Looking to take the first steps to my dream job

Avinvented

Hi I'm looking to find a way to start building my way into having a career in game design and development.

My experience is as follows:

I did a year course at CTI which I got my diploma in software development having learnt c++, c# and Java as well as web development.

Worked for 2 years as a C# developer, hired because of my skills in coding mobile devices. In my term at this company I continued to learn C and programming Linux kernel objects to handle GSM modems, also learnt php and Java android. While working I got courses to C# XNA from adcourses www.adcourses.co.za

During the course I made an arcanoid game. All screenshots attached to this post.

I then moved to another company as a php iPhone developer where I learnt objective c and did electronics for RC cars, also had the opportunity to create programs using the neurosky programmable eeg headset as a controller. Www.neurosky.com

Now I currently work as an R&D software developer focused on mobile development.

During all this I have read books on game development using Direct X and Open gl and books on artificial intelligence.

I did the 2012 Entelect AI challenge.

Attached to this post is some of my work that I still kept around.

Fengol

My advice is to just keep on making stuff. Like an artist you've got to build up a portfolio of games you've worked on.

Elyaradine

It's great that you're putting up work, but putting up work for the sake of putting up work probably isn't very helpful to getting a game job. :P Most of the questions a game developer employer will ask of you can be answered with playable prototypes and an interactive portfolio. Make games, put them up, let people see the code (so they can see how you think, whether your code is clean and team-friendly, etc.), have people play the result so that they can see if you can think like a game designer; whether you have a "feel" for what great gameplay feels like.

And if you're seriously considering putting up art, it'd probably be a good idea to have it presented in a game engine, well lit, with wireframes, uvs, and the specs. Remember that metals, being generally quite reflective, are heavily reliant on their surrounding environment. When you light metals, you want to feed your metals things that they can reflect. And, although it does depend on the subject matter, soft lights with a bit of baked bounce generally look much better. Maybe take up some photography and learn about studio light setups for product photography if this is something you want to pursue. (...Though I expect that you're not actually considering being a game artist, so whatevs).

It's pretty cool that you've dabbled in 3D stuff and hardware as well as being a programmer. That's potentially a useful way to sell yourself. ;)

Avinvented

I'm sorry I don't have much to show, sadly I have an overflowing tap of ideas, but life has this way of steal all your time by forcing you to be the pragmatist, because it is not easy being a starving artist. When project deadlines come so does the end of my personal endeavors.

Fengol

Avinvented

Yes, sadly I wish I had the time to make my visions reality, but I don't want to be poor either.

dislekcia

Just keep on making stuff :)

Any reason why you didn't do the Entellect Challenge this year? Seemed more interesting than last year's one, although I must say that the weird 4x1 demolishing bullets and the too high fidelity grid made very little sense.

Avinvented

I wasn't aware of this years challenge, I would have made an effort if I did.

RickyGC

Wow... even you picture are cooler than what I'm doing :P I think you're in your dream job. R&D is where I wish to end up after I'm done with engineering.

Just slap on your Dr X headset and think-code out a game!

Avinvented

Thank you for the flattery. It is nice to hear, it is what I could do in the small time I had. I would love to have a day I could focus and brain storm and plan a game from beginning to end. I have how ever created a core engine system for a game. But sadly it is only the very core in C# portable library configuration that system can be ported to Xbox or windows phone without alteration.

Tuism

Noone plans a game from beginning to end in a day. Not in a month. Not in a year. We make small steps in a bigger picture kind of way, and we can often only see that bigger picture when we look back.

Just relating my experiences:

I've seldom been able to take a whole day to make anything (besides the one or two game jams with other people that I've managed to make time for).

I work 9-5. Most of my time working on games is either 5-8 hours during weekends when I sit at home while my whatsapp rang with friends talking about getting drinks or my getting off work at 5pm to get home at 6 after getting takeouts to sit in front of the computer from 6 till 1am then crashing out.

Some of that time is lost playing other games because I can't handle being 100% productive 100% of the time, but a typical night I can get 3 or so hours in.

MOST of that time is spent staring at the code and thinking of either how to achieve what I'm trying to make or thinking WHAT would make what I have more fun, or how to convey concepts better.

That is, very little of the time is spent actually typing.

