14 ms·

How do I get into the game industry

214 points by Michelangelo11 1y ago

TheRoque 1y ago
Deleted
- Hamuko 1y ago
  How much privilege do you need to go to a free college?
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - wccrawford 1y ago
    Where I grew up, there were kids in high school that left high school as soon as they were able to get jobs because their family needed them to help put food on the table. So at least some privilege?
  - prewett 1y ago
    Colleges don't accept privilege as a currency. Privilege is the contagion you get from going to one. If you're white, and especially male, you incur a lot of privilege-contagion. If you're from a historically underprivileged segment (but not including poor whites), you get negative contagion--you're struggling against great odds and joining the historically privileged, good work!
- tiniuclx 1y ago
  In British English, 'college' does not refer to University / higher education, it's closer to high-school. Garry's british and probably went to a UK college at the normal age for someone in his cohort.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - ChocolateGod 1y ago
    The post even references this > Our college is free and normally vocation targetted. People who leave school usually either get a job, stay on at school for 2 more years, or go to college.
  - Flere-Imsaho 1y ago
    To be more precise they are called "6th Form College", and take 2 years to complete. At the end you take A-Level exams* which determines which type of university you can apply for. My mates went to Cambridge/Oxford, I didn't. * This information may be out of date!
dminvs 1y ago
https://archive.is/ofX2x https://archive.is/ofX2x
chickenzzzzu 1y ago
While I love Garry's Mod, I don't love this article, so I'll give my pithy advice: 1) Yes, learn to program. 2) Yes, learn 3d art. 3) Enthusiastically do those things almost every day of your life. 4) Don't follow too many tutorials, just enough to unblock you. 5) Let the debugger/screen punch you in the face. Learn to love being told when you are wrong. 6) Keep your expenses low, but probably you still need to go to a relatively good college. 7) Why? That's because a large part of our world is based on needless credentialism. 8) Build tools that people literally use. This is how you know you're ready for interviewing. 9) Grind leetcode and brain teasers and common interview gotchas for your language/domain of choice, but only an hour a day max. That's basically what it takes to get a real and good job in the industry now. No magic bullets, just hard work and acceptance of some arbitrary BS.
- Colony8409 1y ago
  Can you elaborate on your eighth point?
  - chickenzzzzu 1y ago
    Yes and sorry for the delay. A common issue/complaint I see with fellow programmers is they feel like they haven't actually made something on their own. Perhaps they've only followed tutorials, implemented random features in their day job, or perhaps they actually have written something kind of cool but it is sitting unused by anyone in a github or hard drive somewhere. This often translates to anxiety once you get into an interview, because you are trying to answer behavioral/design/career questions based on some heuristic, some proxy, some guess at "what the interviewer wants to hear". While some interviewers are indeed assholes who play weird games and don't operate anywhere near reality, the truth is, if you've written literally anything that people actually use even weekly to do something (e.g a blender add on that simplifies texture baking, a toy online chat room as a discord alternative, a wrapper for ffmpeg or etc to convert files to different formats, a simple time wasting game in threejs, etc), you will be astonishingly more confident in your answers, even if they don't work every time. Why is that? Because, by actually writing software without a tutorial that is still good enough for someone to use, it guarantees you have solved some problem, without any help besides reference documentation, and have therefore wrestled with crucial design questions like "should i make this a vector or a scalar? do i need a map here? should i do this by naming convention? should this be done in a loop or should i make it a task for multiple threads?" It doesn't mean you should like, focus on marketing or chasing hot problems, but definitely do this if you are feeling like you are faking some parts of your interview questions, which are so abstract, they can benefit from delivering a real world answer naturally and confidently.
tiniuclx 1y ago
Times have changed a lot since Garry broke through with the infamous Garry's Mod. That's where I got my first taste of programming - writing a PID controller for a tank turret so I could point the tank's gun using my mouse. Today, it's easier than ever to get started making games (even I can do it! [0]) but standing out in a crowded marketplace is very difficult. The music industry saw a very similar trend about 10-15 years ago, with the release of consumer recording equipment. In both cases it lead to a 'de-professionalization' of the industry, where most participants are amateurs but most of the success still goes to established studios - barring one-in-a-million outliers such as Garry's Mod, or other indie darlings like Hollow Knight, Balatro, Stardew Valley. [0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/3627290/Botnet_of_Ares/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/3627290/Botnet_of_Ares/
- glimshe 1y ago
  Just like in the music industry, people still believe they can be the outlier. Flappy Bird, more so than your examples built by skilled individuals, showed that "anyone could do it".
  - chickenzzzzu 1y ago
    Having a hit game and being an industry programmer/artist might as well be two completely different skills. Sticking with the music analogy, it is the difference between programming your own DAW vs being the audio engineer/writer/producer/singer of your own rap album.
- skeeter2020 1y ago
  >> 'de-professionalization' I'm a dinosaur who's supposed to hate the music kids listen to these days, but the quality seems as good or better, and the quanity magnitudes higher, so maybe it was a professionalization of amateurs?
  - miohtama 1y ago
    Tools are much better compared to old school cassettes and such
bstsb 1y ago
roblox is a good suggestion. i know it's often criticised, especially for its profit margins, but developers get a massive potential audience, free unlimited multiplayer hosting, and many monetisation streams with little setup. the company could definitely do with better PR, and their child safety features are good but not perfect by any means. i'd still say it's a good choice if you're trying to make a game easily and quickly disclaimer: i've made money from Roblox's DevEx program
jayd16 1y ago
I wonder if this is a stealth ad for s&box. Anyway....it looks pretty neat. I feel like the industry as gone from a time of mods, through an era of AAA unmoddable games, and now we're landing on "all games will be mods.". I guess we're chasing Minecraft and Roblox and Fortnite models now.
- hnuser123456 1y ago
