You don’t want to work in the video game industry

Is that just here?

Yeah, sometimes I go to far and have a go at you, but I'd like to think that most of the time I pick apart what you're actually saying rather than be personal.

 

I thought I should give my 2 cents on this. I agree with some of your points, but not all of them; I most definitely don't agree with your "stay away from games" topic in general.

Your final point is probably the most valid, in that video games specific courses are not really worth taking (unless they're a computer science degree with games modules bolted on). Having good maths and physics A levels (no need for degree level), with a good Computer Science degree from a reputable university will put you in the best standing to get a programming job in the industry.

My experience in the industry hasn't been exactly the same as yours it would seem. As a programmer I've also had a lot of creative control over what I work on, and I've definitely enjoyed being in the industry. I think it depends who you work for, what you work on and sometimes the size of the team too. If you're a small cog in the rather large machine then inevitably it won't be as enjoyable.

I agree that the industry is still quite young, and management/scheduling techniques etc still have some way to go. I also agree that wages are less than one might expect in an equivelent non-games job, but I'm not exactly starving either. It's also true that you do need to know how to negotiate to get the reasonable pay rises, they won't just arrive on a silver platter every year like you might expect in some other industries.

The single largest problem with the games industry is the crunch culture. A lot of development studios appear to deem it perfectly acceptable to expect their employees to work way beyond the necessary hours, for free. Some studios have no-crunch policies, but these are very few and far between. In your first year in the industry you'll probably have to just accept that you'll be crunching at some point, but as you gain more experience and have your thumbs in more of their pies it's easier to give management the finger

 

I'm a programmer too, and I truly envy you lot that actually get R&D or creative work thrown your way. With the projects that we're doing, all I seem to be getting is mundane production tasks like reverse engineering and bug fixing shitty third party code. That's basically 95% of what I do nowadays for a year and a half now... Not that I don't understand that those things HAVE to get done, but I can't shake the feeling that I'm just wasting my best years doing stuff like this, when I really have so much more to offer the company.

It's very frustrating personally, so I find a creative outlet by working on my rendering framework at home (which has an implementation of SHexp lighting that is shaping up quite nicely). But that takes up a lot of my weekends though and leaves me with less time to "enjoy the better things in life" so to speak. And after 9+ hours of the most draining work, sometimes all I want is anything but look at another line of code at home. It's just not the same as working on something in a professional capacity.

Seriously though, how many of you know what I mean?

Maybe some programmers out there actually enjoy reverse engineering third party source. Hat's off to you guys really. I don't have the stomach for that, especially when there's nothing to learn except discovering yet more dodgy ways to code stuff. I'm that jaded, yes.

Not that I'm perfect of course, but really if I see another 2500+++ line function, or another #ifdef in the name of "platform independence", or another shitty roll-your-own scripting engine that has 1/10th of the functionality of something like Lua, or another 7-10 classes deep inheritance hierachy, or another monolithic engine that breaks every single coding design rule in the name of hypothetically significant performance, I'm going to... well I'll probably just quit and find myself a wiser employer that is more rewarding to work for.

 

Agreed. It was a bit over the top and a tad too personal. Still, I wouldn't call Bruce's post constructive. It's a deliberate attempt to be provocative and "stir debate".

It's part of his spam-fest posts of the forum with either a copy of a blog post or one or two line posts as am excuse to repeat the link to his blog as many times as possible.

But yeah, I was a dick.

 

Cheers Puppy.

Can't believe I stuck up for Bruce... I'll get kicked out of the cabal now probably.

 

You were never in it anyway, that's just a front cabal to distract attention away from the real one.

 

Oh FFS!!! Shut up. Not in the public forums!

 

I took that test, the answer you were looking for was "Mario"


Yeah, but Codies testing - jesus. 6 hours or whatever it was. My interview was shit, I think I had just died of boredom through the testing, then they turned me down. A couple of years later they expressed an interest through an agent (or something like that). Being older and wiser, I said "no" rather sharpish.

