewind Dale, J.E. Sawyer, used to be a webmaster for Interplay or Black Isle.
Oh, and the two people who founded Bioware (the company that made BG2) are both doctors in Canada who just decided to start a game company.
I'm seen this question asked many times, and more often than not someone at a game company (like Bioware) simply says, "Send us a resume, we do hire people in the normal way."
~Moller
I would actually start by getting a CS degree (good math, algorithmics, ai... courses). Sometimes, I don't understand how people think... anybody (well, with a brain) can learn simple technical stuff like directx by himself over a few days. You don't need courses about that.
.sig
Now a good computer graphics course (you can take one in your CS degree), where you learn about 2d and 3d rendering, recursive ray tracing, visible surface determination, dithering, and other basic techniques, will be interesting. Just look at the discussion (from Tim Sweeney) about the scripting language and scripting engine design Epic did for Unreal Tournament (http://unreal.epicgames.com)... this is serious and interesting game programming challenges that involve higher challenges that making a sprite move with directx...
Now, if this will get you a job in the computer gaming industry, I can't tell you for sure. I just finished this month my CS degree, and I will look into that pretty soon (I already have a job in cs, but i'm really interested in games and computer graphica)
Hope this helps,
(P.S. English is not my first language)
phobos% cat
phobos% cat
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Don't take this entirely serious or entirely sarcastically. I aim to amuse, but I'm also partially serious. Find your foundation and go from there!
I've been programming for over 20 years, I don't a college degree, and have had several jobs. Oddly (or not so oddly,), the better the company, the less they care about paper qualifications. If you find yourself being dismissed out of hand by a company for lack of experience, ask yourself why it would be worth your while to work there.
The way to get a great job is to be a great candidate. It's that simple. This doesn't mean "spinning facts," because if it's a good company, they will detect this.
1) Decide what skills you have (or could have) that are useful. Be prepared to convince them. If you want to do art, have a portfolio. If you want to write code, have some source code. Be prepared to discuss your work.
2) Be able to talk about the field (games.) What do you enjoy playing? What makes a specific game good? What feature was a good game missing? Why didn't the designers put it in?
3) Write a "deep" demo, not a shallow one. No one cares about another bad Quake knockoff. Pick a small domain and master it. For example,
4) "If you wanna be a writer, write!" is a good rule. You should be writing 20K lines of code a year. This is how you hone your skills. Don't worry about the code being useful/portfolio-stuff.
5) "The trouble with most wannabe sci-fi writers is that all they read is sci-fi." Great ideas come because you have deep knowledge of other fields. We all know about war, sci-fi, martial arts, DnD, etc. Great games come from new domains, not recycling ideas.
6) Tell me your idea for the ultimate "FPS-RTS-MMPOLG," and I will listen politiely. Tell me your idea for a game that my mother would buy (and she probably wouldn't even know it's a game,) and I will hire you on the spot.
I graduated DigiPen. There was exactly one SNES related course, and that was because they had some Dev Kit's for it. (As it is, the SNES is not too different from the Gamboy color and the Gameboy Advance, though that was the course that revealed to me the simple fact that I do not want to work at the Assembly level for any length of time if I can avoid it). And DigiPen is not only for US students. It is for anyone who can afford the tuition and living costs. Also, I have yet to work on a Nintendo Console, though I would not mind the chance to do so.
At the time I graduated, there were plans for the new course to incorporate more recent console tech. Though I cannot speak with any accuracy on what they teach now.
As for how much weight A DigiPen diploma carries, it varies. Some companies hired DigiPen grads, liked what they got, and hired more. Others did not like what they got, and those companies did not hire more.
Since I am currently employed and truly love my job, I have to say that for me, DigiPen was a great choice.
And as for the primary thread, I can say the following. The one thing that helps for getting a job as a designer is knowledge of a wide range of games.
END COMMUNICATION
From a personal experience, companies may rate interests and hobbies very high. I've never had formal training in electronics or coding (well except bits of op-amps and FORTRAN with physics :-), yet I've been hired
for responsible positions in serious
projects involving both. Real life experiences are usually valued more
than theoretical education. Of course, the best of such experience is
often from a paid work... Nevertheless, if you're interested and talented
in a certain area, why not get the formal qualifications as well?
