It is difficult to distill a multi-dimensional problem like job satisfaction into one single factor or answer. There wasn't one single thing about game dev that I missed, but rather a convergence of several factors in my life at the time that made going back to game dev the right choice for me. Had some of those factors been different at the time, I may not have returned to game dev.

I've said before that I find most of my job satisfaction in building something engaging for the player. I really like creating experiences for them, thinking about all of the little details and coming up with all of the ways to improve on each iteration. It's what I find most engaging about my work. I want to feel reassured that I'm building something that someone will enjoy. During my employment outside of video games, I worked in a games-adjacent field (casino games) and it was very much not player-driven. Casino games are highly regulated by the local and federal governments here in the US - casino gaming legal requirements are a lot like the console certification process on steroids. The majority of the development process is not to make a good or fun product for the players, but to meet all of the government certification requirements.

Beyond this, the company I was working for was also located in a small town (pop: ~20,000). I grew up in a fairly large city (pop: ~1 million); I grew up thinking a town with 100,000 residents was small. As you may expect, there were some elements of culture clash there. I was not used to dirt roads and lack of options when it came to food and entertainment. The city had two total movie theaters - one with four screens and one with six screens, so if neither showed a new movie I wanted to see, I would have to drive to another city. There wasn't a lot of option for other things to do there either; a lot of the locals did the wilderness thing - hiking, hunting, fishing, camping, etc. I was not (and still am not) really into those pastimes.

In addition to these two major factors (and perhaps most importantly), I was also still single and did not have any major responsibilities that might have kept me there. I did not have a mortgage, I did not have a family to provide for, I did not have a romantic partner who may have had a hard choice to make whether to stay with me and move or stay with their job. I did not have children who would have to leave friends, I did not have a house to sell, I did not have local obligations to fulfill.

It was the convergence of these factors that made it possible for me to decide to look for work elsewhere and go back to proper game dev. There was active pressure to leave from an environment I didn't like (the small town and lack of options), lack of pressure to keep me there (no attachments or responsibilities), and the work was not engaging to me (all cert, all the time). I bided my time, looked carefully for a good exit strategy, then took my leave when the right opportunity presented itself.

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The FANTa Project is being rebooted. [What is the FANTa project?]

Got a burning question you want answered?

Let me reframe the question. You must have some idea of what it is we in the industry do - at a high level, you know that programmers write code, designers create content, artists create art assets, producers grease the gears by managing schedules and tracking progress for other developers, QA tests for bugs. How much supervision do you think an unproven (but talented) new hire with zero direct experience and no relevant degree or training would need in order to be productive?

Aside from gauging a basic competence level, the most important question I really need an answer for is “How much hand-holding do I think this candidate would need from more senior team members in order to do the job?” This is my primary criteria when I am evaluating potential candidates - I don’t give a simple thumbs up or down, but I gauge how much supervision I think they would need in order to be a productive member of the team. Juniors require a lot of supervision, mid-levels require minimal supervision, and senior level provide the supervision. If the role we are looking to fill isn’t suited to the amount of supervision a particular candidate would need to be productive, we move on to the next candidate.

I should point out that supervision here doesn’t just mean direct management and tasking, but also entails the amount of time a more senior dev would need to spend answering questions in order to keep the new hire productive. If the new hire can figure things out on their own in a timely fashion, that’s less time the senior dev has to spend explaining and more time the senior dev can spend working on their own assignments. If you believe that you can perform your duties while requiring minimal supervision on a dev team, then you are probably good for a mid-level position. If you believe that you are good enough to teach others how to do the work then a senior position is probably for you. And if either of these kind of situations feels daunting, then you probably need a junior role just to earn the experience and grow into these more autonomous roles.

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The FANTa Project is being rebooted. [What is the FANTa project?]

Got a burning question you want answered?

Congratulations on joining our ranks. I’m proud of you and I hope it works out. Here’s some advice that I think is applicable to anybody starting in game development.

Learn as much as you can.