I would have to be pretty desperate to consider Codies and I know I am not alone there.

 

I thanked eclectic for a great post. Agree with much of it, some of which had to be said.

 

All a bit tiresome and predictable though, isn't it? Like those "how to get into the industry!!!" articles written by people who, ah, aren't actually in the industry, but, uh, that's their choice because The Man is too blind to see their awesome talent so they've gone indie which is much cooler as you can live the dream!!!!! (Which involves making Source mods in their spare time while they make a living at McDonalds).

My experience with crunch in the games industry, for example, is a very steeply declining curve. Plenty of places are pretty much crunch-free nowadays.

 

It's a fair point though; I also thought it sounded dated. It's current conventional wisdom; old news. It reads like the opinions of somebody viewing things from the outside, and from some distance... like a TV journalist.

If you want advice about getting into the game industry on your own terms, then you'd be far better off getting it from Dan Paladin or Cliffski or any number of other people who are currently doing just that.

I'm doing creative stuff and that's great, but I've also done an awful lot of unpaid work and had a severely unsteady income since basically forever. That's just how it goes, really. There's a reason it's called being a starving artist.

 

The attitude of "making games sucks" reeks of someone who has never had a "real job" in their life. I've had a lot of shit jobs that help me keep just how "tough" things are in the game industry in perspective. At the end of the day, I'm getting paid to do something that I love.Putting up with some bullshit here and there makes it worth it.

 

Whenever I want to read gamasutra I'm just going to read that instead to save time.

 

Hi to all.Let me share my view. Game companies are mainly not very well run. This is because it is an immature industry and the management skills and practices are just not there. It is much, much nicer working in an organization that is run properly. Which you are far more likely to find outside gaming.I'm surprised you said this. I know the company I'm in is run very smoothly. It is far from immature and the cross industry skills and backgrounds we have propelled our company forward and able to handle many issues in a quick turnaround time. The global economic crisis has shown us that every single industry has had some absolutely terrible management which has resulted in all of us being touched on. My knee-jerk response is to ask what business do you represent that is successful and are run properly?

 

Spot on.

This is what my job sounded like 10 years ago. I loved it, but I was wide eyed and innocent.

Now, I still love my job but I love it for grown up reasons as well as "holy moses I get to make games for a living!".

 

If that post had been made in the private forums, by someone other than Eclectic, it would have garnered dozens of thanks, I guarantee it.

Although I don't feel Bruce is particularly qualified (anymore) to write an article about being in the games industry, the points that he makes are fair and spot on in my opinion. All this talk about crunch being a thing of the past and his points not being relevant, are simply not true.

 

Yeah,
I agree. I think there's been a fair amount of bruce bashing, most of it just comes over as bullying now. Most of what he says is subjective, so feel free to disagree, but its turning into "picking on" now, and I'm pretty uncomfortable with it.

 

I think the other article was better than this one, but that is just my opinion.

 

I'm just a junior programmer. I have found that the programming side of things is great fun, since I make things work. artist I know would be drawing in their spare time.
I suppose i'd discourage people with no passion, but I'd discourage anyone from doing something their not passionate about.
"Passion is not a qualification" but it's hard to be qualified without it.

 

Ive made loads of stuff for games, Worked on games, Working on a game right now. Be it just a lil flash marathon mail out. But i have just finished a 9 month stint producing isometric building graphics.

And maaaaan, It was awesome! If i could, i would work for free on this sort of job, but i appriciate this work is very rare to come across. And i would never work for free, as in the real world. people need food, not credits..thats a fact.

Also working for free on anything, will reduce how much you expect yourself to ever get paid, butterfly effect or not.

And at the same time, I would love to be a graphic designer drawing pictures all day long, but the truth of the matter is, to make a living, you need to sacrafice your time for work you probabaly absolutly hate and cannot stand.

Good with the bad.
Enjoy every chance you get...