--
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
As a rule of thumb, it usuallu takes 5 to ten years to get enough experience and expertise at something to be good enough that someone would want to hire you for a skilled position. This includes related experience, and all of the school of hard knocks stuff. This works out to be about 10,000 hours of screwing around with something (40hr.wk X 50 weeks/year X 5 years) You can short cut this to some degree by being talented, or putting in an awful lot of hard work, more hours per week. This is not restricted to formal schooling
Note: Prior Experience with related stuff will count against this. Also, hours daydreaming, watching tv shows, and other brain fart class activities do not count. There is an awful lot of learning time that gets wasted, instead of being really focussed and picking something apart.
(I would love to see a graph of learning rate plotted against IQ sometime. I wonder where the point is where someone learns 2 or 3x faster than a normal person.)
Here is a possible plan of attack:
- At age eight to ten, really get into games, get really good at them
- At age twelve or so, get bored with just playing the games. Pick up a book to figure out how to add levels to the games you do play (such as doom, quake, or whatever) These certainly used to be availble, but things change(?)
- by age 13, start getting familiar with the inside of your machine, or maybe with an old throw-away machine, you might do this if you wanted to install upgrades into your box
- By age 14, get into messing with the game engine. This is certainly available for a number of games. Use this to enhance your games.
- by age 15 start getting into somekind of programming so you can start doing your own stuff, especially building more exotic addons for your favorite game.
- By 17, actuallly build something that runs somehow.
The order is somewhat arbitrary, and shows how you could get several thousand of hours of related experience while being a teenager. Y'know spending maybe 20+ hoursNow if you do this while in college, you would have to put in more time while doing classes at the same time. This could get intense as you could be putting in 80 hr weeks (courses, course work, game work, design) on top of trying to make money, and socialize. (This may be why some geeks have not developed all of their social skills.)
Now If you are older, you'll have to fit this in while indulging in this thing called "having a life", because the earlier plans take advantadge of your free time as a teenager to get things rocketing. Later on, this becomes more difficult, and it becomes far more difficult to find 10 or 20 or 30 free hours in a week to get things rolling. To get the requisite 5 to 10 thousand hours of practical experience will take longer if your are devoting only 5 or 10 hours per week. It is easier if you have a job in a related field, even if it is something like a repair shop at "Computer Jungle" or whatever the local shop is.
So that is a quick overview.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I have worked in the games industry for 10 years on and off, on platforms from Game Boy to PC and many consoles in between. For companies like EA, Relic, and some that shall remain nameless. Between projects in games, I've worked in "traditional" software for about half that time.
My summary (it varies from day to day) is this...
The games work is much harder, much more challenging, sometimes well-paid, sometimes not. And I wouldn't trade that experience for the world. The most brilliant programmers I've worked with are game programmers, bar none. (Not the most organized or best planners, though!) I hope this doesn't sound too idealistic, but... Games aren't made because they're necessary or because a client needs a feature set, or because a competitor is neglecting a niche in the market. Games are made for really noble reasons, IMHO -- so people can have fun, and interact, and be challenged. People play (and hopefully, buy) your creation. And they use it because they want to. That's rewarding. To me.
I have a degree in CS, which still puts me in the minority of games programmers. I have programmed, led, hired, and designed. (Though design is becoming less and less accessible to programmers.) I believe that on the planning, organization, and methodology front, some education and non-games experience is good for the games industry. But make no mistake: you're going to suffer a bit working in that industry. So it's all going to come down to single-mindedness and passion to make a game. If you don't have that, then don't waste your time -- you'll make more money and be happier elsewhere. Projects are getting longer and longer. Budgets are getting bigger and bigger. And of course, it's Big Business now, so occasionally corporate boneheadedness gets in the way. So do it because you want to. And have a backup plan for when you burn out. Then take some time off, and throw yourself back into the trenches. It's the Good Fight in software.
By the way, if Vancouver is in your range of acceptable places to live (and it should be!), then those two companies I named above are fantastic places to work.
