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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.'"
And how do you get into the game industry now without a fairly glowing resume that shows years of prior experience? I'm talking about now... not 2-5 years ago.
There's no such thing as an entry level tech job any more. Even a tech support rep position requires 2 years of tech support experience (see: catch-22). A job in the gaming industry requires not only that but soon it'll require one other thing: fluency in Hindu and Chinese. Preferably both, according to a recent Gamasutra article.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I develop Neverwinter Nights modules for fun and have done so for the last few years. My modules have been included in gaming magazines and I've won several awards. For awhile, I was getting quite a few job offers.
Now, don't take me wrong. I love games and I love making games. The main problem is that I seem to love them when I can develop games on my own terms, something of a rarity in the gaming industry. The pressure in the game industry is intense, with crunch time and publisher demands and an uncertain career path. Plus, if you falter, there's a dozen other people ready to take your place.
I opted for a much more stable and lucrative position in the healthcare industry. The work is interesting (web application development) and I like the people I work with. In what seems like a rarity these days, I can easily see myself spending the bulk of my career where I am. Already I've been here for 10 years and another thirty sounds just fine with me.
Making games as a hobby seemed to be the best choice for me. I enjoy the creative aspect of the work and the freedom to make the story I want to tell. It's fun to be able to give my work away for essentially free and bring a bit of joy to the world. There are occasional frustrations, such as debugging and post-release tension, but for the most part it's an enjoyable pastime that I hope to continue well into the future.
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.
All these fly by night gaming schools are tapping into this market, but there is another way. A few really competent developers could clean up by grabbing one of the open source gaming engines out there, getting some venture capital and building it out into an open source gaming virtual console. Here's the basic idea. You build an open source, cross-platform gaming engine that takes modules, just like neverwinter nights, but a bit more versatile. You build into this a service that allows people to sell and/or give away modules they develop, supported by advertisements. At the same time you build freeware and more comprehensive payware development tools for this engine. You build one game, or maybe half a game including art and the whole shebang as your hook and you give the engine, game and freeware tools away for free. Get it bundled by Windows OEMs and in Linux distros and heck on Apple machines if you can. If you can't, make sure it is a free download everyone knows about.
At this point you have dropped a pile of money on this game/engine and don't have any real return on your investment. This is where the aforementioned market comes in. All the people who want to be game developers will mess around with your free tools and a few will make something worthwhile. A number more will shell out for your professional dev tools. At this point you have a fairly widespread service and will be getting a lot of good press. You have a lot of the work of making a game done for people, so the investment to bring one to market is small. This means companies might consider releasing cheap titles. They will want your dev tools. They may well want improvements to the engine which will benefit you or which they will pay you to make. And who better to hire to do development than the makers and maintainers of the engine?
Throughout all of this you'll be able to undercut other companies developing engines because you are leveraging free work from the open source community. Heck, there are a number of engines now you can leverage. If nothing else you can make and sell more modules, providing low cost games and building brands. If it takes off enough you'll be able to clean up simply on the advertisements on the site and the dev costs will be incidental.
I seriously think this would work, but am way too busy/comfortable to go for it myself. Someone, steal my idea.
PS I got back out of games a year later...
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I don't know about that. I go to a school with an accredited CS program, and somehow we have time for five classes that aren't strictly necessary, but exist to give general background in specific areas. My user interface design and artificial intelligence classes would have been helpful for games programming, but machine learning, image processing, and quantum computing could have been substituted for 3D graphics, networking, and a specific games programming class. Some extra focus on optimization in the class I learned assembly language in (or would have if I hadn't known it) would have been good.
Yes, I did get the core stuff (discrete math, programming language design, operating systems, file systems, multithreading, very low-level hardware, etc.), but that was all 300-level and below.
I'm not saying you're not correct, just that you're not necessarily correct. My school could offer a games programming emphasis in our CS major without losing accreditation.
Undisclaimer: I've written various 3D applications (couple of simple games, volumetric terrain generator) and a couple of Quake 3 mods (Alternate Fire, Unlagged). I almost broke into the industry once, but backed out when I saw the working conditions. All that said, I may or may not know what I'm talking about.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
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.
So here's the deal. To make a fun game, you don't need really fast, impressive graphics. You need gameplay. You absolutely need some good coders to develop good gameplay, but you also need people with vision and who know what works. The next two items on the list are graphics (both coding and artwork) and story. Some of the best games of all time are the ones that managed to get all of these components. Some of the worst games of all time have great graphics and coding behind them, but the gameplay and story is a big pile of crap. The thing is, a lot of people recognize that the coding to make good gameplay can be reusable. That is to say, with a good gaming engine, some scripting, artwork, story, and map makers, you can make a really good game without having to do a lot more actual coding. Companies try this and sometimes succeed all the time when they buy access to engines and dev tools others made.
There are a lot of people out there who are talented storytellers, or artists, or just have a really good idea of what makes a fun game, but they don't have a good way to leverage those skills and those skills are often not valued by many of the clueless development houses.
Since they have no chance to get into the regular gaming industry, a lot of amateurs with other pieces of the puzzle (or who think they have them) would like to have access to a chance to contribute. This creates a big market for gaming schools and for easy to use game dev software.