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What Are the Best First Steps For Becoming a Game Designer?
todd10k writes "I've recently decided to go back to college. I have a lot of experience with games, having played them for most of my adult life, and have always toyed with the idea of making them one day. I've finally decided to give it my best. What I'd like to know is: what are the best languages to study? What are the minimum diploma or degree requirements that most games companies will accept? Finally, is C++ the way to go? ASP? LUA?"
Get out while you still can. I can't imagine a worse career path.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
What I'd like to know is: what are the best languages to study?
Hmmmm, I'm not sure this is going to be a fruitful discussion. It's not too clear to me what kind of game development interests you most. The truth is that games have been written in many languages and developers often scoff at any guideline to restrict them from writing a game in -- say Java -- when there are more efficient languages. Assuming you want to get into console games and/or PC games, I would suggest starting out with simple authoring tools and just tinker with them. Download GameKit and get it building on your development machine. Then set weekly goals for yourself to modify the Space Invaders game by changing graphics, sound, maybe even mechanics. Once you've done that and are bored, move on to another kit/sdk.
... they are both great languages for different tasks. It's more important that if you want to be a graphics engine guy you understand how major APIs are laid out to implement tiles and shaders and renderers ... Go here to start thinking aobut what aspect of the game interests you most.
You see, I doubt the importance is that you know how C++ or Lua works
What are the minimum diploma or degree requirements that most games companies will accept?
This is a topic I could drone on for hours about. Enjoy life, man. They'll take you with a 2 year tech degree or less if you're built for coding. But don't do that. Enjoy the college expereince, go to a four year liberal arts college. Explore math, physics, chemistry, biology, literature, music, etc. I took enough music theory to major in music but I didn't. And I wouldn't have it any other way.
Finally, is C++ the way to go? ASP? LUA?
You should really concentrate on one of three types of games: web, console, PC. While the last two are related, the idea of catering to hardware probably has an effect on games. Is a PC developer going to care about Sony's Emotion engine while a console guy might live and breathe it. Honestly, fool around with Allegro, SDL and OpenGL if you're looking to do serious game coding.
You've got a long difficult road ahead if you're going down this path. You're going to have your heart broken by Blizzard and end up over worked and underpaid at EA. Game programming seems to find you, you can only prepare yourself for it. Read John Carmack's story in Masters of Doom or just wait for the upcoming movie about it.
I've also heard -- and I can't verify this -- that it helps to have a notebook full of sketches, stories, game mechanics, ideas you've had in relation to games. You keep this and bring it to an interview. You pass the technical aspects and then you let them know that you really want this and that you are also creative and not just technical.
Don't forget to have fun and good luck!
My work here is dung.
Game Programming? What in particular:
- UI / Tools
- Graphics, Physics
- Networking
- AI
- Mobile Gaming
etc
But in general if you want to go into Game Programming hit a CS degree and do a game development masters. All while learning C++ and trying to develop a nice portfolio of little games you've created yourself. Try and find a Masters program with hooks into the games industry because they will be your best bet to even get a foot in the door.
If it is Game Design they do an arts degree like English Lit and then do a Masters in Game Design. Same deal with the shoe in the door thing, find the college with the best links not the best course.
C. A taste for ramen.
D. A willingness to update your resume every six months.
E. The number of your State Attorney General's Labor Enforcement Division, to file a complaint when they suddenly decide to stop paying you and ask you to work for free until they close the next round of funding, which is always just a week or two away.
You'll get a lot of decent answers, and I won't try to duplicate any of them here. My addition: amidst many mediocre books about Game Design, there are a couple that really stand out. The first one to come to mind is "The Art of Game Design":
http://www.amazon.com/Art-Game-Design-book-lenses/dp/0123694965
While you are perfecting everyone else's good suggestions, give this one a read...
If your approach to a new career is to find out the bare minimum you need to start... odds are you're not going to excel.
There's not a lot of stories from successful game developers that start with 'When I got in at 8am' and end with 'Then I left at 5pm.'
