Getting Into the Games Industry Isn't Easy

simoniker writes "Lots of people want to be game developers — but it's not as simple as it sounds, as the Game Career Guide website explains in a new feature on game schools. Game professor Peter Raad: 'The number of job seekers who are seriously pursuing this field is staggering. It used to be the case that studios had the liberty to take bright, fresh, new employees with no specific game education background and train them in the methods, tools, and style that are required to make games. This is no longer true.'"

Comments

3am TV Meets 3pm /.

[eldavojohn]

I see these advertisements on television all the time at obscure hours of the morning. I sure would like to program games, that sounds like an interesting career. But I'd imagine the industry isn't as huge as they make it out to be and that there has to be a lot of frustrations/complications when trying to deal with licensing and hardware.

Why are these 1 year game programming schools a bad idea? Because they're highly specific. Even a 2 year technical college would give you more options than a tech school.

I am currently a developer but I went through a four year liberal arts program at a state University. I would recommend at least that experience and I value those classes above everything else I have learned. My number one fear is that people sign up for these game academies and make the mistake of investing a lot of money (through loans probably) while coming away with only the potential for working on games. This isn't a good decision, the results can be quite devastating.

I think that game emphasis should be something only sought after a four year degree at a respected university. If you don't have at least a bachelor's degree, you're setting yourself up for some big time risk.

Re:3am TV Meets 3pm /.

[p0tat03]

Moreover, I do not see game schools as providing coders with the education they need to be game programmers. We're talking about strictly intermediate, cursory knolwedge of C++, little to no education in algorithms & data structures... These guys are the VB programmers of the industry, their education covered none of the CS basics that are wholly necessary in apps as optimized and low-level as performance 3D apps. the only good coders I've seen come out of game schools are the ones that went in experienced programmers already, and drove themselves to learn everything on their own, the school can take little credit for that one.

I disagree with TFA that there are an astounding number of people trying to break into the industry. Game development is the 20-somethings' equivalent of "I wanna be an astronaut!". A lot of people say it, a lot of people fantasize about it, but mostly everyone has no hope in hell of doing it, nor would they stay if they got there. In terms of the real contenders, I think we're doing just fine.

Re:3am TV Meets 3pm /.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, as someone who works in this industry, I'd like to say the industry is quite small - and thanks to market forces, it's getting smaller all the time.

This industry started out with a bunch of small companies making games. Some of those grew into larger companies, some of those grew larger still, and then some of those either went public (EA) or got bought up by megacorps (too many to mention).

Given the amount of cash required to make a game these days, the small players are virtually all gone - they hung in there for a long time, but by and large they all had a fatal problem... once the cash required to make a project grew to a certain point, they could only handle one project not making back the development money. They couldn't handle two - or more - projects crashing and burning. Slowly but surely they've virtually all stumbled and had to close their doors.

Most of the small companies that are left now are basically sweatshops - the company owners farm out projects to big boys, hire a bunch of "vacationing" college kids & grads for peanuts, promise them a bright future, then fire them t the end of the project.

The large Fortune500-ish game companies would probably hire these "game degree" graduates, but they're like the rest of corporate america - they'll hire pretty much hire anyone with a degree. Your opportunities for advancement are small, the hours are incredibly long, you'll have more managers than fingers, and the pay is mediocre at best. Management is where the money's at in those places, and if you're a soulless bloodsucker you could get on the management fasttrack. But may God have mercy on your soul.

The few places that are left that don't fall into either category really don't care about what degree you have. They hire based who you know, and how well those people say you'll fit into organization & the project you're being hired to work on. In effect - Person A has worked with Person B in the past, Person A vouches for Person B, and Person B gets hired. Did I mention it's a SMALL industry? Most of us know each other.

Re:3am TV Meets 3pm /.

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the television commercials you are referring to, as well as the article that was posted, refer to game design training. This is completely different than programming.

A designer needs to have an introduction to programming so that he can script, and know the technical limitations of a computer.

Programming positions still require 4 year degrees, or comparable experience. Computer science is such a large field. And game programming (at least for consoles, which I do) requires a quite in depth knowledge of computer hardware. Most programming positions outside of the industry don't require you to write your own memory managers, be aware of data and code cache coherency, or need to optimise code at the level required of a video game.

A designer straight out of one of these schools would have a low level position placing object instances into the game, perhaps doing some high level scripting, and level design.