And during the rest of the day the same questions brew in the back of my head - a lot of solutions to design problems I have now come during the shower or at lunch time or driving.

So what I'm saying is... Don't let the fact that there seems to be no time stop you - and it's also a self-reinforcing thing - if all you think about is "I have no time" then you WILL have no time. Think about "when can I get 10 minutes in", think about "How could I be doing this when I have 10 minutes to do it".

Keep making things. Don't stop making things. Make things that you want to make. If you want to make games, make games. Explore mechanics. Explore how game loops work. Copy other games (yes a breakout clone is invaluable learning! Now keep going and do more!)

Elyaradine

There's no such thing as "I don't have the time."

What it is, is "This isn't actually a priority for me."

If it's important to you, you'll make time. If it's truly your dream, you'll make time.

The guy who shared that nugget of advice with me is a South African who does work for Naughty Dog, Blizzard, Crytek, Riot and several other game and film studios.

[edit] Actually, I wrote a mini-post about this a little while ago: http://elyaradine.tumblr.com/post/59054083166/priorities-bro

Avinvented

I agree, I am going into it with the wrong attitude. I would say I'm letting life overwhelm me. Also I clutter up my own life, one could call me the hobbyist. In addition to my work I workout at the gym, do a martial art, ice skate, play games including far too much minecraft, build viruses, encryption algorithms, network analysers, AI cores and AI infused database monitoring systems, sitting on gimp, blender and on my sketch pad being all arty, making particle simulators and my raspberry pi building a robot around it.

Tuism

So, prioritise :)

I've had to cut a lot of things out of my own life to focus on fewer things. And it's worth it.

Avinvented

Oh snap just as I read that Mensa send me an event invite for tonight, but you know what, tonight I'll focus on doing ... Something ... I have an idea for a destruction construction mechanic with a digital theme I want to see if it works

Rigormortis

@Avinvented, so in the spirit of doing stuff, take a look at the current comp. I would guess that a game that only lasts 5 minutes should be small enough in scope to actually complete in a weeks time by only working weeknights.

Aequitas

I'd take @Rigormortis' advice. Entering the comp will give you a goal, and a deadline. See if you can make something cool :)

Avinvented

I've never been good at deadlines,, which explains my work overwhelming me, but I have this irritating perfectionist complex. I remember how obsessed I got with my collision physics for my arconoid game, I went mental if the ball didn't bounce perfectly according to my sense of mirror surface reflection.

dislekcia

@Avinvented: Dunno how much has changed, but those Mensa things were pretty damn useless years ago. I went once, bunch of people trying to show off with no actual things to succeed at.

Personally, I find that activities away from the screen help me solve problems subconsciously. MA and skating are both great at those random links between concepts that you wouldn't have made otherwise, so when you get back home you sit down for 5 minutes and fix something that was going to steal days of your life.

The other part to being effective with your time is choosing to do the most impactful things with it that you can. So building a generalist engine isn't very effective at all, compared to building games and then generalising the learning from many games into a library of skills/approaches.

Avinvented

Personally I only go to the new members meetings and the talks on areas of my interest. I just like meeting like minded people.

To be fair those generalised engine libraries I make help port many a problem I have had in the past very quickly, e.g. those collision physics and multiplayer network interfaces and protocols. I'm a massive fan of good modular abstraction. It makes working with systems quicker, easier and most important is the ability to change things without rewriting a whole system.

Tuism

If you're interested in tech and modular programming more, do that.

If you're interested in making games more, do that.

Don't do the one and wonder how you haven't done the other.

The same thing would work the other way. If you spent more time making hacky games, and you complaint that your tech and modular stuff wasn't getting time, and you wonder why that was, well, you'd know why that was.

So, which is more important? Solving modular engine problems or making games? They're not the same thing.

Avinvented

More important? Well that is tough, because I like making games, but I like making them modular, modular abstraction design is how I code. It has a beautiful order that makes my code art in a sense. What I want to do is creates worlds and universes of my visions and have the beauty and splendour of having people inhabit these creations, living them and giving it life, this is what I consider ultimate art in coding.

Tuism

Priorities are important because doing everything takes longer :)

So if your priority *IS* to do everything, then I guess you just have to accept that you'll take a very, very, very long time to do it all.