If you think you've got 'it', do what the guy who did Braid did -- make it. Don't wait for someone to give you a stamp of approval. Sing it loud.
Otherwise, stick with your day job.
First of all, good luck, and I hope you succeed.
But what makes you think that having played games gives you the talent to be a game designer/programmer? Why is this a desirable profession?
Consider the example of cars (just because it's slashdot). I like cars. I like driving cars and doing some of my own minor repair work. That said, I would absolutely hate to be an automotive engineer. Being an avid driver or mechanic enjoying a particularly well built machine is entirely different from being the person in charge of designing and building a machine.
Or consider the example of popular fictional universes (like Trek or Star Wars). I imagine there are a lot of geeks who could spout any amount of minutiae about various ships, planets, races, etc. in a number of fictional SF worlds. That doesn't mean they would necessarily enjoy creating them from scratch. And even if they did create one, I imagine the soul-sucking mass of nit-picky fandom would quickly rob what little joy was left.
Are you sure you don't actually want to be a game tester? It seems to be more in the line of what you enjoy about games - playing them.
Game development is HARD. It's definitely in the "deep-end" of computer programming. You better know some serious math, too.
What I'm saying is, most of the game developers who have jobs doing it have been doing it "for fun" since they were kids. It takes YEARS of work/experimentation/dedication to develop the skills to write a modern game.
If you are planning just to learn some programming and get a job in the game industry, don't be surprised if you get are stuck in entry-level positions for a LONG time. You aren't going to be game programming, per se. You're going to be debugging the installer for the game, stuff like that.
Game DESIGNER?
Well, you could try to create some board games or your own pen & paper RPG. No programmers required for either of those.
"what are the best languages to study? What are the minimum diploma or degree requirements that most games companies will accept? Finally, is C++ the way to go? ASP? LUA?"
You seem to have confused "game designer" with "game programmer". A good game designer would be able to create a good game out of a story, a die, some arbitrary rules, and his imagination. It sounds like you are thinking of a different job description.
First off, forget the college degree if all you want it for is to design/develop games. You can do so on your own without the degree. *** I'd suggest laearning C/C++ and at least one .NET language as well as studying/learning UI and graphic design theories.
Now - I see a lot of comments previous to mine that suggest getting out and not working for a game company. I agree wholeheartedly. If you want to design just games, start your own game company. You will want a niche market - DS games, PC games for Thai Children, Mainframe Games - and focus on doing just that. Then you can expand out. One designer I know who's been somewhat successful is Bill Kendrick. He writes multi-platform educational games. My kids love them: http://tux4kids.alioth.debian.org
Good luck out there.
*** Now, I have recently hired two developers who got the job partially because they worked on games while in college. They had collaborated on a C++ based game which was installable and playable. This put the two of them above the average applicant who had only done coursework. Keep in mind, I manage a government-based software development group so we don't "do" games here. However, their experience did help them get an edge when starting. (We do most development in C#/.NET.)
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
"Good grief, who the hell wants to be a [code monkey]? what a dull occupation that must "
Fixed that for you.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Just because you have "played games for most of your adult life" doesn't mean that becoming a game delevoper is the best career decision for you. I am also an avid gamer. And like you, I also had aspirations of someday becoming a game developer when I was younger. I started out by tinkering with mod tools and working on game maps and such.
I decided to take the next step and pursue a degree in CS. I quickly discovered that it wasn't for me. It's not that I couldn't do the work; I just found programming to be tedious. The amount of work involved to write even the simplest program was frustrating for me. I came out with a higher respect for programmers, and a degree in IT.
Look around any indie game developer forum and you'll see tons of posts about games that sound great, but only a handful of posts about games that are working and finished. Many of these get through the initial design stages, but their creators stall out at some process after that. Sometimes the design is simply too complicated for a first project. Sometimes they get a few lines of code down, but never return. Sometimes they implement all the interesting parts, but get hung up on the final details necessary for making a release.
