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Ask HN: Is it possible to specialize only in the programming part of Unity?
Hello everyone. I am a Sr Software Engineer with lot of years of experience, however, I'd like to start experimenting with gaming, maybe not to pivot to the industry but at least to work on some indie projects, etc.
Anyway, my design/artistic skills are horrible, so I was wondering if it's possible to work with Unity only on the coding/programming side, without having to worry about the artistic side (like modeling, rendering, etc). Is it possible to they are highly connected so it is not?
Anyone had experience doing this? I tried some googling but I couldn't find anything.
Thanks!
- hnthrowaway0315 4y agoYes you can do that. Tons of game programming roles don't touch other parts of game dev. If you are indie then buy assets or use AI to generate placeholder assets.
- dtagames 4y agoIt's also possible to work on the platform or infra side of games, which is how I moved into the industry from business and web apps. Even small studios have platform people who don't do graphics or design but are still very much needed to make a live game work.
- 101008 4y agoCan you please share more about your personal experience? I'd like to read about someone who pivot from business to gaming!
- dtagames 4y agoThe short story is that I was becoming quite depressed about my job prospects after running my own web development company for more than 20 years, then starting a startup with a small amount of money and seeing it fail. I was interviewing for a lot of boring and fairly awful positions when I asked myself what I really wanted, and that was to work in games! (I've been playing them since we got an Atari VCS the year it came out. My mom worked for the chip company.) I started applying to game studios for positions that used my web, API, and data skills. I've worked with JS, TS, JSON, SQL, and NOSQL for years and it turns out all games need some of that stuff. Any game that has inventory, an economy, or real users will need some kind of dashboard and platform tools to bring together that data and let the team manage it. Also, they need a public-facing website. So that's what I do in my current position, build and maintain both of those things for a AAA mobile game. My favorite thing about being in the "plumbing" department, so to speak, is that I'm allowed to do my technical work in the way that I think it best. Having fewer people in the company involved in those languages and tech gives me more freedom and more of an architecture role and I think our products are better for it. I also love being on the inside and seeing how sausage is made. Games are a fascinating industry and in many ways different from business software and that's been fun to learn about.
- 7373737373 4y agoI'm pretty sure many VRChat world creators would appreciate your help. I'm not sure how well this could be made into a career, but I've heard anecdotes of people having done that very successfully.
- aprdm 4y agoYea, look into vfx companies doing virtual production
- ffhhj 4y agoCreating games from the code side is actually the best way to make them. I'm currently working on a large FPS and I mock everything with capsules and boxes. Also it's better not to trust on the data serialization of the editor, but creating your own structures and parsers to store data in code and files. You can either use assets from the store or make your own programmatically.