  He has an interest in getting good devs hyped on S&box, but he's being pretty open ended and honest here. Want to be a game dev? Make a game and ship it... all of the resources for the in between steps are out there and it's only getting easier, but for everyone else just as much as you. I grew up in the gmod mini-modding scene and it's still one of the most impactful parts of my life. First there's editing existing scripts, then there's recognizing what people (or yourself) would like that doesn't already exist, then there's the grunt work of turning it from idea into reality, then there's releasing it with your name attached. It's very rewarding. Still working on releasing something with a price tag attached but this post a good reminder and motivation. And yeah, the steam workshop was way ahead of its time, and feels like a new, higher tier of sandbox game. I don't think there's any other game that came out around the same time as gmod (2006) that has had comparable momentum and staying power.
- squigz 1y ago
  Is Fortnite particularly moddable? I know next to nothing about it, but didn't think it had a comparable modding scene to Minecraft and Roblox.
  - jayd16 1y ago
    They have a special build of the Unreal Engine for Fortnite maps called UEFN. They have a similar pay for user playtime kind of payout model. They're trying very hard to be the the omni-game engine of choice. https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/uses/uefn-unreal-editor-for-fortnite https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/uses/uefn-unreal-editor-f...
fidotron 1y ago
I worked on the software dev side in the games industry for years. I have never seen a worse time to be attempting to make a living doing that, it's pure madness. The endgame being pushed, and looking increasingly technically viable over a decade or so, is the user, holodeck style, describes what they want and it is assembled in front of them. There is a lot of cope in the games industry about this ever happening because of how disruptive it would be. In the mean time as others have mentioned I know people, industry pros, that make money on Roblox and UEFN. The valuable part is a talent for creating gameplay systems, which is not in any way related to low level programming or rendering algorithms, then you stand at least a small chance, but due to how crowded the market is the returns on this get smaller every day. To anyone wanting to make a living from the games industry I would advise simply going outside and doing something else. Edit to add: I have noticed than when I started in games over twenty years ago people knew hard work was involved. These days if you tell people you work in games you are met with a response that you basically play all the time and are not serious, and to some extent this reflects the changing nature of most of the work being done in that period.
- Flere-Imsaho 1y ago
  > the user, holodeck style, describes what they want and it is assembled in front of them. I think people have their head in the sand about how disruptive generative AI will have, not just to the game industry, but all entertainment industries. It has started with music, 2D and 3D art, text to voice (voice actors no longer needed). Entire 3d environments, and then worlds, characters, story lines will be generated on the fly. The people holding IP will be the big winners (Disney, etc). If you don't hold any IP then you'll be shit out of luck. I too started in the games industry 20+ years ago, and would not have recommended it even then. Crunch was brutal, the pay was low, and I left feeling like I hadn't learnt software best practices or really progressed in my skill set compared to people working in "boring" enterprise shops.
  - jayd16 1y ago
    What's the point of IP if the conjecture is that creativity is solved? Why not just generate different IP?
proteal 1y ago
He mentions s&dbox, his new engine/gmod spiritual successor. They maintain an interesting devblog over at https://sbox.game/news https://sbox.game/news if you are interested in how the sausage is made.
- ehnto 1y ago
  It feels like his new goal is directly challenging the niche that Roblox sits in. They have their work cut out for them if they hope to pull people away from that ecosystem.
  - qingcharles 1y ago
    The other https://sandbox.game https://sandbox.game have been trying to do exactly that for about 7 years and haven't managed it with hundreds of millions of investment and many large IP partnerships. Roblox and Fortnite are hard to fight.
    - Rohansi 1y ago
      Probably because thats more about crypto/NFT trash than games.
      - qingcharles 1y ago
        Crypto/NFTs are a means to an end for Sandbox. They were used in the hope that it would make things better, not worse, by allowing users to freely sell their in-game assets on the open market. Unlike, say, Fortnite, where if you get banned all your assets are burned too.
        Rohansi 1y ago
        I know it's a terrible argument but just don't get banned? Anyone that cares about the financial aspects of their assets shouldn't be doing things that could get themselves banned. Sure, false bans can happen, but is going crypto/NFT the solution?
JanSolo 1y ago
The article highlights how to get into the modding industry. While that is part of the games industry, it is a small fraction of the larger game production business. I've hired many game programmers and the key to getting into the industry is demonstrating a few critical skills: 1. Sufficient technical skill in whatever your field is. 2. Curiosity applied to problem solving. How can we make this work? 3. An ability to finish what you start. Get it done. If you're a new programmer looking to start out on this journey, I recommend picking an engine and just start making stuff. Participate in as many Gamejams, Mods or minigame productions as possible. Ship things; Finish them. Then, when you're interviewing for a 'real' game job, you will have some experience to share and discuss. For technical candidates, there's a minimum threshold that you must cross to be considered. For programmers, it's often C++. So learn the basics, get proficient, use the tools. Read the books on programming interviews and learn the types of things that are expected.
- porridgeraisin 1y ago
  3) there is my biggest challenge personally
  - lentil_soup 1y ago
    Keep things really small. Small projects you can pull off in a few days and then move on. The kind of scope you'd do for a uni trimester for example. I used a lot of my uni coursework to build small game(ish) projects around them
  - 3036e4 1y ago
    Absolutely necessary in a solo project, but in a team it is enough if a few members, or really only the leader, is good at that (as long as the leader is somewhat competent and has some cat-herding skills to keep everyone on track).
- taytus 1y ago
  What about unity? If you are proficiently with it, is that a good signal or not?
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
h1fra 1y ago
He quickly mentioned it, but good god, coding for a game is the hardest thing ever in the field. If you are a good software engineer, there is a good chance you are a bad game dev. It's so different, convoluted, mostly relying on tricks, clean code will slow you down, nothing works as you expected, and you have to learn so many things around coding (the engine itself, physics, texturing, modeling, lighting, etc.)
