What path did you take to your current career? Would you describe it as "routine" or an unorthodox way to break into the industry? What even is the "routine" route to a career in game development, if such a path exists?
Whelp, screwed on the first step already.
0. Got born, very important, highly recommend you do this first.
When I said you'd have to focus your whole life on making it happen I meant it. And you'll have to keep that up for as long as you do it. You'll have to keep it up when your games are winning industry awards and you'll have to keep it up when youtubers are shredding your hard work. You'll have to keep it up when life is good and when life decides it's your turn for a beating. You'll have to keep it up when you think you can't possibly go on, and you'll have to keep it up when you KNOW you can't. Ultimately that's the choice you make when you start out. Will you do whatever it takes to make this art happen no matter what?
I'm not sure there is any orthodox path into the industry. Mine went something like this.
1. I fell in love with videogames as a medium. Developed my passion to become a developer.
2. I figured out what type of video game developer I'd like to become. I was always into art. I chose character art.
3. I learned absolutely everything I could about videogames and thier development outside of an academic environment.
4. *CRUCIAL* I focused my entire life on becoming a game developer. I left myself no other option. It was do or die.
5. I got accepted to SCAD. I majored in game development and interactivity.
6. I went above and beyond at school. Surrounded myself with other ambitious students. We didn't wait on a professor or curriculum to tell us what to do.
7. We got permission to do a senior project outside of the scope of other senior portfolio classes. We did everything we could to set ourselves apart from the pack.
8. I went to the game developer's conference my senior year. I had to work at it to be able to afford to go. I knew it would be critical networking that I'd need.
9. I met with a developer at a studio I wanted to work at. We hit it off and he said he'd try to help get my resume on top of the stack.
10. I talked to every dev I could. And applied at every studio I could.
11. Finally got a call back from the studio that that dev put in a word for me at.
12. Got my foot int he door and Internshipped my ass off as an environment artist. Made sure I was an asset to the team and a good person to work with.
13. Made friends with the devs at the studio. Worked my ass off more. Got my contract extended.
14. Continued to work my ass off and did a character art test in the evenings at the studio I was already working at.
15. Worked my ass off more (notice a pattern here?) and finally got hired on as a character art contractor.
16. Kept at it until I was hired on full time as a full fledged dev.
I have been at it now 13 years. I've had the honor of working on some of the biggest releases that the industry has produced in that time. I've had high highs in my career and some low lows too. I've been through Divorce. I lost a child with my ex fiance and that relationship fell apart. I've lost loved ones and family in that time. I Developed Alcoholism and recovered from it. I've been sober 7 years now. I'm now happy and healthy. I've remarried and learned how to ride the waves of the industry and of life.
When I said you'd have to focus your whole life on making it happen I meant it. And you'll have to keep that up for as long as you do it. You'll have to keep it up when your games are winning industry awards and you'll have to keep it up when youtubers are shredding your hard work. You'll have to keep it up when life is good and when life decides it's your turn for a beating. You'll have to keep it up when you think you can't possibly go on, and you'll have to keep it up when you KNOW you can't. Ultimately that's the choice you make when you start out. Will you do whatever it takes to make this art happen no matter what?
I chose this life because of what happened way back there on step one. I fell in love with it and I wanted to be a part of it. You figure out your steps and you'll be able to do the same.
Damn your life history is great, and it shows me how much I still have to grow up as a programmer.I didn't go to normal school growing up. I grew up right outside of NASA, and in kindergarten they identified me and a few other kids from the district and moved us to a magnet program run by NASA and University of Houston. We were allowed to take classes on science and art of our choosing and in the 4th grade I took a class on game development and computer programming. Mind you, prior to this, I was already a die hard Sega fanboy since getting the Sega Master System and Genesis and Game Gear and Sega CD prior.
The class was focused on hypercard, and I wound up making a myst clone:
That class blew my mind, and from that point on, game development and graphics programming has been my primary passion in life. Immediately following that class, my dad put an old PC in my bedroom and installed QBasic on it, and I started playing with it. About a year or two after that, my dad surprised me with a copy of Visual Basic 6 one christmas, and I took to that very hard. This was around 1997 or so.
The years of 1997-2000 were hands down my most formative years as a computer scientist. My dad and I joined a PC Users club in Houston, Texas after going to a LAN party they threw one february, the place was called HAL-PC. They offered Special Interest Groups on saturdays where you could go and meet like minded people and have informal lectures. I started going every weekend specifically for the Gaming SIG where I became heavily involved in the inner workings of the club.
