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Game Dev
Voxtrium
Member
How does one actually become a game developer for a studio like Intrepid? How do you decide what you should learn and how you can become marketable for these companies to get hired? Yeah sure a college degree in com sci is great, but I have to imagine there are ways to skip the majority of what college requires and jump to what you need to know, I just don't know how one decides on that or even where to begin for that route. If you have any insight that would be neat.
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Why should the employees that completed their studies hand over important tasks to someone that "skipped what college requires".
You can be like the millions that roleplay inrl as a game dev, fiddling with various engines, but forget about ever working on a real video game.
There are many many many subcategories of 'Game Dev'.
But one thing I can tell you that applies for literally all of them.
STUDY games instead of just playing them. You have to be able to understand exactly WHY a given thing is done in a specific way, whether or not it fit the game being made, if it was a good idea as a whole, how it impacted the Genre, why people liked it, why people disliked it.
If you're talking on the level of 'actually writing programs', learning some C++, particularly from the side of 'decompiling simpler older games', will help a lot too, but again, this depends massively on what your goal position is.
You could 'skip' college, but it's not really 'skipping' if you take twice as long and have to do 2x as much work, is it?
Learning this sort of thing by yourself or even within a group, takes longer when you don't have framework points for someone to tell you why your 'good ideas' aren't actually good ideas. Generally we're far enough in gaming that fighting to do it 'your own way' at the mid-levels is generally bad. Your job as a developer is not 'to prove that the way you want to do something is right', but 'to learn and in so doing become right' as fast as possible.
And that starts with lots of studying. As for what makes one 'marketable', that varies by studio, but without experience, your best hope is to show passion and detailed understanding.
Regardless, it will always depend on what each company needs, ie do they need graphical designers, back-end programmers, scripters, AI/ML engineers, network engineers, etc. In general, you need to understand and be able to do a variety of things, especially because smaller companies don't have one guy for each task, but instead many people multitasking.
Some examples of things a professional needs to know that I can think of are: graphical design in Blender, Unity or UE for the models and animation; actual logic/back-end development in C++, C#, Java, Objective-C or, more rarely, Python and CUDA; persistence of data, both relational and noSQL databases, their design and best practices. Depending on the game, developers may also need to worry about other non-trivial fields such as scripting, artificial intelligence/machine learning, networking, streaming, memory management, threading, server-client optimization, cheating detection, etc.
I have developed a handful of dumb little games in Java where I spent most of the time designing the phyisics/math behind ball bounces, motion equations for projectiles, vectors, velocity, character movement, etc. Nowadays many engines offer to do most of the work for you so you can skip learning the math, but I don't think you can skip on a deep programming logic and design understanding.
If I wanted to become a game developer with zero CS knowledge, I would focus on learning basic programming logic and design, creating a variety of simple software like calculators, text parsers, etc in either C++, C# or Java. After that, I would learn how to create games for Android because there's a lot of material out there and it's easy to set up Android Studio, beginning by trying to create a copy of simple games like candy crush, subway surfers, flappy bird, etc. That should allow one to touch some of the aspects involved in game development.
Like others have said, you might be able to skip on the college degree, but you can't skip on the dedication if you want to become good at it. I'd say one needs at least 500 hours of reading books, watching videos, taking online courses, designing, coding and testing to be skilled enough to give a shot at doing freelances online for regular development (back-end + front-end software using current technologies). Game development is a niche within software development, so you gotta be really good or really lucky to find an opportunity, in my experience.
Short cuts in life don't work. Go to college and excel there and that will help convince an employer to invest money in hiring you. While in college, not only get a 4.0 but also do internships and work in the field you are interested in. Impress people with your drive, interpersonal skills, life skills, and everything else. Work harder than your bosses, show up early to work and work late, don't complain.
Thank you everyone for the input, I appreciate it.