You’ve spent a lot of effort to get here, but this isn’t the end of the game. It’s only the beginning. A lot of us have been doing this for a long time. We’ve done a lot of things, made a lot of mistakes, and learned from all of those mistakes we made. Listen to us when we tell you about possible consequences of a specific decision. You don’t always have to do exactly what we say (unless we’re your boss) and you can push back on things, but you should really recognize that there’s a lot to learn from those with more experience than you.

Pace yourself. Don’t throw yourself into extra hours if you don’t have to.

A lot of fresh faces in the industry will want to throw themselves into the work to prove their passion. This takes a [pretty major toll on you, mentally and physically, in the long run]. It’s great to be passionate. By all means, put that passion into your work. But you need to take care of yourself or you’re no good to us when we do need those extra hours. Self-induced burnout helps nobody.

Be prepared to kill your babies

The longer you stay in the industry, the more of your beloved ideas you’re going to have to kill. It might not work within the theme of the overall game, or it might need too many development resources to get done properly. The technology might not be there, or the team leadership might decide to go another direction. Early in development, there’s just so much potential that would be awesome if we can get the resources to execute on it, but we’re always limited in our time, our expertise, our team size, our budget, and so on. Just because an idea is good (or even great) doesn’t mean it will get made. Don’t get too attached to any one idea or feature.

… But don’t be afraid to defend your ideas

We’re smart and experienced, but we’re also human and therefore not infallible. Bring your perspective to the discussion and defend the ideas you think are worth defending. Maybe we didn’t consider something you did. Maybe there’s less work involved than we thought. But don’t just defend something blindly, you also look at things critically. Maybe there’s another option that can get 90% of the way to the idea with a much lower resource cost. It’s worth fighting for the ideas you think are worth defending, even if you don’t win that fight.

Not every part of the work is going to be fun

That’s why it’s called work. I love what I do, don’t get me wrong. Coming up with engaging and interesting content for players is one of the most fulfilling things I’ve experienced and I’m pretty good at it. But it isn’t always the fun part. Sometimes I’m working on the plumbing and the back end instead, laying the groundwork and doing the mundane tasks like keying in data, creating stub files, or digging through pages and pages of old code and documentation to try to figure out why my stuff isn’t working. As a producer, you might have to do some more menial tasks as well - getting people software licenses, ordering food for the team during crunch, or even procuring controllers and cables for somebody who needs them. These aren’t glamorous tasks but they are necessary ones.

I wish you all the best. Good luck.

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The FANTa Project is being rebooted. [What is the FANTa project?]

Got a burning question you want answered?

Some studios are better about promotions than others, but it’s not super simple. A lot of it just has to do with timing. Like many tech companies, most dev studios I’ve worked at have some annual performance review and we get promotions, salary increases, bonuses, etc. based on a combination of our performance and the company’s performance for the past year. Joining the company as a new dev near review season might mean that you won’t get a serious evaluation for over a year. Changing managers may also affect promotion, since there’s usually some sort of “getting-to-know-you” period where the manager doesn’t feel good about evaluating your performance since she wasn’t observing it at the time.

That said, you can bypass a lot of this simply by going to another studio. That basically forces an immediate evaluation of your skillset, current title, and compensation package, and it often results in a title bump and pay increase. Somebody on the discord recently said that there’s a long-running joke at Ubisoft - the fastest way to get a promotion is to go work at EA for 18 months. It’s definitely true - I’ve personally gotten many promotions and pay increases because of job changes myself.

The studio itself also has a large effect on things. Studios that have a higher turnover rates tend to have increased promotion rates as a means of trying to retain more talent. Shortened dev cycles are also good for career advancement. It was fairly common for developers at EA Sports, for example, to get promoted fairly quickly because they shipped a new game every year and earned a lot of experience that way.

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The FANTa Project is currently on hiatus while I am crunching at work too busy.

[What is the FANTa project?] [Git the FANTa Project]

Got a burning question you want answered?

You basically have two main options. You can either try moving to a different state and going for the entry level producer job you want, or you can stay where you are and try to get a job that will help you get the experience you need to get the job that you want. They are both viable ways into the game industry, but the risk/reward ratio is very different for each choice. 

