Ask a Game Dev

First, allow me to link an old post about [how emulation works] for those who want a little added context. Let’s also assume that the developers also lack the original assets or code for the original games. Games from 2003 were built using tools that are no longer supported on an OS that is also no longer supported using computer hardware that is mostly no longer available and stored using data formats that are no longer supported.

Now to your question. The principles of software emulation are, indeed, taught in university coursework. The university I attended taught the basics of emulation as part of their upper division computer architecture class. Delving further into the subject would have required graduate-level coursework, but it was definitely available for study if the students so chose. This would have gone over the concepts and theory behind emulation and virtual machines in general. However, this alone would be insufficient because you’d then need to figure out the specifics of emulating a Playstation 2 game in particular.

Thankfully, PS2 hardware has a lot of preserved documentation on how it works. There is also a history of emulation for the PS2 environment built for use with the PS3, and there are publicly available PS2 emulators for the PC as well. Enterprising software engineers can use this information combined with their knowledge of emulation in general to construct their own emulator to run on the platform they want and optimize it for the game they are emulating. They can probably datamine and replace the old assets in the game as well, similar to how modders do their current work. As long as they can reverse-engineer the file formats for the in-game assets, such assets can be swapped out as long as the file format of the new assets are still compatible with the way the old game handled them.

This kind of expertise in emulation and file/asset reverse-engineering is a specialized field in game dev today that doesn’t have a lot of crossover with new game dev. As a result, contract game studios that specialize in this kind of work have stepped up to fill this need. I’m sure you’ve seen the results of their work in the many remasters of old games. University learning can certainly prepare you to start, but it is only the first step of the process. The rest of it is research and experimentation.

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

Got a burning question you want answered?

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?

Game design school can be a tricky topic. Here are some links to posts I’ve written about them before:

That said, it seems like you’re kind of keen on the financial aspect, so let’s discuss that a bit more today.

Many schools that offer degrees in game design are for-profit, meaning that they’ll pile on the student loan debt pretty quickly, and junior designer positions are both rare and not particularly well-paid - you can expect a salary of around $30-50k USD per year starting out, and most dev studios will be in areas with a high cost of living like Southern California, Silicon Valley, New York, Seattle, Austin, Vancouver, etc. If you accrue $120,000 in student loan debt with an unsubsidized Stafford loan (i.e. “not in financial need”) and the current interest rate of 6%, you’re looking at a monthly payment of $1332 USD per month to pay it off over a period of ten years. This comes out to approximately $15,984 USD per year in loan payments, which will take a pretty huge chunk out of your annual salary. If you take earn a salary of $50,000 USD per year in California, you’re looking at a net take home of around $3,256 USD per month. If you deduct the $1332 loan payment, you’ve got $1924 per month left for rent, food, car, insurance, medical, water, power, internet, phone, and everything else. That’s like… sharing an apartment with roommates for years territory. That’s not quite ramen and ketchup packets territory, but you also won’t be able to save much if you go that route (especially in expensive places like California or New York).

Honestly, it really depends on how much you really want to do this for a career. Going to a game school will probably help you get some callbacks early in your career, as long as you work hard and make some really cool projects to show and tell us about. However, it will also almost certainly put you in very thin financial margins for at least ten years of your life in the very best case scenario. That’s a pretty significant commitment - that will be as long as your middle school, high school, and college years all put together. If this is a sacrifice that you (and any significant other) are willing to make, then I suggest you go for it. But if you’re at all doubtful, I’d consider something a little “safer” that’s game design-adjacent in school like Computer Science. If you get a Computer Science degree (like I did), you could find work as an engineer as well as utilize those skills to work on your own game designs in your own time. Then, after graduation, you could bring additional skills to the table and potentially go after other roles, like [technical designer], [scripter], or [gameplay programmer] before transitioning to a more content creation oriented role once you’re already in the door. It may be a longer road to take, but it is a safer one. It really depends on where it is you want to be, and how badly you want it compared to other things in your life.

This week we continue the Design Phase of the FANTa Project!

[What is the FANTa project?]

Got a burning question you want answered?

If you want to work on indie or with a small team/project, there is a greater benefit to having breadth of skills than specializing in a single skill. This is because it is likely that the small team will require a designer to perform multiple roles - level design, scripting, writing, system design, and so on. There won’t be an entire design team to handle that; it will likely just be a handful of people, or possibly just you. When the team size is small, the number of hats you have to wear increases. If you want to get a job at an indie studio, you need to be able to do all of the things, because they can’t afford to hire a writer when they need to get all of the things done.

If you want to work on AAA games with high production values, you need to specialize. AAA games have enormous teams, with entire departments of designers, engineers, artists, and even producers. Combat designers spend their days focusing on the elements of combat. Writers focus on writing content. Level designers lay out maps and areas. When AAA studios are hiring, they look to fill a specific role - the combat team needs a system designer to handle X task, or the environment team needs a new level designer to handle Y zone. Were I a hiring manager, I would look for someone who can do the thing, and somebody with specialty experience typically trumps someone without, especially just out of school. 

Presumably the education you received during the course of obtaining the degree will have some value, but the degree itself is not actually a compelling option when it comes to the game industry. There isn’t a certification that we require like passing the bar exam for lawyers or finishing residency for doctors when it comes to game development. I wish I had a better response, but… them’s the breaks. A master’s or doctorate degree just isn’t that particularly useful to us. The knowledge and skills you learned over the course of earning the degree might be, but we don’t look specifically for advanced degrees or weigh them particularly higher than others, especially when compared to a candidate who spent the equivalent amount of time amassing work experience.

Here, let me illustrate with a thought experiment. Imagine you are a hiring manager, and you have narrowed it down to three candidates to choose from for a low/entry-level job opening at your game development studio. Your three candidates are:

Who would you choose for the opening if you were the hiring manager and your goal was to hire the best possible candidate for the job? How would you rank the candidates in terms of likelihood to be hired? 

Personally, I’d probably rank then in reverse order - candidate 3 is the best pick, candidate 2 is the second best, and I’d pick #1 last, unless there was something else that came up in the interview. Real world experience delivering an actual product tends to trump theory and academia most of the time, because delivering a product that is used by millions of people will always have a different set of requirements than writing a paper written for academics and theory experts.

Remember, when we look to hire somebody, we always want the best possible candidate. We don’t simply pick somebody at random from a pool of candidates who all meet the minimum criteria for a job. It’s always within our best interests to hire somebody who we think is the best possible candidate. If you want to get a job in the game industry (or any industry at all), you’ll need to make the hiring manager believe that you are that best possible candidate. Part of that is knowing who your competition will be and planning accordingly, because we never get just one candidate for a job opening.