It was around that time I attended a C++ programming SIG, I remember I was still a little boy. I sat in the class and they held a lecture and all of it went over my head, but I sat quietly and listened. At HAL-PC, it was a tradition that people bring things they didn't want or need anymore and would donate them to the group so anybody could take them home if they could use them. Some dude had brought in a bunch of books on C programming, so I asked if I could have them. In front of the whole room, the guy running the SIG, asked me who I was and why I was in the SIG since I was so young, and I told him how I wanted to make video games and needed to learn C and C++. The room laughed at me, and told me that making games was too hard for me, and I'd burn out before I could learn enough. This was back before easy to use game engines really existed. I told them how I made games in Visual Basic and they told me that wasn't "real programming." So they didn't give me those books. My dad was with me and he walked me out of the room and was trying to console me, thinking I was crushed. But I wasn't, that room lit a fire under me and I told my dad on that day that I was going to prove them wrong, and was determined to not listen to them.
A great thing wound up coming from that day, though -- one of the people in the room was a NASA engineer and he thought the way they laughed at me was fucked up. He was also into video games, and thought someone young wanting to get into gamedev was awesome. So, for the next several months, every saturday, he and I would meet at HAL-PC in the gaming SIG and he taught me C along with the basics of graphics programming. His two advices -- Learn OpenGL, and Learn SDL. This was like late 1998, SDL was brand new. He told me to learn SDL because it'd be the future, and to this very day I use SDL2 every single day I write code. Over the course of about 2 years, we remade Ultima I, II, and III in SDL:
(the game selector on the bottom is a docker-style bar we made in SDL because OSX aqua had just come out, haha)
Now, at the exact same time, in 1997, I was also joining the earliest gatherings of what would become the Sonic Hacking Community and Sega Genesis Demoscene. 1997 was basically the start of that entire circle, and I am one of the foundational and longest tenured members of that group. Back then, I didn't know much about low level programming or anything like that, but i knew Sega, and I knew sonic, and I loved both and loved to talk about them. One of the dudes who was around back then were people like Simon Thomley of Sonic Mania fame, who was much older than most of the rest of the scene. Stealth was already a computer scientist, and really dragged the scene along with major discoveries. Being so young and into programming, I got into this stuff mainly to try and keep up with learning what people like Stealth and Nemesis were finding. Sometime around early 1998, thanks to my mentor at HAL-PC, I won a copy of Visual Studio 97 in a coding competition, and that came with a bunch of memory editors and visual debuggers. That got me all into understanding how memory worked, which played right along into Sonic hacking. Between 1998 and 1999, I taught myself binary, hexadecimal, and ultimately m68000 microprocessor assembly and started playing around with Rom Hacking and Save State editing. A big part of early sonic hacking was changing graphics, which had to be done in bytecode as no community tools existed. And that really solidified to me how graphics worked, as I was doing this right alongside the time I was learning OpenGL and SDL.
Finally, in late 1999, I got a Sega Dreamcast. Being on the internet frequently with the Dreamcast, and hanging around Dreamcast circles, in late 2000 I learned that it was very easy to write and run Dreamcast programs on retail hardware. So I started to look into it all, and this was when Marcus Comsdedt had just released information about how to run code on a stock DC. I started following and playing around in that demoscene heavily and, for the first time ever, managed to write and run programs on a real video game console, after having worked from that goal since taking that hypercard class as a kid.
Of course, I kept it up after all that. Following that was highschool, where I kept honing my craft, then college where I did comp sci, then afterwards where I worked at various companies until I formed my own company about 4 years ago. Owning your own company is like a time honored tradition in my family -- my great grandpa owned his company, my grandpa owned his, my dad owned his, and now I own mine. All of them have been in completely unrelated fields, too, haha.
So pretty much my own path through it all, but probably a very unique one. I felt like this was what I wanted to do since I was in grade school and worked at it pretty much my whole life. I don't consider it a job, really, I consider it more like a craft, something I take pride in doing and want to do well. Part of that is also never feeling like I'm where I want to be, because there's always more to learn, more to do, etc.
Damn your life history is great, and it shows me how much I still have to grow up as a programmer.
I'm not sure there is any orthodox path into the industry. Mine went something like this.
1. I fell in love with videogames as a medium. Developed my passion to become a developer.
2. I figured out what type of video game developer I'd like to become. I was always into art. I chose character art.
3. I learned absolutely everything I could about videogames and thier development outside of an academic environment.
4. *CRUCIAL* I focused my entire life on becoming a game developer. I left myself no other option. It was do or die.
5. I got accepted to SCAD. I majored in game development and interactivity.
6. I went above and beyond at school. Surrounded myself with other ambitious students. We didn't wait on a professor or curriculum to tell us what to do.