My first suggestion is to use Apple as a model and never talk about things you are planning. Only talk about things that are finished or very close to finishing. You may need some outside programming help at some point along the way, of course, but there's rarely a need to get too specific about your game when asking for help.
Second, finish something. It can be a simple as a pong clone. Doesn't matter if anybody ever downloads it, just finish it and release it. Just getting that far puts you above 90% of the indie "developers" out there.
Not a typewriter
Sorry if the paragraph breaks end up jumbled here; Slashdot is being weird for me.
Disclaimer: I am a professional game developer
Why are you asking how to be a game designer, and then turning around and asking about programming languages? Decide which job you want.
Truly, the best way to immediately become a designer is to start your own company. Outside of that, nobody will want to hire an unknown to design things, unless you somehow have an extremely impressive portfolio. No matter how many games you've played and how great that experience is, it is an entirely different beast than designing a game.
The best experience for designing, if you still want to continue down that path, is to read about it constantly, and actually do it, also constantly, and get lots of people to tell you how you're a bad designer, until they stop saying that. Get a subscription to Game Developer Magazine, read books on game design, and by all means design your own games. Start simple and write a complete design document for an existing game such as Pac-Man. Maybe even figure out how to make it better and incorporate that into your design. Join the nearest IGDA chapter and go to meetings. Form relationships with people in the industry and ask them to critique your design documents from a professional viewpoint.
Now, you asked about programming languages, which is totally not what a designer should be asking. But if you want to go that route and be a game programmer, then consider what platforms you want to target, and learn the languages appropriate for that. For the iPhone, learn Objective-C++. For consoles, C++ is generally the way to go. For websites, probably ActionScript in Flash, or you could try lua in WildPockets. And if you have aspirations of being a level scripter (much easier than arbitrary game programming), then you should learn to make a mod in a variety of engines using their native languages: lua, python, UnrealScript, QuakeC, etc.
For any route you want to take, the most important thing for you to learn is everything. By that, I mean study all kinds of topics that you might think are completely unrelated to game design: history, fashion, languages, art, avionics. After you've gotten yourself into the habit of learning with great breadth and depth, and hopefully applying your new varied knowledge to your ideas, the best way for you to get a job in the industry is to meet and hang out with people who are already in it. To that end, join your local IGDA chapter, as I mentioned two paragraphs ago.
C++ is the language of choice, as I understand it, but a Bachelor of Computer Science is really what you need. However, as parent said, there's no way you're going to get in with just a degree. Think of how many gamers there are out there, and how many of them want to make a career out of games: almost all of them. That's who you're competing against.
You'll need a substantial portfolio of game dev work you've done, so get coding right away: Join open source game dev projects online, build your own games/programs, show what you can do that most others can't.
Game dev is an EXTREMELY competitive field, and if you don't have the drive to devote the majority of your life (and soul) to it, then...again, as parent said, stick with your day job.
what are the best languages to study?
Considering you ask about computer languages too, I'm assuming you are being literal. Hindi and English.
What are the minimum diploma or degree requirements that most games companies will accept?
High school dropout with proof of code.
Finally, is C++ the way to go? ASP? LUA?"
C++ and LUA.
IMHO Listen to the "don't do it responses".
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
There's not going to be a simple answer to your questions. If you want to make games, make games. You can write them in Flash or Objective-C or Perl or PHP or Lisp or C++ or... Obviously you'll have a little trouble writing an iPhone game in Flash, or a Flash game in !Flash, so choose the right tool for the job; but if you're in college, your goal shouldn't be to learn a single tool and then pretend that all the jobs you might get later in life use that one tool.
Also, most of the game industry doesn't care about your degree(s). They care about what you can do, and in particular how you've demonstrated that you can do things by having done things. So do things, and get them done. Get the degree to help you have a career to start on, a career to fall back on, and a career to move on to... burn out is common, and doing this your whole life and then retiring is ridiculously rare.