Most of the time, the “minimum 2 years experience” bit is more of a guideline than a hard and fast requirement. My first industry job also “required” two years of experience, but I had never had a full-time industry job before then either. The hiring manager counted the project work I had done while in school towards that experience in terms of being willing to give me a phone interview. So… if you truly believe you have what it takes to do the job and you’ve got some project experience from school and such, then you could take the risk of moving to a state like California or Seattle without the safety net of a job, and hoping to find one after arriving there. You could also try finding a job doing QA or customer service and try to transition into an associate producer role. I know of a few producers who have managed to do that. Of course, doing this could also end very badly for you as well - you could be stranded far away from your friends and family without a job.

The other major option is to get some project management experience in a software development environment. Find a job as a producer or project manager at a software or app development studio locally. Most cities will have some sort of project-based developer of something. Find a job doing that, ship some products, and try to learn as much as you can. You can also get certified with Project Manager Professional (PMP) certification to help establish your skills as a producer. Then, once you’ve established yourself as being able to manage a schedule and ship software successfully, you can try switching industries and aim for a position in the game industry. This is a safer option than the previous one, but it also requires you to play the long game. This choice will require some serious patience.

Ultimately, it’s a question of balancing the risk you’re willing to take with how soon you want to try to get the job you want. The more appealing a candidate you are, the more experience you have, the less risky a blind move becomes. You could also try something like applying to some game companies and footing the bill for your own interview and relocation expenses if you really want the job, and then moving only if you get an offer. Unfortunately, most studios just aren’t willing to pay to relocate an entry-level employee. Your only real options when separated by geography are to foot those bills yourself, or to become a candidate worth relocating.

Got a burning question you want answered?

Ok, so… game schools. This can be a bit of a tricky subject. First, I suggest you read this old post I wrote [on game schools from some time ago]. Then, let’s discuss the finances, because that’s kind of a big deal.

Financing school is probably one of the most important decisions of your life, because most school loans are permanently stuck to you until you pay them off. As far as I know, they are the only kind of loan that can’t be discharged via bankruptcy. They will affect your credit, which will affect your ability to buy a car, a house, apartment approval, and even job prospects. And, as you said, tuition can get super expensive. The federal government hands out student loans, but does not directly fund tuition for any individual university (though they do pay for university research, which isn’t quite the same thing). So here’s a quick primer on how school tuition works.

Private Schools

Private schools do not receive funds from the government for education, and are entirely funded by private sources (usually tuition and donations). These include for-profit schools like Digipen and Full Sail, as well as established private universities like Stanford, Harvard, and Notre Dame. It does not matter to a private school where you are from; the cost is the same. Digipen charges around $30,000 per year in tuition and fees for a four-year Game Design degree. Full Sail charges around $32,000 per year for a 2.5 year Game Design degree. For comparison’s sake, USC has a pretty good game design track and charges ~$50,000 a year.

Public Schools

Public schools receive government funds from the state to help defray the costs of tuition. If you are a legal resident of the state, you are entitled to the subsidized tuition costs. This can be a substantial amount of money - I went to a public university in California that is currently charging ~$14,000 a year for in-state students and ~$40,000 a year for out-of-state students. The university in the city I’m in right now (top in the state) charges ~$10,000 per year for in-state and ~$35,000 per year for out-of-state. So… keep this in mind - in-state public school is often far cheaper than a trade school.

Post-Graduation - Getting a Job

There is another piece to this puzzle, of course - you need to get a job after you finish school. Most for-profit schools have placement rates - the percentage of graduates who go on to find work in the field. [According to Full Sail], about 38% of their Game Design bachelors’ students go on to get a game designer job, while 70% of their Master’s graduates find jobs. [Digipen has a much higher placement rate of 80%] for game design bachelor’s degrees. Placement rates are harder to find for major universities like USC or MIT. 