- kamranjon 1y ago
  A really good book I read recently was Game Programming Patterns by Robert Nystrom - I think it has helped me, as a more traditional software engineer, to dip my toes into game development in a way that doesn't feel like a spaghetti plate full of hacks and tricks. I recommend it.
- ehnto 1y ago
  I do find years in enterprise made me uniquely prepared for organising my game code. I definitely see the spaghetti in there, but it's at least neatly contained in the bowls I've set out. But it's definitely the hardest software domain I have ever tackled, and if only it were just software! Game dev is realy 6 other disciplines in a trenchcoat. Which disciplines they are depends on your game and whether or not you have help.
- mclau157 1y ago
  Normal maps are a good example of tricks in games, why make a watery surface millions of triangles when you can just fake how light reflects off of it and trick people into thinking its got millions of triangles
- wallstop 1y ago
  > Clean code will slow you down Hard disagree. In fact, learning how to apply clean code and architectural patterns in game dev has kept projects manageable and on track and done nothing but level up my general software ability.
- Sohcahtoa82 1y ago
  Game coding makes you have to think about thinks that a lot of web devs don't have to (or merely don't bother to) consider. Optimization is paramount. To maintain 60 fps, you need to calculate your game state and render graphics in under 1/60th of a second. That's only 16.6[..] milliseconds. If you want to appeal to the high-end players with 240 hz monitors, you get less than 5 ms. When you're operating at that level of latency, every microsecond counts. You start having to care about how your data is laid out in memory so that you can optimize cache usage. You start caring about branch mispredictions. Multithreading becomes an absolute must, but locks are landmines. If you're using a garbage collecting language, per-frame allocations are kryptonite and you re-use buffers to avoid unpredictable pauses. Your profiler becomes your best friend. You're not just looking for good performance, but consistent performance. If there's a 3 ms spike in CPU time every 10 frames, your players will absolutely notice it and it will destroy the feel of your game. That 3 ms becomes a critical bug.
lentil_soup 1y ago
if I may offer some advice as game/engine programmer. If you want to get hired at a company as a programmer, make really really small things, like tiny games. I am talking start with hangman, then sudoku in the console. Then move on to minesweeper and tetris. If confident do space invaders. At this point maybe get started with 3D? Maybe Unity and Unreal? There's SO much stuff you'll learn making those games. Maybe you end up making a fancy menu, or adding sound effects. Maybe you come up with some basic particle effects. It doesn't really matter, what matters is you went through it and have something to show. Don't get side tracked with big projects and trying to be a designer at the same time. Keep it small. If I am interviewing you and see some solid and polished small games and we can talk about stuff you found cool you're already punching way above most entry level coders.
- Viliam1234 1y ago
  I agree. It is better to finish a small project than start a big one and never finish it. I have seen a few people, and a few groups of people, who had big impressive plans... and never delivered. It is easy to imagine big: this game should be 3D, full of action, but also logical puzzles, and strategy, with an AI opponent, and also multiplayer; perfect graphics and a great storyline, but also allow complete freedom of movement... and then, five years later, you have five characters made in Blender, a map of the world where the story is supposed to happen, a list of fifty magic spells divided into multiple categories, and a tech demo where one of those characters is walking across an endless green plane. If you can't make a small game, you can't make a big game. So make the small game first; it should take much less time than the big game, so if you are afraid that doing the small game would waste too much of your time, you are definitely not ready for the big game. Even the small game requires a lot of work to make it look nice. Consider minesweeper: after implementing the minimum mechanism (click on a field to expose it, you either die or not, the number of adjacent mines is displayed), you are not even half done. You need the recursive exposure for fields with zero adjacent mines, editing the flags, showing the unflagged adjacent fields. Preventing the first click from being a mine. A hi-score table, where you can write your name, and it gets automatically saved, and loaded at start of the game. A menu to choose between simple, medium, and hard version of the game, maybe also custom dimensions. Should the game pause when minimized? All these details matter for user experience. Maybe also an installer? On the other hand, if you can do the minesweeper right, you can easily create a new interesting game by tweaking some details. Maybe, play on a hexagonal map? Or play on an infinite map that scrolls to the right when you completely clear the leftmost column (except for the fields containing mines)? Add some bonuses (that you can collect by clearing a certain area) that allow you special moves, such as eliminating a mine, or reshuffling the existing mines? Would it be possible to create a version where you can have more then one mine per field? (Just a quick idea I had now, I don't even know whether that makes sense.) Maybe add some time pressure, like you need to make a click before the timer runs out, or maybe every twenty seconds a new mine is added to the plan (make sure it is not right under the user's cursor)? Or just make some non-functional feature, such as displaying a pretty picture in the background, and you get a new pretty picture when you complete the level.
manas96 1y ago
One esoteric route would be to try and specialize in an area where talent is scarce. There's a lot of gameplay programmers, few engine programmers, fewer graphics programmers, and very few physics programmers (in my experience at least). As such you could try to specialize in this area (collision detection, ray queries, rigid body simulation, constraints, solvers, softbody sim, fluid sim etc.). Of course this isn't for everyone as it requires skills and interest in: low level concurrent programming, maths/linear algebra and physical behavior intuition. If you do find these topics fascinating and can demonstrate some ability in them, your skills will certainly be in demand.
pphysch 1y ago
Chris Wilson, (legendary) co-creator of Path of Exile, also recently answered this same question on his new YouTube channel. https://youtube.com/@chriswilsonvideos?si=qD1rbztnI0nY7pDf https://youtube.com/@chriswilsonvideos?si=qD1rbztnI0nY7pDf Definitely a controversial question in this economy.
bentt 1y ago