7. We got permission to do a senior project outside of the scope of other senior portfolio classes. We did everything we could to set ourselves apart from the pack.
8. I went to the game developer's conference my senior year. I had to work at it to be able to afford to go. I knew it would be critical networking that I'd need.
9. I met with a developer at a studio I wanted to work at. We hit it off and he said he'd try to help get my resume on top of the stack.
10. I talked to every dev I could. And applied at every studio I could.
11. Finally got a call back from the studio that that dev put in a word for me at.
12. Got my foot int he door and Internshipped my ass off as an environment artist. Made sure I was an asset to the team and a good person to work with.
13. Made friends with the devs at the studio. Worked my ass off more. Got my contract extended.
14. Continued to work my ass off and did a character art test in the evenings at the studio I was already working at.
15. Worked my ass off more (notice a pattern here?) and finally got hired on as a character art contractor.
16. Kept at it until I was hired on full time as a full fledged dev.
I have been at it now 13 years. I've had the honor of working on some of the biggest releases that the industry has produced in that time. I've had high highs in my career and some low lows too. I've been through Divorce. I lost a child with my ex fiance and that relationship fell apart. I've lost loved ones and family in that time. I Developed Alcoholism and recovered from it. I've been sober 7 years now. I'm now happy and healthy. I've remarried and learned how to ride the waves of the industry and of life.
When I said you'd have to focus your whole life on making it happen I meant it. And you'll have to keep that up for as long as you do it. You'll have to keep it up when your games are winning industry awards and you'll have to keep it up when youtubers are shredding your hard work. You'll have to keep it up when life is good and when life decides it's your turn for a beating. You'll have to keep it up when you think you can't possibly go on, and you'll have to keep it up when you KNOW you can't. Ultimately that's the choice you make when you start out. Will you do whatever it takes to make this art happen no matter what?
I chose this life because of what happened way back there on step one. I fell in love with it and I wanted to be a part of it. You figure out your steps and you'll be able to do the same.
Thank you! It has been a long road. If you want it bad enough you can make it happen. Anyone can. It isn't about talent. It's about what you put in.I loved that story, this is inspirational for landing a job in ANY field. Way to go!
I wasn't much interested in game development until the 3D era began. Magazines like Next Generation went into detail with features like bilinear filtering and trilinear mipmapping, talking about how many polygons per second the new machines could pull off. Going from just a person who was passionate about games to knowing a bit about how the new generation of games would work really fascinated me, especially as I was just coming of age then (13 or 14?).
But what really pulled me into the fray was emulation. Once I saw zSNES and UltraHLE, I was amazed you could do something like this just with software. I could play Chrono Trigger or FF6 on my PC and disable/enable BG layers to see how tile-based games worked - simply amazing! When UltraHLE came out (shortly after OoT), it was truly mind blowing to see my favorite game of all time running on my Voodoo. I somehow immediately bought UltraHLE.com and started to post about ini hacks and eventually became the de-facto source for news on the emulator.
Thanks to my UltraHLE connection, I was able to procure a Z64 (N64 backup device) and AR Replay flashed with Caetla (PS1 modchip cartridge) by serving ads to the site and that truly began the development journey for me. I shockingly got my hands on the N64 and PS1 SDKs from the dark corners of EFNet IRC and started modifying PS1 and N64 homebrew samples from dev scene to run on actual hardware. In essence, I learned C on N64 and PS1 in High School and skipped most of my senior year to cut my teeth with real world conditions. It was probably the hardest way to learn programming, especially back then since the Internet was still new, but super rewarding because I could only count on myself and a few like-minded friends on IRC.
By the time I was 19, I had enough skills to get hired by an indie developer and begin professionally making games, skipping college in the process. Here we are almost 20 years later and I've been successfully running my own game dev shop for nearly 10 years.
As unnamed developer in step #9 I can vouch that he did, indeed, work his ass off.
My own path was pretty meandering.
-Started off with Doom and Duke Mods in the 90s
-Taught myself Lightwave and 3dsmax in High School
-Spent a lot of time bumming around Next-Gen online forums where some of the posters worked for a local company
-Went to School for 3d animation
-Got cajoled to apply to said local company by said forum contacts my freshman year.
-Interned on my college breaks and then got a full time position when I graduated.
I literally fell into most of it but times were pretty different back then. It was just stuff I was doing anyway and someone was like 'you should e-mail about a job' and so I did, and they were like 'cool'.
I as well went in with QA but dropped it once I really started modding games, and I thankfully got a break on a large fan mod for a game that net me a job offer or 3.