If you come out of Digipen with $120,000 in debt with a 5.0% interest [Perkins student loan], you’ll have to pay $644 per month for 30 years. For a [6.8% interest Stafford student loan], that number jumps to $782 per month. If you want to be a game designer, you should also consider your earning power - the median salary for an entry level game designer is not very high. Most junior designers only earn from $35,000 to $50,000 per year. If you live in California and start at $50,000, you’ll take home about $3100 a month after taxes. If you pay $1500 monthly for rent, food, and utilities (super cheap for California) and $782 per month for your student loans, that leaves you with $818 a month for everything else - entertainment, household needs, medical expenses, gas, car payment, insurance, etc. In comparison, $40,000 debt from a strong in-state university is much more manageable at $262 per month in student loan repayment (though still for 30 years).

Further Reading:

Got a burning question you want answered?

For reel specifics, here are a few suggestions: 

The core focus of any game animator is crafting motions that can (and will) be performed an infinite number of times (or for an infinite length of time). This usually means standing, crouching, climbing, walking, running, jumping, and attacking, but also means transitioning from a given cycle to another all the time. You need to show your potential boss that you can do these things, and that you can do them within a reasonable frame budget. Think short cycles of around 1.5 seconds at most, with each full motion being around 2.5-5 seconds at most.

Most games with any kind of melee combat will have light and heavy attacks, and any lead animator will expect to see attacks that both read well and could be useful in a game setting. I wouldn’t worry too much about setting up some sort of combo attack, unless you can demonstrate your ability to vary when one motion can transition into another. Game developers try to take as little control away from the player as possible, and that usually means that every attack must correspond to a button press. That second button press can occur at practically any time during the first attack, you’ll need to be able to set up a window during the animation to allow it to transition into the new attack while still occurring within a handful of frames (~8 frames at most, assuming a frame rate of 60).

Overall, the biggest difference between game and film is that you really have a lot fewer anticipation frames to work with. The player isn’t going to sit around and wait for a beautifully animated windup; the player is going to get really annoyed that it takes forever for the move to come out after pressing the attack button. This means that you need to shave as many frames off of the anticipation frames of most motions as you comfortably can, and you need to do it in such a way that it still conveys the anticipation phase of the motion because the player still needs to see it. I heavily suggest picking some really strong key frames and favoring those more than smooth in-betweens.

Finally, your animations are never going to remain pristine. There will be engineers and designers bending and breaking them in order to make them fit the gameplay. You can make the prettiest arcs you can make, but somebody is going to speed it up or slow it down or chop frames off or whatever in order to make it work with the new system. A designer is going to tell you that you have to keep all of the motion within a 4 square meter box on the ground, and you’re going to have to rework the motion until it fits. Remember, games are a collaborative process. Nobody works in a vacuum. If all this sounds like something you find appealing, I wish you good luck.

Got a burning question you want answered?

I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Plenty of industry veterans have bad or critically panned games on their resumes, myself included. I’ve never had a potential employer hold it against me. They’ve always been much more interested in what skills I can demonstrate and what I actually did on the project. What they are really looking for is the ability to finish and deliver a product, and that’s what having a shipped title means. Many developers never get to pick and choose what they work on, especially when there are all sorts of other factors involved with determining your career (where you live, your family/financial situation, job availability, other priorities, etc.). Under most circumstances, having a shipped game (even if it is bad) is far superior to having no shipped games at all.

Remember the trifecta of things that I, the hiring manager, am looking for:

A blog can show me all of these elements if you structure and populate it with the right content. For a programming blog, what I primarily want to see are things that help reinforce all three of these qualities. As such, I would like to see:

Animations for games are a little bit different in the specifics than traditional animation techniques and principles, though you should definitely have a strong grasp of animation fundamentals before knowing how and why to break those rules when needed. For the uninitiated, I really recommend [Art Eater’s post “Darkstalkers and the Twelve Principles of Animation”].

Game animation in particular differs from traditional animation because of how interactive games are. Traditional animators almost never need to worry about changing or blending on the fly, because they have established shots and camera angles that are effectively set in stone. The length and duration is already known, so they can spend their time making the animations look their best from the angle of view, while games often have to be viewable from many angles, and need to be able to read well while easily getting interrupted through various means and effects like initiating another action, which means familiarity with things like partial animations and creating assets for animation blending. Game animators often also need to work to clean up motion capturing and work within the constraints of limited rigging while still making things look good.

