On 9/2/2020 at 7:04 AM, BruceMcF said:
But the first one, just share it with anyone who is interested and get private feedback, leave it off your CV.
21 hours ago, StephenHorn said:
Neat, I hadn't realized MattGrandis was from the industry. Myself, I've been working at Deep Silver Volition, a modestly-sized studio in Champaign, IL, since 2006. So, close to 15 years in the industry. I have coworkers who have experienced every corner of the industry, from tiny indies who came looking for job security, to publishers like Activision and Ubisoft who have more artists working on flotsam like cola cans and dining props than Volition directly employs across the entire studio.
About the industry in general
Everything Matt said about the industry is absolutely true.
I think the AAA side really hits its low point around the time of the infamous "ea_spouse" letter, which accused AAA mega-giant Electronic Arts of abusing their workforce with 70 hour work-weeks, as their modus operandi before talking about "crunch". EA was rumored to have 50% year-over-year turnover in their employees around that time, as in 50% of their workforce was leaving and needed to be replaced, each year.
Crunch is still an infamous issue in the industry, whether we're talking about CD Projekt Red crunching to release Cyberpunk 2077, Ubisoft crunching to release Prince of Persia: Forgotten Sands, or Activision crunching to release the next Call of Duty, it's a practice that is endemic to the industry. To some extent, my understanding is that it's endemic to software development, but it's especially acute in gamedev. It's a complex problem to solve, and unionization would probably force the issue, but unions have their own problems and many gamedevs are understandably worried that if they attempted to unionize then they'd just get fired and replaced by younger, more naive kids.
Job security is also still an issue today. Even the largest publishers are only 1 or 2 big flops away from ruin at any given time, and many studios don't functionally survive their first flop (they lose key employees, or are reorganized, or hemorrhage people until they can't operate, or simply shutter their doors forever), even if they have long histories of success. Also, it's still common for folks, artists especially, to finish a project and be immediately laid off because their studio won't have work for them to do for several months. Thankfully, Volition doesn't work like this, and never has, but my understanding is that we're an outlier. And yeah, in spite of some 27 years of being in business, we got hurt badly by the failure of Agents of Mayhem, our most recent release, which was just completely dead on arrival.
This industry, I tell you. Saying "it's not for everyone" is a level of understatement I'd almost exclusively reserve for British characters from historical fiction. If V shutters, I'll probably exit the industry entirely, myself, go back to gamedev being a hobby that can exhaust my creative urges, and eventually reclaim the ~30% pay difference I'm told I could be making by plying my trade anywhere else in town.
Oh, and that reminds me: Since nobody else has mentioned it, be aware that AAA gamedev absolutely comes with a fun tax, in that I mean you can expect to be paid less for what you're doing than if you were doing it for anyone else. Because getting in is grand, but there's no shortage of kids willing to absolutely kill themselves to get in behind you, and that drives down wages. (My story of breaking in out of college involved driving 5 hours to an in-person interview from out-of-state and booking my own room in a local motel. It really didn't bother me, in part because I didn't have any idea what to expect from the interview process; but since V tries to be better than most, our recruiter at the time was rather embarrassed by it. It helped drive my resume to the top of the pile, though.)
Game-development options
I also agree with Matt that, of those options, Godot is the closest to approach direct relevance for a game programming career, though you really want to look into Unreal if you're looking at a programming path. Failing that, at least C++. It's not that our industry has no need of low-level CPU and hardware guys, it's just that we're talking about a team of maybe 3 dedicated guys amongst a programming staff of 46, and it wouldn't even be that many except that we roll our own bespoke game engine for our franchises, instead of using a third-party engine. And besides, almost every platform is X86 these days... and have you seen that instruction set? Even in the heydays of Michael Abrash writing articles about VGA programming, optimizing that stuff was an art in trial and error, and these days really is best left to compilers.
I would also echo Bruce's advice that you should probably think of your first game as a learning experience, and to decide whether you like gamedev enough to want to get in for the long haul. (Of course, if it turns out well, I don't think there's anything wrong with using it as a portfolio piece.)
Whatever path you go, just remember these things:
Keep it small.
Keep it focused.
Have fun! (Otherwise, what's the point?)
15 hours ago, StephenHorn said:
So, maybe a person needs a few loose screws to stay in the games industry in the long-term, but I want to try and offer some positives about the game industry, reasons that I have stayed for as long as I have:
I found a great studio that looks after its employees.
