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Indeed, game engines are one of the prime destinations for game devs near the end of their career. Game engine companies are more relaxed and on average better

Indeed, game engines are one of the prime destinations for game devs near the end of their career. Game engine companies are more relaxed and on average better paying than studio work since they are not tied to game releases and the related crunch. Yet there also exists a sea of inexperienced programmers jumping straight into "engine dev". They have none of the critical production experience which drives quality engines. This flood of enthusistic yet unprepared engineers causes a bipartite population. With the majority of public articles or YouTube presentations coming from those least prepared to speak with knowledge. If you want to become a game engine dev your first step should be joining a studio as a gameplay programmer. No one wants to use an engine written by someone who does not know how to make games.

meheleventyone 5y ago
> If you want to become a game engine dev your first step should be joining a studio as a gameplay programmer. No one wants to use an engine written by someone who does not know how to make games. Plenty of engine companies and studios will hire juniors and mid-level engineers into engine teams. And it’s been that way for a long time. And whilst the engine will preferably be made whilst developing actual games using it you don’t need everyone on the team to have been a gameplay programmer. There’s almost too much specialisation required these days and a lot of engine engineers aren’t interested in or good enough at game design to do gameplay roles. What it does need is active feedback from game teams building serious projects. I’d agree though if you want stability and much less chance of crunch pick a company with a stable income. Engine companies are good for this but there are plenty of others.
Animats 5y ago
The next frontier is "metaverse engines". A metaverse engine client is partly like an MMO game engine, and partly like a web browser. You've got a flood of incoming events and content to deal with, no idea what it all means until it arrives, and have to present the illusion of a coherent world to the user while the data is coming in. A big difference from MMOs is that worlds with user-created content don't get all the pre-computation and optimization that happens in, say, Unreal Engine's level building tools. It's the 3D equivalent of rendering un-optimized web pages. A metaverse engine server (probably a whole farm of services) is somewhat like a MMO game server, except that it may have to deal with other similar servers. Possibly untrusted servers run by others, if you allow portals or teleporting or adjacent regions run by different grids. Hard problem. Improbable tried to build such a thing, as Spatial OS, but the end result was really expensive to run and all the games that used it went broke. Both Tim Sweeney and John Carmack see many unsolved problems in this area. If this "metaverse" stuff survives the hype and the scams and turns out to be important, there's plenty of hard work ahead in this area.

meheleventyone 5y ago

> If you want to become a game engine dev your first step should be joining a studio as a gameplay programmer. No one wants to use an engine written by someone who does not know how to make games. Plenty of engine companies and studios will hire juniors and mid-level engineers into engine teams. And it’s been that way for a long time. And whilst the engine will preferably be made whilst developing actual games using it you don’t need everyone on the team to have been a gameplay programmer. There’s almost too much specialisation required these days and a lot of engine engineers aren’t interested in or good enough at game design to do gameplay roles. What it does need is active feedback from game teams building serious projects. I’d agree though if you want stability and much less chance of crunch pick a company with a stable income. Engine companies are good for this but there are plenty of others.

Animats 5y ago

The next frontier is "metaverse engines". A metaverse engine client is partly like an MMO game engine, and partly like a web browser. You've got a flood of incoming events and content to deal with, no idea what it all means until it arrives, and have to present the illusion of a coherent world to the user while the data is coming in. A big difference from MMOs is that worlds with user-created content don't get all the pre-computation and optimization that happens in, say, Unreal Engine's level building tools. It's the 3D equivalent of rendering un-optimized web pages. A metaverse engine server (probably a whole farm of services) is somewhat like a MMO game server, except that it may have to deal with other similar servers. Possibly untrusted servers run by others, if you allow portals or teleporting or adjacent regions run by different grids. Hard problem. Improbable tried to build such a thing, as Spatial OS, but the end result was really expensive to run and all the games that used it went broke. Both Tim Sweeney and John Carmack see many unsolved problems in this area. If this "metaverse" stuff survives the hype and the scams and turns out to be important, there's plenty of hard work ahead in this area.