That said, you asked for animation courses and not just a basic primer on how animation differs from traditional. I’m not an artist, but I did ask some artist friends about this and the general response are the game animation workshops at iAnimate.net.

[Click link here]

Please keep in mind that these are four 11-week workshops, and they are not free. This is an actual online course to teach you these things, but they come at the recommendation of actual industry professionals.

In addition to iAnimate, there’s also 3DMotive.com, which has online tutorials and lessons about 3D art in general - modeling, texturing, animating, etc. They have a number of free lessons as well as paid.

[Click link here]

Finally, you might want to check out ReAnimators.net, which is a great online resource for animators in general. They specialize in a podcast on various aspects of game animation, and have a forum where you can ask questions, discuss animation in general, and even hire animators or find work.

[Click link here][Forum Link here]

I hope this answers your question. Good luck on the animation front, it’s a challenging but rewarding field and highly in demand.

Were I you, I'd do two things.

First, I'd take a sample of some code I've written for a project and post it to a programmer-specific website like Stack Overflow, asking for critiques and readability. As a programmer, your number one responsibility is to write functional code. Your number two responsibility is to write portable, legible code - if you want to get hired somewhere, you're going to be working on a team, and that means that other engineers are going to have to be able to look at your code and understand what it's doing. Imagine taking over a game system from somebody... say a camera system, or an animation system. The last thing you want is to spend hours trying to puzzle out what exactly the other person was doing. This is why legibility is usually more important than squeezing out that last bit of performance. If you're the only one who can understand it by looking at it, the code loses a lot of value if you ever leave or are unavailable. 

The second thing I would do is either visit the book store, or look online for programming tests and programming job interview questions. There are a lot of varying opinions on the necessity or usefulness of a programming test, but the only programming positions I've ever gotten that *didn't* require a programming test were ones where the job was already basically guaranteed to me because I had worked there before and they wanted me to return. You should be able to adequately complete both written tests and the verbal interview-type questions. One of the books I suggest is Programming Interviews Exposed. It's a decent primer on what interviewers will ask about basic programming concepts, and I've seen quite a few interview questions like the ones in the book. I've also personally used programmerinterview.com as a supplementary site, though the overall content isn't as good as the book I mentioned. Finally, if you are aiming for a gameplay position in specific (which is my expertise), you should understand and be able to explain what vectors, dot products, and cross products are, and why they are useful.

I'll be the first to say that not all software engineers are trained that way. One of the senior software engineers who helped create the animation system in Tomb Raider wasn't a computer science major at all, but a physics major. The main issue with being self-taught is that you don't necessarily get the 'why' while learning the 'how'. Concepts like data structures and the four core principles of object-oriented programming are important to know (the why as well as the what), and it's very easy to learn to code without picking these up properly. These are the two ways I would suggest using to test whether you're ready for an interview. Best of luck.

I think it’s an excellent way to teach yourself concepts and have something to actually show for it. If you want to do indie development, you’re setting yourself up for something good. If you are hoping to get into the industry as an engineer, so much the better - sending code samples and examples of your work are sure to help differentiate you from other candidates who are seeking entry-level positions.

If you enjoy that sort of thing, you’ll definitely be an attractive potential hiring candidate should you decide to apply for a job. Engine programmers and those who are familiar with the concepts of building low level code are definitely in demand. If you just wanted a pat on the back, you’ve got it. Keep going, you’re doing fine.

If you want suggestions as to what to do next… I would suggest taking the next step and bringing this to 3D. Most 2D stuff is going away, mostly because of how much less efficient it is to draw each frame of animation, while 3D is more efficient for creating data, since you can utilize the model + animation skeleton for action and locomotion instead. It’s why we’re seeing games that are traditionally 2D done in 3D, but made to look 2D - the data generation savings are that big.

Still, I’m impressed you were able to build your own engine, and think that you’ve got a pretty bright future ahead of you if you can keep up that sort of work ethic and level of interest. Good job.