--Matthew
1. learn all about games, start by playing every available game.
2. Whatever (I'm still not done with stage one)
As of Postgres v6.2, time travel is no longer supported.
Sorry to burst your bubble but game designer/game programmer is one of these professions that you can't just say "hey, I know what I wanna do in life, I want to be a X. Now I'll just go to college to become that!". You can't right out of the blue suddenly decide to go to college to become a successful game designer/programmer/pianist/geologist/astronomer/graphical artist, because to have a successful career in those things you need a passion, and if you had the passion for it then whatever you want to make into a career would be your hobby to begin with.
From what you told us you don't seem to have any such passion, it sounds more like you decided "hey that sounds kind of cool, I'll just put my mind to it and surely I'll succeed". It doesn't work that way, because half of your colleagues will be people who code 512 byte demos in ARM assembly in their spare time just for fun, and who've been doing that type of thing since a decade before you had the bright idea of considering making games. My advice would be, either follow whatever passion you REALLY have, or go for a job that doesn't take any.
You just got troll'd!
The question is horribly muddled.
I want to be a game designer and then... "Finally, is C++ the way to go? ASP? LUA?"
Sorry, lets start from the beginning. Do you want to be a game designer or a games programmer? If it's the former then language isn't really important, you should be focussing on being able to create a good interactive story so you probably really need to study something like literature or perhaps even a screenwriting class would help if you can't get an explicit game design class. Don't expect to get far though, really there's a lot of people who want to be game designers, in fact, probably too many, because everyone wants to be in control of a team that will make their dream game for them, very few actually come up with ideas that everyone else thinks is awesome too. You have to be able to develop games that everyone will enjoy, not that you think would be cool which isn't as easy a skill as many probably assume. Programming will be a help to some extent, but it's not the first thing to worry about if you want to be a designer.
If you in fact want to be a programmer, then you need to get some basic knowledge of programming, the fact you suggested ASP is puzzling, I'm not even aware of any web based games written in ASP - I've only ever seen them written in PHP. I can only guess then that you're just throwing around terms you've seen about the net to make it look like you're anywhere near close to even beginning to work towards your ideal career. The issue is you can't even get started as you don't even seem to have a basic idea of what you want to do, or what is involved in these roles.
So here's the best advice anyone can give based on your question - go read some places like Gamedev.net or Gamasutra.com. Actually figure out what you want to do first. Don't come back and say I want to be a programmer, come back and say "I want to be an engine programmer", or "I want to be an AI programmer" or whatever else.
If you're wondering why a lot of responses here seem hostile, it's because you seem to be expecting answers without even bothering to put as little effort is required to even figure out what you need to ask first. If you had at least done that and figured out if you want to be a designer or a programmer you'd probably find better responses.
Still, the Slashdot editors should've at least picked that up, I'd like to think they vet questions to see if they make sense first but judging by this one it seems like it was streamed straight from their inbox onto the front page.
I hope this response will in itself give you a good start though as again you really need to figure out what it is you actually want. When you do finally figure out what you want, may I suggest you start by working with an indie or a mod team to at least get an idea of the facets involved in building a game first hand. I'd suggest you also read some books and so on, but most importantly perhaps - just get involved in a community like that at Gamedev.net or somewhere that produces indie focussed engines like Garagegames or the C4 engine community at terathon.com or perhaps even get involved with an open source rendering engine like ogre.
I'm sorry, but having been a programming lecturer at the ncca, i actually think it's the worst possible place to start. The industry uses C++; standardized API's (eg, openGL, D3D, openAL); middleware (physX, morpheme); and is largely based in 3D graphics (BSP trees, quad trees, quat blending, shaders etc etc).
I can't see any advantage in wasting time with a basic-like language, on hardware that has very little relation to current consoles (single threaded, no GPU of merit). It may be of some benefit to programming handheld consoles (ok, just the DS), however even that is not going to help in a few years time (the next generation of handhelds are likely to include fairly powerful GPU's - eg PSP).
