Sure thing. Here are my answers.

1. What do you do as a game dev?

I am responsible for creating the rules for the game I am working on. These sort of rules are often things like:

Establishing such rules allows us to build the game taking these rules into account. If we know how far Mario can jump, we can make gaps that are easy, hard, and even impossible for Mario to jump. We can create levels that have different paths for players to discover by jumping properly. We can place power-ups in easy, hard, or impossible to reach places. Having rules allows us to create fun ways to play within those rules.

2. How did you discover this job and what made you want to do it?

When I was a child, I played video games for the first time and thought they were wonderful things. I had so many ideas for games the games I played that I thought were super cool, and even ideas for games that didn’t exist yet. Then I found out that there were people whose job it was to make these games and I thought “Wow, that’s what I want to do!” so I went to school, studied hard, and eventually got to do it.

3.  How much do you get paid as a game dev?

It depends on what kind of game dev you are. Most game devs are either programmers, designers, producers, artists, or testers. Programmers usually start off being paid more, testers usually start off being paid less, and the other fields are usually somewhere in between. As you get more experience and level up as a game dev, you usually get promoted and paid more. When I started my very first job, my company paid me $42,500 per year. You would probably get more than that if you started today.

4. How many hours a week do you have to work?

Most of the time I work eight hours a day for five days per week. Sometimes there is just too much work to do and I need to work extra hours. This is called “crunch time” and can usually be anywhere from one extra hour a day to many extra hours. Most game dev studios try to limit crunch time from happening, but it does happen - usually when we are very close to finishing the game.

5. Was a specific class or special schooling need for your job, if so what was it?

Most game developers need a college degree. Artists need a portfolio that shows their skills. Programmers need schooling in computer science. Designers need training in game design - playing games and analyzing them to figure out what the rules are and why they were used in that way. There aren’t any specific must-have classes or degrees that someone needs to get this job, but a university education is very helpful in general.

I hope this helps!

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

Got a burning question you want answered?

The first thing I always have to ask somebody who tells me he or she wants to get a job in the game industry is “Doing what?” There are a lot of different roles that we need filled in order to build games - [programming, designing, arting, producing, testing, etc.] and they each require a specialized set of skills to be useful enough for us to pay you to do that thing. We don’t just give jobs to people who really really want them, we have a bunch of work that we need to hire people to do and my number one concern as a hiring manager is whether a candidate can do that work.

If you are going to be an IT specialist in the army, then presumably you’ll be bringing IT specialist skills to the table. If that’s the sort of job you want to do in the game industry, then go for it. We’d be glad to have you. Games are technology-based, we need people to keep our networks and workstations running smoothly. However, as an IT specialist, you probably wouldn’t have any input at all in the development of an actual game. We don’t ask our IT specialists for input about combat, itemization, or stories, we ask them for input about networks, hardware, and software licenses.

There’s nothing wrong with going into the Army to help pay your way through college. It’s a totally viable path moving forward, and I thank and salute you for your (potentially impending) service. However, you need to figure out exactly what it is you want to do if you want to work in this industry. Then you need figure out how to acquire the skills needed to do what you want. Maybe that’s your major in school or maybe it’s some tech you could learn. The Army is a great way to pay for the costs involved with skill acquisition. But it all hinges on figuring out what the goal is first.

Further Reading:

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

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

Got a burning question you want answered?

If you want to be an engineer, most hiring managers look for a solid background in Computer Science more than a degree in something like “Games software development”. Computer Science as a field is more widely accepted and understood across universities worldwide, while nobody is really sure what “games software development” might entail. There’s a lot of accepted concepts and practices taught at the university level in Computer Science, while most concepts and practices in game development really aren’t taught that well in schools.

That said, for most hiring managers your coursework is just a line on a resume. We don’t really care what classes you’ve taken. What we really care about is three things:

That means that, unless you can show us how your classwork helps answer one of these questions, we really don’t care. If you want to appeal to a game studio as an engineer, you’ll learn your fundamental computer science principles, probably your vector math, and you’ll be able to show us projects you’ve done that show us that you can do the job you’re applying for.

Further Reading:

There shouldn’t be anything stopping you from going into school without knowing a thing about game development. School is a place of learning, after all, so it should be the best place to get yourself started. I was personally only vaguely aware of how programming worked when I started university, though I had a strong science and math background, and I managed to get a job in the gaming industry when I graduated. I’ve known plenty of other developers who did so as well. Most courses will list their course prerequisites, so as long as you’ve taken those, you should be just fine.

The main issue about operating knowledge isn’t prerequisites for formal education. Everybody starts from zero. The main issue with operating knowledge begins when you start competing with others. The more operating knowledge you have, the more attractive a candidate you tend to be. Whether this is for grades, a research position, working as a TA, applying for an internship, or looking for a job, it’s generally a question of how well you know your stuff. While you’re in class, you probably won’t be competing for anything but a final grade. The operating knowledge requirements will really only kick in when you need to get someone to choose you over another candidate.

IT isn’t really about software development, it’s more about network maintenance and infrastructure. As such, IT’s main responsibilities are to keep the data safe and keep the network running. This means the IT department keeps all of the development computers up to date in their software, monitors network traffic, keeps the network secure, cleans and images new computers, and so on. The problem is that you don’t necessarily learn the fundamentals of software engineering or architecture from an IT degree - you learn how the computers interact with each other, but you don’t really focus on how that software is created.

If you want to be a programmer, at the basic level you’ll need to understand how programming solves problems - the concepts of iteration and recursion, coming up with a correct solution, and then improving that solution once it is correct. Remember that even if your solution produces the right answer, it might take up too many resources, or not calculate the solution fast enough, or might be too difficult for other programmers to easily read and understand. Beyond this, a good software engineer will have to consider the future and extensibility - will this solution work if the parameters change? Will it be easy to add handling for different types of data, or if the client needs it to do more? You’ll also need to be able to work with other programmers in such a way that the code you write will be able to work with theirs with minimal hand-holding.

A graphics programmer in particular will need a strong understanding of data structures, algorithms, performance analysis, and 3D math (particularly linear algebra). Most IT curriculums won’t go over this sort of material, so you’ll have to make up the deficit yourself if you plan on pursuing this field yourself. I suggest trying to take or audit those classes in particular while you’re still in school if you have the room in your schedule for them. If you can’t, there are a lot of books and internet information on those topics out there, but it’s some stuff that most people have questions about while learning. I’ve found that it helps a lot if you can mentally picture points, planes, lines, and rotations in 3D to learn this stuff.