25 years in the industry here. Started at studios and been indie for 10. My best advice for today: Make something in your craft, whether it is art, a game, code/tools, music… that gets significant attention from an audience online. If you cannot get enthusiasm for your work online, it is unlikely you are going to get a job. In some ways, it’s never been easier to know if you are good enough. It’s never been easier to learn. It’s never been harder to stand out. And imposter syndrome is too often confused for “you just arent good enough yet”. So if you keep making stuff and nobody cares, figure out how to get better or quit wasting your time.
- fidotron 1y ago
  This is brutal but accurate. I have heard from authors that get asked by publishers what their X and Instagram follower counts are before they're even considered. Being able to connect to an audience is becoming absolutely everything.
  - bentt 1y ago
    It doesn’t mean you have to be a social media star. It could mean you put out a game on itch that gets some players and comments. It could mean you have followers on ArtStation, or SoundCloud. But yeah… something.
smeeger 1y ago
people say that its hard to stand out with a game. theyve been saying this since 2013. if you look at the vast, vast majority of games they almost try purposefully to be bad. they blatantly ignore users and entertain their own fantasies about what is fun and what is not. if you make a game that is clean, simple, straightforward and thoughtful then your game will be good. exceedingly few games manage to do this and never even tried to. i have a hobby of watching movies. i watch a new movie, new to me, almost every other day. after doing this for years i can tell you something: the vast, vast majority of movies made before 2010 were horrible. almost every movie ever produced has at least one glaring flaw that could have easily been fixed. but the idiot at the helm entertained delusions about their crappy writing being interesting. this was all before netflix slop and AI slop… it was all professionals. there is something deeper at play here than indie devs. if you can actually have a rational, clear and accurate opinion about what makes something good then your game will are better than 99% of your competition
- shayway 1y ago
  Yeah, you'll see people pointing to statistics like how many games are being released on Steam nowadays. But if you actually sort by new on Steam, and look at the quality of these games, it's 95% complete low-effort trash: gacha games, published Unreal templates with some tweaks, half-baked ideas, just stuff that no one would ever actually want to play. If you have taste, drive, and vision, your actual competition is miniscule. Marketing and whatnot can still be a challenge, but it's not an insurmountable wall if you have the patience to climb it. And if you ever feel lost, you'll be hard pressed to find a group more ready to dispense advice than game developers.
  - bob1029 1y ago
    > Marketing and whatnot can still be a challenge If a game truly has "the magic", then you often don't even need to worry about this. I think the best case study of a zero-marketing launch being successful would be the Apex Legends. That one was like a precision bomb strike in the middle of the night and was wildly successful.
bob1029 1y ago
I worked for a studio for about half a year. You have to be willing to completely enslave yourself if you want to go down that path and succeed. Making an impact in a AAA studio (or one of their contractors) requires fairly extreme output on a constant basis. The only alternative is to have enough runway to quit your day job and self-publish a game to steam. The biggest problem with this (beyond the money) is having a game concept that is marketable in 2025. If you have both the money and a good gameplay mechanic in mind, this would be the most sustainable path. Setting your own schedule makes all the difference if you can afford to.
Joof 1y ago
Garry Newman seems like a really real guy.
PeterHolzwarth 1y ago
I have decades+ in the American games industry. Bluntly speaking: don't join it. There are too many people chasing diminishing, shrinking (relative) job counts; large studios are offshoring more and more of their work; funding has dried up and we don't see the light at the end of the tunnel; there are too many games. Are you from the UK or Europe? Have at it! American game jobs are quickly relocating to those cheaper places. If you are from the US, the costs have gotten too high and the pressure is massive to reduce those costs: large projects are seeing an increasing percentage of the total number of people on the project be from partners outside the States. The trend is bottom-up: outsourcing partners are providing cheaper staffing starting at the bottom of the org chart, steadily going up said chart. The growing desire to have a smaller primary-studio footprint means more outsourcing in general. A desire to cut costs means more and more of that outsourcing is going to cheaper locals. Often, the majority of people who work on a game are not from the "parent" company - and a quickly growing percentage of those are not in the States. The model that we are slowly converging on, bit by bit, is maybe 20-30 percent "home studio" in the States, with the rest being partners from non-American, cheaper areas. The pressure that drives this is massive and inexorable. Some of this came from the lead up to, and the full stretch of, the covid years: up until just a couple years ago, it was quite difficult for an American studio to hire staff - it was a wonderful time to be looking for a job, and salaries for non-engineers (who were cheaper) rapidly went up. Now we are in a situation where the costs are just too high, so the pressure has mounted to manage those costs. Outsourcing to cheaper areas is the solution, and the pace is increasing significantly. Again, if you are an American interested in the games industry: don't do it. It has become deeply unreliable and unstable for anyone who isn't quite senior. //edit - i have more thoughts. These will be deeply unpopular, but I feel compelled to express them. A well-intentioned union drive in the popular press (a great idea when focused on bottom-of-the-heap, poorly-treated QA teams) accelerated annoyance with American development teams by studio and publisher leadership, leading to more exasperation-driven offshoring. I don't have a strong opinion on this topic, but I have to admit to myself it is a real issue. At many American studios, covid-era hiring goals changed in a way that placed value on things other than immediate raw skill - instead favoring a more holistic stance on staffing. This was an approachable concept during ZIRP, when funding was more generous, but has put studios in a tough position in the new era of an absolutely brutal filter of pure output. A passionately-defended work from home thing means that, just as everyone predicted during covid, studio leadership has realized that if they forego the power of intense in-office collaboration, why not just remote those remote jobs to cheaper places? After all, west coast studios still get a couple hours overlap with UK development teams: get better at slightly out of sync development, and suddenly US-timezone jobs don't seem as massively necessary as they once appeared.
andrew_mason1 1y ago
not the point of the article, but i really like the structure of this site
lofaszvanitt 1y ago
Get into the gamebiz by creating something unique, not another copycat game and then find out how to market your game. That's the hardest part.