That's not to say that Volition has never crunched, and never made mistakes along the way. Actually, the first Saints Row had an infamously long and hard crunch period, worse than anything the studio had ever experienced. I started at the tail end of that, and I think it kind of traumatized everyone. For the first decade or so working there, I'd describe the attitude towards crunch as "we're never letting Saints Row happen ever again." The studio invested in more and better project management, experimented, and we're continuing to try and improve planning and cut earlier, specifically so we never crunch that hard ever, ever, ever again.
Games are fun to work on, and their teams are fun to work with.
Yes, it's a job, and it's common to have a very narrow view of what you're working on on any ordinary day-to-day work, and so that does take some of the "fun" out of it. Especially when you're dog-fooding on your own work.
But I remember the internship positions I had doing "real jobs" before going into games, and they were B-O-R-I-N-G. I found my internships to be hideously awful, soul-crushing, "why-did-I-ever-think-programming-would-be-interesting-or-fun" affairs. Writing 100 or so trivial database queries over the course of a summer and then watching the resulting application for 8 hours/day to make sure processes are running is my literal definition of purgatory. And then there was the office politics... you know your internship is at a winning employer when your direct supervisor is suddenly fired, with two weeks left in your internship, and everything you've worked on all summer is completely forgotten and discarded, and you're told to still show up for work but to sit there and twiddle your thumbs until the end.
And then there was the other internship, in which a senior programmer had an inexplicable grudge against me on Day 1, and wasted dozens of hours over the course of the summer trying to get me fired. The only reasons that was tolerable was my boss appreciated the schadenfreude when that senior programmer would accuse me of something new, only to be shown contradicting evidence and documentation. I thank the mighty Pastafarian noodleship that programmer was even more incompetent than they were malicious, because that paycheck was going towards my college tuition.
I guess we all choose our demons, and I prefer being paid less to work harder on something I find interesting, alongside people I can actually like. Finding a silly bug, poking my office neighbor, and having a brief laugh and seeing if we can reproduce it. Playing board or card games over slightly-longer-than-usual lunches. I've become friends with a number of my coworkers - by which I mean more than just professionals working well together, these are folks I invited to my new place for a housewarming party, and that I've turned to when I needed help with a flooding basement, and that I've helped when moving across town. Folks I've gone drinking with, not just for team-building, but because they're great people to hang out with.
Watching a project succeed is hugely satisfying
After working hard to deliver a product, seeing it appear on store shelves - and then disappear from those shelves, with plastic markers indicating where it would be if only the store still had units in stock - is a remarkably cathartic experience. And reading positive reviews of the project is energizing. And even the negative reviews can be motivating, recognizing weakness in your own contributions and planning how to do better the next go-round. I think the proudest moment of my career was relatively early on, watching Red Faction: Guerrilla briefly bump up to a 9.0 metacritic score around launch time. I worked on its multiplayer, as part of a core team of 3 programmers and 1 designer. What I wouldn't give to relive those days, with just a few tweaks of benefit from a more experienced perspective.
2 hours ago, John Chow Seymour said:
One more thing (sorry for the double post, this occurred to me a few minutes too late, haha).
You mentioned that you're not much of an artist so you'll design the game with simple graphics. That makes sense, but the other route would be to find an artist and team up. Not only will the game look nice, but doing so will have the arguably more important benefit of giving you experience working on a game with other people. When it's all done and you begin looking to join an indie studio, your artist friend can write you a letter of recommendation vouching that you're a good person to work with, you understand how to work as part a team, etc., all of which will be attractive to smaller studios.
4 hours ago, John Chow Seymour said:
Lots of good advice in this thread, but I disagree with the idea above. Life's too short to pretend that some of your accomplishments don't matter. Maybe when you're on your 10th game, the first amateurish one won't matter so much. But until then, if what you make is good enough to release, then it's good enough to go on your CV.
18 minutes ago, BruceMcF said:
I'm looking at it from the front side, not after the fact. Going into the game with the goal of putting it on the resume is not the best mindset for the exploratory learning required.
Indeed, going into it with the attitude that it's job interview material will, paradoxically, give a lower probability of it actually being effective as job interview material.
After the game is finished, the advice has expired. At that time there's a game to look at to decide whether it merits being put on the CV.