I've been in the industry for 6 years at both Origin and Retro Studios. I'll answer two questions and ask another, and you can take it from there.
1) I officially started in the industry when I sought an internship at Origin. They needed more help and I was 'overqualified' (read: monkey), so they hired me full time. So much for finishing my degree.
2) I officially left the games industry after shipping only three titles in 6 years, all of which happened to ship in the first three years.:-(
Now, my question for you is, why do you want to enter the games industry?
It's a harsh environment, full of people willing to do it for very little money because they love it. Most of the senior management of most companies are hackers at heart; this sounds like a grass roots appeal, but it actually indicates a complete lack of managerial understanding for running a company. Larger teams (most of mine were A+ projects with 25+ people on the game full time) have many egos to contend with and too many good ideas to implement. Smaller teams tend to be dominated by a few vocal individuals, but frequently suffer from having projects killed or companies going out of business.
Let me make this last part very, very clear: You will NEVER make the game you want. Never. Get over that right now and accept the rest of this and you might actually be a good fit in the industry.
For advice on how to make a splash, see other replies--they're pretty accurate. The one thing I would stress any programmers that are interested, is to either specialize completely on one topic, or learn everything a little bit. Competition is fierce, but there's always value in a resource that can be thrown into any project anywhere.
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I've been in the industry for 6 years at both Origin and Retro Studios. I'll answer two questions and ask another, and you can take it from there.
:-(
1) I officially started in the industry when I sought an internship at Origin. They needed more help and I was 'overqualified' (read: monkey), so they hired me full time. So much for finishing my degree.
2) I officially left the games industry after shipping only three titles in 6 years, all of which happened to ship in the first three years.
Now, my question for you is, why do you want to enter the games industry?
It's a harsh environment, full of people willing to do it for very little money because they love it. Most of the senior management of most companies are hackers at heart; this sounds like a grass roots appeal, but it actually indicates a complete lack of managerial understanding for running a company. Larger teams (most of mine were A+ projects with 25+ people on the game full time) have many egos to contend with and too many good ideas to implement. Smaller teams tend to be dominated by a few vocal individuals, but frequently suffer from having projects killed or companies going out of business.
Let me make this last part very, very clear: You will NEVER make the game you want. Never. Get over that right now and accept the rest of this and you might actually be a good fit in the industry.
For advice on how to make a splash, see other replies--they're pretty accurate. The one thing I would stress any programmers that are interested, is to either specialize completely on one topic, or learn everything a little bit. Competition is fierce, but there's always value in a resource that can be thrown into any project anywhere.