Rigormortis

Avinvetned said:

What I want to do is creates worlds and universes of my visions and have the beauty and splendour of having people inhabit these creations, living them and giving it life, this is what I consider ultimate art in coding.

So that doesn't sound like making games to me. It sounds really awesome, but not very gamelike. It sounds like you want to create awesome code that will do awesome things, if the those things happen to be games you'd enjoy it more, but your priority is the coding part.

So as an exercise to get away from the modular abstraction of coding, try to design a board game. As there is no coding involved you won't get bogged down by the modular design and can find out if you really want to have making games as a higher priority than making awesome code.

Avinvented

........ ... .... . ..uhmmm I feel like I'm trying to explain one thing and everyone is extrapolating it differently inferring something I do not feel I'm saying. The creation of a "game" is not unfamiliar to me, in my youth, being quite poor and introverted I created many analogue games. Card games, board games, dungeon adventures and whole RPGs on paper. I think my words are being misconstrued.

Tuism

Sorry if you feel that way! To us, we only know what we see, we don't know you IRL, don't know your history... What we do see is a seemingly very talented and frustrated person who says he has no time to make games, but wish he did, and then proceed to show us a whole bunch of other things that he has done, which aren't games.

To us that sounds like "I've spent all this time on all this other stuff but I have no time to make games".

And thus we're only trying to help - not insult or demean or be condescending. We're trying to figure out if making a game IS REALLY what you want to do, and IF IT IS, how you could go about making it come true.

Rigormortis

[quote = Avinvented]I think my words are being misconstrued[/quote]

That is entirely possible. I mean with the little interaction we've had on this forums it would be easy to have misunderstandings. I'm just trying to call it as I see it. I also realize that I might have gone a bit off topic with my previous post.

So to get the discussion back to what you asked. I don't have a definite answer on how to build your way into a game dev career as that is sort off where I'm at, at the moment as well. The advice I can give you however is to meet people. Come to the meetups(if you can) and meet the actual people involved in the industry. Make yourself known by having the games that you've made visible on as many places as possible. If you are looking for actual dev jobs try and explain what unique programming challenges you faced in your games and how you solved them. The best way (I believe) to get started is to be present so people know you are available.

Hope that helps somewhat.

dislekcia

The best way to build a career in game design/development is to make games.

Is it not playable? Then it's not a game. Start making games.

Is nobody playing it because you haven't given it to anyone? This it's not really a game, it's just an exercise. Let your games be games: Give them to people to play.

Is nobody playing it because they didn't enjoy the first time they tried it? Congratulations, you're on step 1 of building a game development career. Make more games.

Are people playing it who will give you money for the game, or for your time so you can make more games? You now have a potential game development career. Make more games.

Are you earning a living making games? Yes? Awesome, make more games!

Avinvented

I'm sorry, I know I'm not good at being that... User friendly in language. I often say I fail at language. I do really want to make games, sadly I am a bit of a scatter brain as well. My pattern has always been 1) start doing something awesome 2) get far enough to feel like I'll actually finish and have made something amazing 3) WORK!!!! I must note work being my key antagonist, because going to the gym or training in muay Thai - although taking time - puts me in a good sane mood which allows me to be creative, work just drains me and crushes my motivation to create 4) project gets forgotten as I'm pulling my hair out for months finishing a project 5) find project undone almost a year later with only feelings of disdain and regret 6) next month spent recovering from the fallout of an insane project 7) repeat

I am grateful for the support and advice it gives me more motivation to work towards my dream.

BTW I'm sure you people should know me, I have been hanging around the rAge game development areas since 2008. If there was a game development area I was there. Even for the rainbow shader cows.

dislekcia

@Avinvented: Well, given that history, I'd suggest trying to change the element that's killing your projects. And no, I'm not talking about work, I'm talking about scope.

Either your the scope of your ideas or the scope of your systems engineering is unachievable in the time you end up getting to work on your games in. Switching to a focus on getting to a playable point in a matter of hours not only lets you keep scope smaller in both spaces (by working on "simpler" projects AND using existing engines) but it also lets you restart a project when you come back to it after a work crunch - instead of feelings of failure, you'll have something to improve on that's already an experience.