TheRoque 1y ago

Deleted

Hamuko 1y ago
How much privilege do you need to go to a free college?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- wccrawford 1y ago
  Where I grew up, there were kids in high school that left high school as soon as they were able to get jobs because their family needed them to help put food on the table. So at least some privilege?
- prewett 1y ago
  Colleges don't accept privilege as a currency. Privilege is the contagion you get from going to one. If you're white, and especially male, you incur a lot of privilege-contagion. If you're from a historically underprivileged segment (but not including poor whites), you get negative contagion--you're struggling against great odds and joining the historically privileged, good work!
tiniuclx 1y ago
In British English, 'college' does not refer to University / higher education, it's closer to high-school. Garry's british and probably went to a UK college at the normal age for someone in his cohort.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- ChocolateGod 1y ago
  The post even references this > Our college is free and normally vocation targetted. People who leave school usually either get a job, stay on at school for 2 more years, or go to college.
- Flere-Imsaho 1y ago
  To be more precise they are called "6th Form College", and take 2 years to complete. At the end you take A-Level exams* which determines which type of university you can apply for. My mates went to Cambridge/Oxford, I didn't. * This information may be out of date!

dminvs 1y ago

https://archive.is/ofX2x https://archive.is/ofX2x

chickenzzzzu 1y ago

While I love Garry's Mod, I don't love this article, so I'll give my pithy advice: 1) Yes, learn to program. 2) Yes, learn 3d art. 3) Enthusiastically do those things almost every day of your life. 4) Don't follow too many tutorials, just enough to unblock you. 5) Let the debugger/screen punch you in the face. Learn to love being told when you are wrong. 6) Keep your expenses low, but probably you still need to go to a relatively good college. 7) Why? That's because a large part of our world is based on needless credentialism. 8) Build tools that people literally use. This is how you know you're ready for interviewing. 9) Grind leetcode and brain teasers and common interview gotchas for your language/domain of choice, but only an hour a day max. That's basically what it takes to get a real and good job in the industry now. No magic bullets, just hard work and acceptance of some arbitrary BS.

Colony8409 1y ago
Can you elaborate on your eighth point?
- chickenzzzzu 1y ago
  Yes and sorry for the delay. A common issue/complaint I see with fellow programmers is they feel like they haven't actually made something on their own. Perhaps they've only followed tutorials, implemented random features in their day job, or perhaps they actually have written something kind of cool but it is sitting unused by anyone in a github or hard drive somewhere. This often translates to anxiety once you get into an interview, because you are trying to answer behavioral/design/career questions based on some heuristic, some proxy, some guess at "what the interviewer wants to hear". While some interviewers are indeed assholes who play weird games and don't operate anywhere near reality, the truth is, if you've written literally anything that people actually use even weekly to do something (e.g a blender add on that simplifies texture baking, a toy online chat room as a discord alternative, a wrapper for ffmpeg or etc to convert files to different formats, a simple time wasting game in threejs, etc), you will be astonishingly more confident in your answers, even if they don't work every time. Why is that? Because, by actually writing software without a tutorial that is still good enough for someone to use, it guarantees you have solved some problem, without any help besides reference documentation, and have therefore wrestled with crucial design questions like "should i make this a vector or a scalar? do i need a map here? should i do this by naming convention? should this be done in a loop or should i make it a task for multiple threads?" It doesn't mean you should like, focus on marketing or chasing hot problems, but definitely do this if you are feeling like you are faking some parts of your interview questions, which are so abstract, they can benefit from delivering a real world answer naturally and confidently.

tiniuclx 1y ago

Times have changed a lot since Garry broke through with the infamous Garry's Mod. That's where I got my first taste of programming - writing a PID controller for a tank turret so I could point the tank's gun using my mouse. Today, it's easier than ever to get started making games (even I can do it! [0]) but standing out in a crowded marketplace is very difficult. The music industry saw a very similar trend about 10-15 years ago, with the release of consumer recording equipment. In both cases it lead to a 'de-professionalization' of the industry, where most participants are amateurs but most of the success still goes to established studios - barring one-in-a-million outliers such as Garry's Mod, or other indie darlings like Hollow Knight, Balatro, Stardew Valley. [0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/3627290/Botnet_of_Ares/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/3627290/Botnet_of_Ares/

glimshe 1y ago
Just like in the music industry, people still believe they can be the outlier. Flappy Bird, more so than your examples built by skilled individuals, showed that "anyone could do it".
- chickenzzzzu 1y ago
  Having a hit game and being an industry programmer/artist might as well be two completely different skills. Sticking with the music analogy, it is the difference between programming your own DAW vs being the audio engineer/writer/producer/singer of your own rap album.
skeeter2020 1y ago
>> 'de-professionalization' I'm a dinosaur who's supposed to hate the music kids listen to these days, but the quality seems as good or better, and the quanity magnitudes higher, so maybe it was a professionalization of amateurs?
- miohtama 1y ago
  Tools are much better compared to old school cassettes and such

bstsb 1y ago

roblox is a good suggestion. i know it's often criticised, especially for its profit margins, but developers get a massive potential audience, free unlimited multiplayer hosting, and many monetisation streams with little setup. the company could definitely do with better PR, and their child safety features are good but not perfect by any means. i'd still say it's a good choice if you're trying to make a game easily and quickly disclaimer: i've made money from Roblox's DevEx program

jayd16 1y ago

I wonder if this is a stealth ad for s&box. Anyway....it looks pretty neat. I feel like the industry as gone from a time of mods, through an era of AAA unmoddable games, and now we're landing on "all games will be mods.". I guess we're chasing Minecraft and Roblox and Fortnite models now.