There is a huge amount of information to learn and digest before you can expect to get a job in this industry, so spend time learning that (by writing games) and not on information that has little real world usage.
I ended up getting a job as a game producer thanks to Quake. I was playing online in a clan, and was one of the worst in the group but having fun. To help my score I "cheated" by figuring out how to modify the models in the game, and then adding the rocket attribute to all the player models. This caused them to smoke when they ran (pretty funny) and more importantly glow in a way which allowed me to see them when they hid in dark areas or were just around the corner.
This was long before Punkbuster, wallhacks, or any other cheats. The result was I played a lot better. One of the guys in the clan found out what I had done, and his father owned a game development studio. Next thing I know I was on a plane for Silicon Valley and working as a game producer for a few dreamcast and playstation games.
Unfortunately I was only able to continue to work until my life savings ran out. Yes the jokes about eating Tap Ramen are quite true. I was making only about 70% of what I needed just to cover basic expenses. When I asked for a raise I was told in no uncertain terms that there were plenty of other kids living with their parents who would gladly work for what I was getting.
I'm now a sysadmin living in the midwest making about 3x what I was making in the games industry, and my mortgage payment is less than the rent on my studio in Silicon Valley. I love what I do, but am really glad I took the opportunity to work in the video games industry. Have I thought about writing something on my own, sure I have. I even have a couple notebooks with fully fleshed out game designs. And I have time to do those because I'm not working 90 hours a week on somebody else's game.
So my advice for somebody wanting to get in is simple. Do something, anything, to stand out from the other potential applicants. Find a game you enjoy and mod it. If you're into graphics, find an open source game and help them out (Open source games are notorious for needing graphical help) Write flash games, make something with the XNA. In short, just do something. You'll find out a lot about yourself, and if you have the drive and dedication necessary to make it. Set yourself timelines, make milestones and meet them. But most importantly, do SOMETHING.
Introducing Microsoft Vacuum 1.0 The first Microsoft product that doesn't suck.
One of the most useful pixel art tools I've found so far is mtPaint - I did a lot of little isometric drawings for a game project I'm working on (e.g. this one of a park) entirely in this program. Far easier than using paint or a full-fledged image tool (although I did use GIMP for compositing layered tiles into final images at times).
picpix image polls. create - share - vote. fun!
I'm a game developer, having worked at Elixir and Lionhead, and now running my own indie show --> http://www.positech.co.uk./ Parent poster is right, most people who now work as game designers started young and worked for years. i wrote my first code in 1981, aged 11, so that's about 28 years to get to where I am now (albeit with some major detours, you can do it much quicker).
Key points to be aware of are these:
1) The competition to be designer is harder than any other role, so the chances of getting work as a designer are way way lower than getting a job as an artist or coder or tester, so you need to be uber-good.
2) What most people consider to be game design is being 'lead designer' or even better 'concept designer'. These roles are even rarer. You need to run/own a studio or go solo to get this job.
3) 50% of the coders and artists at each game company also harbour design ambitions. They are also ahead of you in the queue.
Having said all this, you can do it, I certainly have. I've even designed games for Maxis (SimSocial) as well as my indie stuff. The key thing is, that I did it through the route of programming. I didn't have to persuade a coder to make my idea, I could code it myself, which is 90% of the battle. I have to employ an artist or three, but at the start, you can get away with coder art.
In short, if you are one of the game design wannabes who aims to never learn any code and is afraid of C++, you are very likely doomed, unless you get in through the route of game testing, and then work your balls off or show incredible ability. Even given that, you are looking at 5+ years minimum before you get to really design. Thats 5 years of checking that barbies new riding game doesn't crash with a French keyboard and other exciting tasks.
On the other hand if you are happy to learn some code, and willing to start out small, you can do everything yourself. With platforms such as wiiware, iphone, the web (flash and PC downloadable) there are many opportunities to get to be a game designer on a smaller scale.
