Breaking Into the Video Game Industry

An anonymous reader writes "RPGamer has posted an interview with Atlus USA's Tomm Hulett, who has played pivotal roles in bringing various RPGs to North America, as well as the recently-released Trauma Center: Under the Knife. The interview, however, revolves around Tomm's experiences and the advice he would give to those looking to make a living off of the video game industry. From the article: '...You don't get to make games by sitting around playing RPGs and dreaming (unfortunately)--you have to get out there and work hard. I've known a lot of really smart people who just never applied themselves. So, now they're just playing FFXI and talking about how they're going to make games someday.'"

Comments

Breaking Into the Video Game Industry

[darkmayo]

1. Crowbars and Balaklavas are optional.

How I broke into it

[Surt]

I made a couple of small freeware games, followed by a couple of successful quake mods. The quake mods were successful enough to have been played by the game developers who later interviewed me for a position at Blizzard North, which I got.

Then later after finding out how painful it is to work in the gaming biz, I got out. But if you want in, make some games.

Now I just make fun little games in my spare time, like squish:

http://ptth.net/squish/

If you check it out, journal me how to improve it please!

Break into the industry via a new market.

[MiceHead]

One way to break into games and earn a living is to build a small team and develop for a new market such as cell phones.

During the early '90s, shareware authors focused on creating games for the newly-popular desktop PCs. That's much tougher nowadays, due to direct competition from untold thousands of shareware developers and the larger studios. During the late '90s, Palm OS and Pocket PC popped up (another new market). At that time, it was possible to spend a week or two of development on a simple-but-enjoyable PDA puzzle game with a grossly disproportionate number of sales (with respect to development costs) during the first few months, and a decent long tail a year or two out.

These days, the buzz seems to be around casual/cell phone games, on the basis that a) it doesn't take [as] much to develop a cellphone game, and b) there are many millions of cellphone users. Java isn't my cup of tea(!), but J2ME offers individual developers and small teams a way to develop content for the myriad mobile platforms.
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