Once you decide what kind of work you're interested in, as George said, I would not skip the college to get there, since what you'll learn is quite valuable to what you do, and apply at a college that is teaching the subject you're interested in. It helps if that's also in the same state as a studio, since many studios pick up interns directly from nearby colleges to give new devs experience. Since practically all companies require you to have worked on a AAA title before working on their AAA title, the intern route is one of the most direct ways to get your foot in the door. If you miss the intern route, and didn't score high enough in college to get picked up on credits alone; you can join an Outsource studio, who help overburdened studios complete overflow work, and rack up experience that way to put on your resume.
As far as passing the actual study and college parts, the only feasible way to do it is to be insanely lucky. You have to make an indie game like minecraft that's a smashing hit and get famous. But you'd basically have to learn how to do every position yourself and there's the unfortunately high chance of spending years working on something just for it to flop. So, I would really recommend the schooling.
Formal education is not necessary but you need some way to prove you are a competent worker. Start making games and build a portfolio. Prove you can figure how to make things work and are motivated enough to finish a project.
Look for local game jams that you can join and work with others people to make games.
I've never used one but i know there are coding bootcamps which are shorter programs that teach you and help you build a portfolio. I have worked with web devs that used that to get their foot in the door.
My advice would be to focus on getting a job in tech. I'd recommend becoming a developer if you don't start as one. Get good and learn a lot. Interview at game companies that interest you for roles you are proficient in. Once you get a job in a game company, move to the position that interests you.
You can do it either way. Degrees will obviously help.
I've been working towards a job in game dev for a while and everything I've read and heard from game developers is that there is no "single path" to making it in.
We currently exist in the golden age of Indie games. Games like Vampire Survivors are made by a single person (to my knowledge) and end up more popular than tons of AAA titles. Stardew Valley and Undertale are more examples: games made by a single person that have become extremely culturally significant.
That is to say: you can become a game dev by yourself. If you pump out games onto itch.io and one becomes huge like Vampire Survivors and you put it onto steam and gain huge amounts of popularity, that will be better on your resume than any CS or Game Design degree. Not calling degrees useless, just saying shipped products look great on resumes.
But there's no replacement for hard work. If you don't work hard at it, you won't get it.
Here's a great twitter thread by Ghostcrawler about how to break into the games industry: https://twitter.com/Ghostcrawler/status/1512823993861959685
Sure. Look at a game studio's hiring page and look at their requirements. Now try to fill those requirements. Learn how to code, learn how to use UE4/5/Unity, make a game. Make a bunch of games and try and get others to join you. Make a bunch of games with your small team. Now you have a bunch of shipped products that prove you can work in a group, work with popular game engines, and make fun games. The question is whether or not learning on your own would be faster/better/cheaper than learning through university and getting a degree. You're not skipping the work, you're just skipping the process of going to classes.
And always remember that game devs are people too. If you really want to get some good insight, find some game devs on twitter and ask them their experience. They'll know a lot better than I would.
(Side tracking)
FYI electives do help. I'm a comp sci graduate myself and used to question the need for elective credits like you just did.
It's only after I've entered the workforce that I realized I couldn't possibly navigate the challenges society & life throw at me with what I had learnt from my "core" comp sci courses alone. Thank goodness they made me dabble in pscyhology, economics, writing and foreign languages.
At least I had the right pointers that helped me find more information / knowledge / wisdom when I needed them.
btw while anyone with enough dedication could probably educate themself into a qualified software developer, I'd argue the efficiency of that self-teaching process is nowhere near what a proper education at a qualified college can offer you -- The former's like hunting for the necessary raw knowledge in a mind-bogglingly vast sea of information, then burn your neurons trying to understand & digest them while filtering out the unrelated & outright wrong/outdated stuff; while the later's like having someone spoon-feeding you distilled wisdom straight down your throat in an organized, well planned manner.
That's what I realized when I had to pick up iOS & Android development somewhere along my career.
There's this - BUT it's also a field where cowboys excel; It's about what you can prove that you can do.
Build a portfolio showcasing your capacities for both being able to use a game engine - but also display your ability to problem-solve. Being able to explain an obstacle to an interviewer AND how you engineered a solution is a great thing to be able to present.