The sad thing is, it's far harder to "break into" the game industry in the same spectacular way as did, say, the wunderkids of the 1980s. (I'm thinking of Crammond, the Oliver twins, Braben and Bell, etc etc.)
These days, there's such an emphasis on expensive production effects (full motion video, Hollywood actors, life-modelled action, and so on) that you can't really do anything that competes on your own.
Such is the price of progress. It's a far cry from the day when one teenager could write a best-selling game (Jet Set Willy) or two undergraduates could introduce a totally new genre into gaming with one game (Elite). The question is, have we lost something? Does all this glitz and glamour stifle true innovation?
Over to you kids...
arnald
I can't imagine a better way to break into a game company other than getting involved in the industry. Run a gaming website (or work for DailyRadar... oops! heheh), make mods for existing games (the guys that did 3wave CTF and Rocket Arena got jobs this way), or even do skins (read: Paul Steed). Anything that you can do to attract the development companies' attention has got to be a definate plus.
--The space between my ears was intentionally left blank--
here
If you're keen on building games, you ought to be hanging out on sites that deal with them, like the Linux Game Development Centre or Gamasutra and such.
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
Getting A Job In The Game Development Industry
http://www2.ravensoft.com/getajob.htm
Here is the index of the article:
To be a game designer/programmer, you have to spend almost every waking hour playing Quake III, Unreal Tournament, and every current first-person shooter. Sure, I know that some kill-joys are going to tell you about becoming a proficient programmer, going to college, and all that stuff. Or they will go on about how there are so few jobs in that field and so many eager candidates that it's real unlikely you will get such a job. Don't listen to them. Just sit there day and night playing games until your fingers bleed.
As someone who worked in the mainstream game development industry, I can confirm your statements.
You work 80 hours a week (no overtime), have co-workers egos to battle with, endless paperwork. Every aspect of the code has to be documented. Programmers have nothing to do with the creative process, that is up to the producers, designers and publishers.
All in all, it's a shitty job and not worth the effort.
BUT.... if you really do want a job in the industry, contact an agency. I don't know where the poster is, but in the UK there's Aardvark Swift, Datascape and Gamejobs.
Experience is not required, but good indepth programming knowledge is (I was quizzed on preventing memeory fragmentation and fast database sorts. I wasn't asked a single questions about graphics).
I have no qualifications, and all my expereince before the games industry was working as a sysadmin.
I got involved with GameDev.Net (me=Godfree^) which was all the C.V. filler I needed. Oh, and I was writing a book a game programming at the time.
That;s it.
P.S. I was drunk during my first interview, and got the job. Maybe being drunk helps...
"Faith is the last resort of a desperate man" - Me
You can get all of the basic skills of being a game programmer from a CS or Comp. Eng. degree. But remember, those are the basic skills. The main thing that seperates the good programmers from the bad is experience. Being able to create a doable schedule and make milestones is just as important as knowing killer 3d and ai hacks. As a game programmer you don't really have that much input into the design of the game simply because you are too busy trying to get everything done on an impossible time frame. Sometimes you have say in the design but that job is better left to...
Game designers are people that eat, live and breath games. Most of the game designers I have met have generally been people that were good at thier job (testing, art generally, but sometimes programming) but wanted to move up the food chain. The best skill a game designer can have is the ability to organize reams of data and present it in a clear and coherent form for the programmers and artists (in the design doc). Having moved from the more technical side of game development they have a better idea of what goes into each part of the game, be it technical or artistic.
The best game designer i know was an artist that started out on the Atari ST and worked his way through all the consoles up to the Playstation. He had great technical knowledge about artwork and the limits of each console and could design the game appropriately for whatever system he was working on.
With all that, your best way to get a first break is as follows. If you have no skills whatsoever, try and get into the testing department. Slowly but surely, if you're good at your job, you will have to chance to learn the skills that will let you move up in the company (just don't but everyone while they're working :). If you have or art taking a CS degree, try and get a co-op term during school, or try and get an entry level position on one of the game or tools teams. Then you just work and work and work while you get some real experience making games. It's kinda like climbing the corportate ladder, but slightly more fun.
But always remember, making games is fun, but it's not as glamorous as it seems.
Listen to my music.