hnuser123456 1y ago
He has an interest in getting good devs hyped on S&box, but he's being pretty open ended and honest here. Want to be a game dev? Make a game and ship it... all of the resources for the in between steps are out there and it's only getting easier, but for everyone else just as much as you. I grew up in the gmod mini-modding scene and it's still one of the most impactful parts of my life. First there's editing existing scripts, then there's recognizing what people (or yourself) would like that doesn't already exist, then there's the grunt work of turning it from idea into reality, then there's releasing it with your name attached. It's very rewarding. Still working on releasing something with a price tag attached but this post a good reminder and motivation. And yeah, the steam workshop was way ahead of its time, and feels like a new, higher tier of sandbox game. I don't think there's any other game that came out around the same time as gmod (2006) that has had comparable momentum and staying power.
squigz 1y ago
Is Fortnite particularly moddable? I know next to nothing about it, but didn't think it had a comparable modding scene to Minecraft and Roblox.
- jayd16 1y ago
  They have a special build of the Unreal Engine for Fortnite maps called UEFN. They have a similar pay for user playtime kind of payout model. They're trying very hard to be the the omni-game engine of choice. https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/uses/uefn-unreal-editor-for-fortnite https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/uses/uefn-unreal-editor-f...

fidotron 1y ago

I worked on the software dev side in the games industry for years. I have never seen a worse time to be attempting to make a living doing that, it's pure madness. The endgame being pushed, and looking increasingly technically viable over a decade or so, is the user, holodeck style, describes what they want and it is assembled in front of them. There is a lot of cope in the games industry about this ever happening because of how disruptive it would be. In the mean time as others have mentioned I know people, industry pros, that make money on Roblox and UEFN. The valuable part is a talent for creating gameplay systems, which is not in any way related to low level programming or rendering algorithms, then you stand at least a small chance, but due to how crowded the market is the returns on this get smaller every day. To anyone wanting to make a living from the games industry I would advise simply going outside and doing something else. Edit to add: I have noticed than when I started in games over twenty years ago people knew hard work was involved. These days if you tell people you work in games you are met with a response that you basically play all the time and are not serious, and to some extent this reflects the changing nature of most of the work being done in that period.

Flere-Imsaho 1y ago
> the user, holodeck style, describes what they want and it is assembled in front of them. I think people have their head in the sand about how disruptive generative AI will have, not just to the game industry, but all entertainment industries. It has started with music, 2D and 3D art, text to voice (voice actors no longer needed). Entire 3d environments, and then worlds, characters, story lines will be generated on the fly. The people holding IP will be the big winners (Disney, etc). If you don't hold any IP then you'll be shit out of luck. I too started in the games industry 20+ years ago, and would not have recommended it even then. Crunch was brutal, the pay was low, and I left feeling like I hadn't learnt software best practices or really progressed in my skill set compared to people working in "boring" enterprise shops.
- jayd16 1y ago
  What's the point of IP if the conjecture is that creativity is solved? Why not just generate different IP?

proteal 1y ago

He mentions s&dbox, his new engine/gmod spiritual successor. They maintain an interesting devblog over at https://sbox.game/news https://sbox.game/news if you are interested in how the sausage is made.

ehnto 1y ago
It feels like his new goal is directly challenging the niche that Roblox sits in. They have their work cut out for them if they hope to pull people away from that ecosystem.
- qingcharles 1y ago
  The other https://sandbox.game https://sandbox.game have been trying to do exactly that for about 7 years and haven't managed it with hundreds of millions of investment and many large IP partnerships. Roblox and Fortnite are hard to fight.
  - Rohansi 1y ago
    Probably because thats more about crypto/NFT trash than games.
    - qingcharles 1y ago
      Crypto/NFTs are a means to an end for Sandbox. They were used in the hope that it would make things better, not worse, by allowing users to freely sell their in-game assets on the open market. Unlike, say, Fortnite, where if you get banned all your assets are burned too.
      - Rohansi 1y ago
        I know it's a terrible argument but just don't get banned? Anyone that cares about the financial aspects of their assets shouldn't be doing things that could get themselves banned. Sure, false bans can happen, but is going crypto/NFT the solution?

JanSolo 1y ago

The article highlights how to get into the modding industry. While that is part of the games industry, it is a small fraction of the larger game production business. I've hired many game programmers and the key to getting into the industry is demonstrating a few critical skills: 1. Sufficient technical skill in whatever your field is. 2. Curiosity applied to problem solving. How can we make this work? 3. An ability to finish what you start. Get it done. If you're a new programmer looking to start out on this journey, I recommend picking an engine and just start making stuff. Participate in as many Gamejams, Mods or minigame productions as possible. Ship things; Finish them. Then, when you're interviewing for a 'real' game job, you will have some experience to share and discuss. For technical candidates, there's a minimum threshold that you must cross to be considered. For programmers, it's often C++. So learn the basics, get proficient, use the tools. Read the books on programming interviews and learn the types of things that are expected.

porridgeraisin 1y ago
3) there is my biggest challenge personally
- lentil_soup 1y ago
  Keep things really small. Small projects you can pull off in a few days and then move on. The kind of scope you'd do for a uni trimester for example. I used a lot of my uni coursework to build small game(ish) projects around them
- 3036e4 1y ago
  Absolutely necessary in a solo project, but in a team it is enough if a few members, or really only the leader, is good at that (as long as the leader is somewhat competent and has some cat-herding skills to keep everyone on track).
taytus 1y ago
What about unity? If you are proficiently with it, is that a good signal or not?

deleted 1y ago

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h1fra 1y ago

He quickly mentioned it, but good god, coding for a game is the hardest thing ever in the field. If you are a good software engineer, there is a good chance you are a bad game dev. It's so different, convoluted, mostly relying on tricks, clean code will slow you down, nothing works as you expected, and you have to learn so many things around coding (the engine itself, physics, texturing, modeling, lighting, etc.)

