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first off, I didn't think this should be in the video games section because it's not actually a post about a video game....so if it is technically in the wrong forum I apologize.

Anyways, I was wondering if anyone else on dakka was in the game industry. I've been thinking of ideas and such with a buddy of mine, and we were thinking about starting a our own game company. What kind of education should I get for this? How good of an idea is this? anything helpful would be greatly appreciated, thanks.

Programming, then programming, and then finally, programming.

If you want to do art assets or animation go for technical graphics or something like that.

No one starts as a game designer generally, you start as a different job and move your way. Now, if you are going for smaller gaming, like browser games and such, still go with programming.

If you don't understand how it all works, it can be difficult to understand how to build it. Also, get used to writing as designer docs and presentations are important.

To sum up, programming.

Ah so that is also advice for me. As I want to be a game designer. As I have pacticular talent for being able to organize people into cohesive groups. But I will probably have to work my way to the top.

I am with bombboy with this.

Have you looked at the Obsidian Entertainment developers Chris Avellone's and Josh Sawyer's twitter pages (actually any of their forum accounts)? They're asked similar questions all the time and give some really in depth answers (as I recall Chris actually posted a few thousand word forum post on the subject once). Those two guys are the ones that you really should query if your trully dedicated to getting into the industry. =P

Oh and I recall that former Obsidian employee Therisa (Tess) Treadwell (she goes by Blade Maiden on her blogs) also mused a little on the subject from time to time too. She's a little more down to earth than the other two though.

Wyrmalla wrote:Have you looked at the Obsidian Entertainment developers Chris Avellone's and Josh Sawyer's twitter pages (actually any of their forum accounts)? They're asked similar questions all the time and give some really in depth answers (as I recall Chris actually posted a few thousand word forum post on the subject once). Those two guys are the ones that you really should query if your trully dedicated to getting into the industry. =P

Oh and I recall that former Obsidian employee Therisa (Tess) Treadwell (she goes by Blade Maiden on her blogs) also mused a little on the subject from time to time too. She's a little more down to earth than the other two though.

Obsidian......that sounds familiar....I'll check this out.

What I really want to go for is map designing. I like making the area where you actually play the game. Do I still need to know a bunch of programming for that?

bombboy1252 wrote:

Wyrmalla wrote:Have you looked at the Obsidian Entertainment developers Chris Avellone's and Josh Sawyer's twitter pages (actually any of their forum accounts)? They're asked similar questions all the time and give some really in depth answers (as I recall Chris actually posted a few thousand word forum post on the subject once). Those two guys are the ones that you really should query if your trully dedicated to getting into the industry. =P

Oh and I recall that former Obsidian employee Therisa (Tess) Treadwell (she goes by Blade Maiden on her blogs) also mused a little on the subject from time to time too. She's a little more down to earth than the other two though.

Obsidian......that sounds familiar....I'll check this out.

What I really want to go for is map designing. I like making the area where you actually play the game. Do I still need to know a bunch of programming for that?

Plus Art institutes actually consider game design an art. So you could apply there for college

Asherian Command wrote:

bombboy1252 wrote:

Wyrmalla wrote:Have you looked at the Obsidian Entertainment developers Chris Avellone's and Josh Sawyer's twitter pages (actually any of their forum accounts)? They're asked similar questions all the time and give some really in depth answers (as I recall Chris actually posted a few thousand word forum post on the subject once). Those two guys are the ones that you really should query if your trully dedicated to getting into the industry. =P

Oh and I recall that former Obsidian employee Therisa (Tess) Treadwell (she goes by Blade Maiden on her blogs) also mused a little on the subject from time to time too. She's a little more down to earth than the other two though.

Obsidian......that sounds familiar....I'll check this out.

What I really want to go for is map designing. I like making the area where you actually play the game. Do I still need to know a bunch of programming for that?

Plus Art institutes actually consider game design an art. So you could apply there for college

Ya, I'm still thinking about where I'm going to go for a college for game design....

bombboy1252 wrote:

Asherian Command wrote:

bombboy1252 wrote:

Wyrmalla wrote:Have you looked at the Obsidian Entertainment developers Chris Avellone's and Josh Sawyer's twitter pages (actually any of their forum accounts)? They're asked similar questions all the time and give some really in depth answers (as I recall Chris actually posted a few thousand word forum post on the subject once). Those two guys are the ones that you really should query if your trully dedicated to getting into the industry. =P

Oh and I recall that former Obsidian employee Therisa (Tess) Treadwell (she goes by Blade Maiden on her blogs) also mused a little on the subject from time to time too. She's a little more down to earth than the other two though.

Obsidian......that sounds familiar....I'll check this out.

What I really want to go for is map designing. I like making the area where you actually play the game. Do I still need to know a bunch of programming for that?