Game schools are basically jokes

[kinglink]

So yes, there's "colleges" that teach people the game industry. And yes they have decent tools. But the problem with those schools is a lack of discipline. I'm not talking S&M but coding discipline. When I left my college after 4 years with a CS degree, I knew Java, C, C++, the differences between the two, Lisp, and Prolog, as well as SQL, and how to connect and admin a database, I also had a great understanding of Networking and some exposure to XML.

Out of all those things they all have helped me now that I'm in the industry, these "schools" are basically 16 month programs where if you really work you can learn a lot however there's not a huge drive to work hard, you can pass with a little work or you can excel if you push yourself.

That's not to say they are useless, one guy I work with went through these programs and he actually said that because he had a lot of drive he really went far, but that doesn't mean the school did anything other then give him people to learn from. It was his own personal push that got him through the school and got him a job at our company.

The only problem is that if he doesn't like the game industry it would be significantly harder for him to leave and get a job in IT or programming outside the game development world. The degree is so precise in what it teaches and so fast that with out experience it becomes null and void much faster then even basic CS degrees. But I guess you get what you pay for, my friend got the cannon which he loaded with the blasting powder which shot him up to our level (a decent sized studio making blockbuster sized games), while others in his class barely had enough to blow their own nose with.

Duh. Wha?

[Aladrin]

"The number of job seekers who are seriously pursuing this field is staggering."

Right... It's called 'every teenage boy wants to do this with his life.' It's the next generation version of 'rock star.' It also means that not everyone who is 'seriously pursuing this field' is even remotely competent at it. They just want it really bad.

"It used to be the case that studios had the liberty to take bright, fresh, new employees with no specific game education background and train them in the methods, tools, and style that are required to make games. This is no longer true."

What? Sure it is. They are totally at liberty to take completely unknowledgeable people and try to expensively train them while ignoring semi- and mostly-trained people that also want that job. They'd be fools to do it (in most cases), but hey, that's their right.

I don't think there's any news here at all. Especially since there have been school entirely dedicated to this for quite some time. (I won't bother to advertise for them, as I feel they are all scam artists. "We promise to get you a job" etc etc. My sister's boyfriend just went through one... $80,000 later he's still looking for a job as a clerk.)

Game development is hardcore development

[CptPicard]

I mean no offense for anyone enrolled in such education and might be interested in hearing what exactly it entails, but...

I don't know whether to cry or laugh when I see mentions of these schools offering specific game programming courses and "degrees" that last for a year or two. Who are they kidding? Even colleges that offer 3-4 year programs with some kind of game programming specializations would, in my view, hardly prepare a person to actually develop games. Design, maybe, from the user's point of view, but "develop" in the programming sense? No.

Maybe I am out of the loop and game programming has indeed turned into some drag and drop excercise, but I am of the old skool where we used to optimize inner loops in assembly to get our pixels onto the screen as fast as possible when me and my friends were coding some crappy little games in high school. Nowadays I'm just about to complete my M.Sc. in CS, with studies both in fundamental algorithmics and all sorts of applied fields, AI, graphics, the works you'd find in a game engine. I STILL wouldn't dare actually seek employment in a game development company, as I don't feel like I am strong enough in the pragmatic aspects of coding (I'm mostly a bookworm, not a geek who codes into the night) and I'm sure I would have a lot to learn about the algorithms side of things, too.

There's this stupid idea floating around that just because most people in the world these days are involved with technology and even like it and an increasing number are even gamers, this inflation of geekness actually means that more people also have the capacity to master this technology so profoundly as to be able to actually create more of it. I am absolutely certain this is false, because people haven't all of a sudden got smarter, and because the offerings are becoming increasingly complex. The fact that a lot of the stuff is being moved into libraries and thus not all games are just written from scratch anymore probably doesn't compensate for this.

You can't just take Joe Random off the street and educate him into a game programmer. Likewise, if you want a career in game development, become a developer first. You need to be a really GOOD developer to actually get to develop games, as you will have to master a large set of complex theoretical ideas and apply them.

Here's a good test: grab any entry-level university textbook on linear algebra. If it makes your head spin, move on.

Re:The gaming industry wasn't for me

[Profound]

I used to work for EA, 80+ hours a week.

Now I work 37.5 hours a week doing financial web apps, and code games at home.

I make more money, have less pressure and get to spend more time on doing innovative, interesting games development.

The only downside is that I'll never have 6+ million people play a game I worked on, and young boys don't say "wow you have the coolest job ever!"