kamranjon 1y ago
A really good book I read recently was Game Programming Patterns by Robert Nystrom - I think it has helped me, as a more traditional software engineer, to dip my toes into game development in a way that doesn't feel like a spaghetti plate full of hacks and tricks. I recommend it.
ehnto 1y ago
I do find years in enterprise made me uniquely prepared for organising my game code. I definitely see the spaghetti in there, but it's at least neatly contained in the bowls I've set out. But it's definitely the hardest software domain I have ever tackled, and if only it were just software! Game dev is realy 6 other disciplines in a trenchcoat. Which disciplines they are depends on your game and whether or not you have help.
mclau157 1y ago
Normal maps are a good example of tricks in games, why make a watery surface millions of triangles when you can just fake how light reflects off of it and trick people into thinking its got millions of triangles
wallstop 1y ago
> Clean code will slow you down Hard disagree. In fact, learning how to apply clean code and architectural patterns in game dev has kept projects manageable and on track and done nothing but level up my general software ability.
Sohcahtoa82 1y ago
Game coding makes you have to think about thinks that a lot of web devs don't have to (or merely don't bother to) consider. Optimization is paramount. To maintain 60 fps, you need to calculate your game state and render graphics in under 1/60th of a second. That's only 16.6[..] milliseconds. If you want to appeal to the high-end players with 240 hz monitors, you get less than 5 ms. When you're operating at that level of latency, every microsecond counts. You start having to care about how your data is laid out in memory so that you can optimize cache usage. You start caring about branch mispredictions. Multithreading becomes an absolute must, but locks are landmines. If you're using a garbage collecting language, per-frame allocations are kryptonite and you re-use buffers to avoid unpredictable pauses. Your profiler becomes your best friend. You're not just looking for good performance, but consistent performance. If there's a 3 ms spike in CPU time every 10 frames, your players will absolutely notice it and it will destroy the feel of your game. That 3 ms becomes a critical bug.

lentil_soup 1y ago

if I may offer some advice as game/engine programmer. If you want to get hired at a company as a programmer, make really really small things, like tiny games. I am talking start with hangman, then sudoku in the console. Then move on to minesweeper and tetris. If confident do space invaders. At this point maybe get started with 3D? Maybe Unity and Unreal? There's SO much stuff you'll learn making those games. Maybe you end up making a fancy menu, or adding sound effects. Maybe you come up with some basic particle effects. It doesn't really matter, what matters is you went through it and have something to show. Don't get side tracked with big projects and trying to be a designer at the same time. Keep it small. If I am interviewing you and see some solid and polished small games and we can talk about stuff you found cool you're already punching way above most entry level coders.

Viliam1234 1y ago
I agree. It is better to finish a small project than start a big one and never finish it. I have seen a few people, and a few groups of people, who had big impressive plans... and never delivered. It is easy to imagine big: this game should be 3D, full of action, but also logical puzzles, and strategy, with an AI opponent, and also multiplayer; perfect graphics and a great storyline, but also allow complete freedom of movement... and then, five years later, you have five characters made in Blender, a map of the world where the story is supposed to happen, a list of fifty magic spells divided into multiple categories, and a tech demo where one of those characters is walking across an endless green plane. If you can't make a small game, you can't make a big game. So make the small game first; it should take much less time than the big game, so if you are afraid that doing the small game would waste too much of your time, you are definitely not ready for the big game. Even the small game requires a lot of work to make it look nice. Consider minesweeper: after implementing the minimum mechanism (click on a field to expose it, you either die or not, the number of adjacent mines is displayed), you are not even half done. You need the recursive exposure for fields with zero adjacent mines, editing the flags, showing the unflagged adjacent fields. Preventing the first click from being a mine. A hi-score table, where you can write your name, and it gets automatically saved, and loaded at start of the game. A menu to choose between simple, medium, and hard version of the game, maybe also custom dimensions. Should the game pause when minimized? All these details matter for user experience. Maybe also an installer? On the other hand, if you can do the minesweeper right, you can easily create a new interesting game by tweaking some details. Maybe, play on a hexagonal map? Or play on an infinite map that scrolls to the right when you completely clear the leftmost column (except for the fields containing mines)? Add some bonuses (that you can collect by clearing a certain area) that allow you special moves, such as eliminating a mine, or reshuffling the existing mines? Would it be possible to create a version where you can have more then one mine per field? (Just a quick idea I had now, I don't even know whether that makes sense.) Maybe add some time pressure, like you need to make a click before the timer runs out, or maybe every twenty seconds a new mine is added to the plan (make sure it is not right under the user's cursor)? Or just make some non-functional feature, such as displaying a pretty picture in the background, and you get a new pretty picture when you complete the level.

manas96 1y ago

One esoteric route would be to try and specialize in an area where talent is scarce. There's a lot of gameplay programmers, few engine programmers, fewer graphics programmers, and very few physics programmers (in my experience at least). As such you could try to specialize in this area (collision detection, ray queries, rigid body simulation, constraints, solvers, softbody sim, fluid sim etc.). Of course this isn't for everyone as it requires skills and interest in: low level concurrent programming, maths/linear algebra and physical behavior intuition. If you do find these topics fascinating and can demonstrate some ability in them, your skills will certainly be in demand.

pphysch 1y ago

Chris Wilson, (legendary) co-creator of Path of Exile, also recently answered this same question on his new YouTube channel. https://youtube.com/@chriswilsonvideos?si=qD1rbztnI0nY7pDf https://youtube.com/@chriswilsonvideos?si=qD1rbztnI0nY7pDf Definitely a controversial question in this economy.