Indie dev may not sound as exciting as working at epic, but today I spent my working day fine tuning the circumstances under which AI-controlled space cruisers retreat to engage auto-repair systems*. It beats working in a call center :D
Good Luck!
*that was for this -> http://www.gratuitousspacebattles.com/
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
You might find my own story interesting with regards to this subject. I more or less fell into game design, and although I still don't get paid for what I do, I get a great amount of enjoyment and satisfaction from it.
As for languages: a familiarity with C++ is a must. Once you have down the basics, most other "C" based languages will be pretty easy to pick up.
The project I work on has also recently released the source code for the Medusa Engine SDK, a fully featured MMO development platform. the same one we are using to create the game DarkSpace.
Medusa is being licensed under one of three different licenses depending on how you want to use the source code. In a nutshell, If you want to make money off the source code, then you will have to pay a fee. If you just want to make games and release them for free or just for fun, the source code and engine is free of charge. Download it at http://www.palestar.com./
The following text is an except from my blog on http://www.mmoprg.com/ (http://www.mmorpg.com/blogs/Drafell/022009/3337_DarkSpace-Development-Blog-Introduction), giving an overview of how I got into game design.
I hope you enjoy it.
- - - - -
First, I would like to introduce myself to you all, and explain my role in the DarkSpace community.
Several years ago, I was idly rambling through cyberspace,looking for a new game to play, when I stumbled across an odd title called DarkSpace. Although not your classic MMO, something about it appealed to me, so I downloaded the client and got sucked into losing the next few months of my life.
The initial introduction was bleak. There didn't seem to be a great number of players, and I was a little confused to start with as to what exactly the aim of the game was. I was on the verge of quitting when a clan offered to teach me the ropes and learn the basics on how NOT to die. I realized that a small community did not automatically mean that a game has no future, and I soon became an avid supporter of the game, administering the DarkSpace arm of a clan fleet called the Shattered Star Confederation. Six months later I was asked if I would like to join the DarkSpace Moderation team - a group of player volunteers who help police the community, dealing with player queries and helping to prevent exploitation of the game system.
Naturally I said "Yes," and real life was postponed for another couple of years.
As time passed, I gradually took on more and more responsibility whilst seeing the game evolve through many variations, and just helping out where I could, or where I saw a need for assistance. Note that I have had no training, and no formal education with regards to community management or public relations. This is probably very apparent from my particular style of communication, and I have a tendency to ramble into totally unrelated topics, such as now...
As time passed, I started to get more and more into actual game development. I had an interest in music, and so made a few, somewhat questionable tracks (you have to admire anyone that can actually write and produce music. It is not as easy as it may look, or sound). I also developed an interest into graphics, and through playing a multitude of other games, I got interested in the concepts of game balance and design.
Eventually this coalesced into me and a friend (Jack) submitting a general balance proposal to the owner of the DarkSpace game and head of development, Richard Lyle, and despite having few coding or development skills between us, we were given access to the source code and development environment for the DarkSpace game. I was getting into LUA scripting, and had messed around with creating my own little DarkSpace themed HTML game, and somewhat cheekily stated that I would probably be able to learn C++ in a few weeks. Ignorance is bliss, and a few years on my "C" skills are still questionable, to say
I ended up getting quite a few job offers after my Neverwinter Nights modules became successful. It was flattering, but the reality is that my current job as a developer in the healthcare industry is way too good. I've managed to keep it in a recession while the gaming industry has become far more cutthroat.
I still love making games, but purely as a hobby.
...is English.
I am serious. I make games for a living and the most useful tool overall is written communication with the rest of the team. Nobody can remember how every nuance of a game should work so being able to go to the internal wiki or wherever and re-read the explanation is hugely important.
Also, make games. Lots and lots of games. Board games, card games, dice games, any kind of simple game. Look at other games - start with very simple games - and think about them critically. Examine each part of the game and try to figure out why it is that way. If you can't deconstruct games like this you've no business being a game designer.
Graham
First you need to ask yourself "do I actually want to become a game designer"? Most people think that the game designer comes up with the idea for the game, and such, but this isn't really the case. Ideas are often a collaborative effort by several members of the team mostly coming from different backgrounds. Yes some studios do it differently, but most of the successful studios make games by committee. Also you need to remember that ideas in the game industry are a dime a dozen so if you think you're an "idea man" then you're going to be worthless to 90% of the industry. Back to the topic at hand. Being a game designer means you hash out all the details of a broad design. You map out how the UI is going to interact, or write how you want a system to interact. You could be part of the level design, or mission design team that helps create the world. Also your work is always at the whim of a rogue artist or programmer who "thought it might work better this way". It seems like most people that don't know much about the video game industry want to design, but few are good at it, and most can put their skills to better use in other fields. While programming is a good/necessary skill to have it always seems like those w/ art backgrounds have a much better idea on how to design things. Most companies can hire a handful of "code monkeys" to do your programming for you, but it's hard to find a good artist, and even then communicating art isn't an easy task. I highly suggest doing art, over programming if you want to move over to design. Next you'll never get anywhere in the game industry w/out experience. Now it may seem like a catch-22, but if you're persistent opportunities will pop up. Also just because it's not professional experience doesn't mean it's not worth trying out. Companies will hire people w/ modding experience over those w/out, and if the mod experience is with their own software then they might take you over somebody w/ professional experience (don't count on it though). Last is do you actually want to work in the game industry. Playing games is necessary for the industry, but just because you like playing games doesn't mean you'll like working on them. First off if you're qualified to work in the game industry somebody else will pay you more outside of the game industry. If you make $60k a year expect to make $30k in the game industry. Second you're going to work much harder in the game industry than anywhere else. Though management in the industry is getting better it's still common for people to sleep at work, or pull 80+ hours in a week. Missing a deadline can be very expensive, and you're working w/ some of the most complicated tech projects in the world. Also just about everything you know now will probably become useless in 5 years. The technology and design in this industry change so fast that being ahead of the curve means you're already late by the time your product hits the shelves. So you'll always be learning in this job, and if you take a break from the field you're probably going to need to start all over again.
I started out programming some OpenGL applications for visualizing realtime complex data sets. After the project was over, I continued playing with it because it was fun. I then got to the point of making an application to animate some machines and robots I had made in a CAD package. Later I got to the point of rendering a model from Poser/DAZ. Then i got into particle effects, played some with shaders ... etc etc... All very good fun.
Then i got it into my head that i wanted to make a full 3D game, and got to the point of matrix palette skinning a mesh of a character. Off course I wanted next-gen graphics, so I kept the polycount very high.
and here's where i started realizing this was not for me. Getting a mesh to an acceptable polycount and still have it looking good is hard enough. But skinning a high poly mesh is not just A LOT of work and very time consuming. It is also very hard.
Just like Sierra And Lucas Art back in the day could get beautiful (for then) graphics in QVGA with 256 colors, it requires a special breed of man to take a high poly model and downsample it to acceptable levels, both for the eyes and for the available processing power.
You also need an arsenal of 3D software (many of it commercial)
And you need a very good basis in higher math, so that you can at least understand some concept by reading about it.
Start writing games.
Seriously. That's the first thing you need to do. If you know C++, write 'em in C++. If you know Flash, write 'em in Flash. If you don't know any programming language, pick up GameMaker and write 'em in GameMaker. Can't draw? Grab The Gimp, read some sprite tutorials, and draw anyway.
Then start making games. Don't make epics, don't make blockbusters, spend a week on a game and churn them out, because you'll learn a thousand times more from making ten games than you will from making a tenth of a game.
I've recently started a project where I make a game every month, spending at most a week on it. I strongly recommend it. You'll learn fast, and quite possibly end up with real games to show off.
If you want to design games, you gotta practice your ass off.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.