bentt 1y ago

25 years in the industry here. Started at studios and been indie for 10. My best advice for today: Make something in your craft, whether it is art, a game, code/tools, music… that gets significant attention from an audience online. If you cannot get enthusiasm for your work online, it is unlikely you are going to get a job. In some ways, it’s never been easier to know if you are good enough. It’s never been easier to learn. It’s never been harder to stand out. And imposter syndrome is too often confused for “you just arent good enough yet”. So if you keep making stuff and nobody cares, figure out how to get better or quit wasting your time.

fidotron 1y ago
This is brutal but accurate. I have heard from authors that get asked by publishers what their X and Instagram follower counts are before they're even considered. Being able to connect to an audience is becoming absolutely everything.
- bentt 1y ago
  It doesn’t mean you have to be a social media star. It could mean you put out a game on itch that gets some players and comments. It could mean you have followers on ArtStation, or SoundCloud. But yeah… something.

smeeger 1y ago

people say that its hard to stand out with a game. theyve been saying this since 2013. if you look at the vast, vast majority of games they almost try purposefully to be bad. they blatantly ignore users and entertain their own fantasies about what is fun and what is not. if you make a game that is clean, simple, straightforward and thoughtful then your game will be good. exceedingly few games manage to do this and never even tried to. i have a hobby of watching movies. i watch a new movie, new to me, almost every other day. after doing this for years i can tell you something: the vast, vast majority of movies made before 2010 were horrible. almost every movie ever produced has at least one glaring flaw that could have easily been fixed. but the idiot at the helm entertained delusions about their crappy writing being interesting. this was all before netflix slop and AI slop… it was all professionals. there is something deeper at play here than indie devs. if you can actually have a rational, clear and accurate opinion about what makes something good then your game will are better than 99% of your competition

shayway 1y ago
Yeah, you'll see people pointing to statistics like how many games are being released on Steam nowadays. But if you actually sort by new on Steam, and look at the quality of these games, it's 95% complete low-effort trash: gacha games, published Unreal templates with some tweaks, half-baked ideas, just stuff that no one would ever actually want to play. If you have taste, drive, and vision, your actual competition is miniscule. Marketing and whatnot can still be a challenge, but it's not an insurmountable wall if you have the patience to climb it. And if you ever feel lost, you'll be hard pressed to find a group more ready to dispense advice than game developers.
- bob1029 1y ago
  > Marketing and whatnot can still be a challenge If a game truly has "the magic", then you often don't even need to worry about this. I think the best case study of a zero-marketing launch being successful would be the Apex Legends. That one was like a precision bomb strike in the middle of the night and was wildly successful.

bob1029 1y ago

I worked for a studio for about half a year. You have to be willing to completely enslave yourself if you want to go down that path and succeed. Making an impact in a AAA studio (or one of their contractors) requires fairly extreme output on a constant basis. The only alternative is to have enough runway to quit your day job and self-publish a game to steam. The biggest problem with this (beyond the money) is having a game concept that is marketable in 2025. If you have both the money and a good gameplay mechanic in mind, this would be the most sustainable path. Setting your own schedule makes all the difference if you can afford to.

Joof 1y ago

Garry Newman seems like a really real guy.

PeterHolzwarth 1y ago

I have decades+ in the American games industry. Bluntly speaking: don't join it. There are too many people chasing diminishing, shrinking (relative) job counts; large studios are offshoring more and more of their work; funding has dried up and we don't see the light at the end of the tunnel; there are too many games. Are you from the UK or Europe? Have at it! American game jobs are quickly relocating to those cheaper places. If you are from the US, the costs have gotten too high and the pressure is massive to reduce those costs: large projects are seeing an increasing percentage of the total number of people on the project be from partners outside the States. The trend is bottom-up: outsourcing partners are providing cheaper staffing starting at the bottom of the org chart, steadily going up said chart. The growing desire to have a smaller primary-studio footprint means more outsourcing in general. A desire to cut costs means more and more of that outsourcing is going to cheaper locals. Often, the majority of people who work on a game are not from the "parent" company - and a quickly growing percentage of those are not in the States. The model that we are slowly converging on, bit by bit, is maybe 20-30 percent "home studio" in the States, with the rest being partners from non-American, cheaper areas. The pressure that drives this is massive and inexorable. Some of this came from the lead up to, and the full stretch of, the covid years: up until just a couple years ago, it was quite difficult for an American studio to hire staff - it was a wonderful time to be looking for a job, and salaries for non-engineers (who were cheaper) rapidly went up. Now we are in a situation where the costs are just too high, so the pressure has mounted to manage those costs. Outsourcing to cheaper areas is the solution, and the pace is increasing significantly. Again, if you are an American interested in the games industry: don't do it. It has become deeply unreliable and unstable for anyone who isn't quite senior. //edit - i have more thoughts. These will be deeply unpopular, but I feel compelled to express them. A well-intentioned union drive in the popular press (a great idea when focused on bottom-of-the-heap, poorly-treated QA teams) accelerated annoyance with American development teams by studio and publisher leadership, leading to more exasperation-driven offshoring. I don't have a strong opinion on this topic, but I have to admit to myself it is a real issue. At many American studios, covid-era hiring goals changed in a way that placed value on things other than immediate raw skill - instead favoring a more holistic stance on staffing. This was an approachable concept during ZIRP, when funding was more generous, but has put studios in a tough position in the new era of an absolutely brutal filter of pure output. A passionately-defended work from home thing means that, just as everyone predicted during covid, studio leadership has realized that if they forego the power of intense in-office collaboration, why not just remote those remote jobs to cheaper places? After all, west coast studios still get a couple hours overlap with UK development teams: get better at slightly out of sync development, and suddenly US-timezone jobs don't seem as massively necessary as they once appeared.

andrew_mason1 1y ago

not the point of the article, but i really like the structure of this site

lofaszvanitt 1y ago

Get into the gamebiz by creating something unique, not another copycat game and then find out how to market your game. That's the hardest part.