Plus Art institutes actually consider game design an art. So you could apply there for college

Ya, I'm still thinking about where I'm going to go for a college for game design....

Art Institutes,
Do not go to the following
ITT
MIT (its a great school but you will quit half way through)
Tribeca Flash point
any school that only offers an associate degree.
Having researched it. Anything that offers you a masters and a bachelors DO IT!

My 3d animations professor said that MIT was one of the better schools to go to....is it just a ridiculous work load?

If you want to go to MIT you better have a 4.0 GPA, a dozen AP credits, letters of recommendation from some very smart and influential people, and thousands of hours of community service and being a minority definitely doesn't hurt either... nor does having a couple patents to your name...

Its a ridiculous school with a ridiculous workload and ridiculous grading policies and ridiculous professors and urgh... I went to RPI, a slightly lesser known school in New York that is consistently ranked up there with MIT for its engineering program and difficulty (I studied engineering, not art) and it was a miserable 4(.5) years to say the least. Other friends of mine got to enjoy college and go to parties on a regular basis, I worked my ass off and averaged about 20 hours of sleep a week (barring weekends).

This may be relevant to your interests.

If you want to make money, or at least earn an appropriate amount of money for the workload you are going to end up with, pick a different field.

I asked for help, preferably by people in the industry or also getting into it. I don't care if you think it's a crappy job. So stop posting about that.

bombboy1252 wrote:I asked for help, preferably by people in the industry or also getting into it. I don't care if you think it's a crappy job. So stop posting about that.

This is in your OP

How good of an idea is this?

I told you, from a monetary perspective, that it's not a good idea. I have a good friend who worked for Gearbox, and he always told me, the pay for the amount work he did was horrible, and often had to work a lot of extra hours, for seemingly impossible deadlines. It's also a very hard industry to get into as well.

So, if you want a sugarcoated response, then you should make that clear next time in your OP.

Sasori wrote:

bombboy1252 wrote:I asked for help, preferably by people in the industry or also getting into it. I don't care if you think it's a crappy job. So stop posting about that.

This is in your OP

How good of an idea is this?

I told you, from a monetary perspective, that it's not a good idea. I have a good friend who worked for Gearbox, and he always told me, the pay for the amount work he did was horrible, and often had to work a lot of extra hours, for seemingly impossible deadlines. It's also a very hard industry to get into as well.

So, if you want a sugarcoated response, then you should make that clear next time in your OP.

My bad, I've been up for what seems like days and can barely remember what I post. But how do you know that gearbox wasn't just a bad company? Besides I hopefully plan on starting my own company.

bombboy1252 wrote:

Sasori wrote:

bombboy1252 wrote:I asked for help, preferably by people in the industry or also getting into it. I don't care if you think it's a crappy job. So stop posting about that.

This is in your OP

How good of an idea is this?

I told you, from a monetary perspective, that it's not a good idea. I have a good friend who worked for Gearbox, and he always told me, the pay for the amount work he did was horrible, and often had to work a lot of extra hours, for seemingly impossible deadlines. It's also a very hard industry to get into as well.

So, if you want a sugarcoated response, then you should make that clear next time in your OP.

My bad, I've been up for what seems like days and can barely remember what I post. But how do you know that gearbox wasn't just a bad company? Besides I hopefully plan on starting my own company.

Perhaps Gearbox was a bad Company, but I've heard a lot of the same rumblings from other people.

If you planned to start your own company, you need capital, how do you plan to obtain that? Do you have any sort of Business experience? How do you plan to compete with other Video games? You need a lot of resources for this kind of thing, and in the state of our current economy, I can only imagine how hard it would be to get a loan.

I'm not trying to crap on your dream or anything, just to try to stick a little reality in the situation.

bombboy1252 wrote:
My bad, I've been up for what seems like days and can barely remember what I post. But how do you know that gearbox wasn't just a bad company? Besides I hopefully plan on starting my own company.

I would recommend reading some of the "Tales from the Trenches." at the link I posted, its hardly definitive, but the rigors of game design are well known.

There was also a big story a while back about terrible working conditions at Team Bondi, better know as the people who developed L.A. Noire.

Edit: Here it is.

Edit 2: This is also a good read.

bombboy1252 wrote:

My bad, I've been up for what seems like days and can barely remember what I post. But how do you know that gearbox wasn't just a bad company? Besides I hopefully plan on starting my own company.

If you're going into this thinking you're going to walk out of 4 years of college with a successful business think again. Its not that it can't happen, its just that its very much less likely to happen. Your plan should be to get a job working for someone else, your dream should be to get a job working for yourself. There is a big difference between the two. Besides that, prepare to be working 80-120 hour long weeks if you're running your own company, if not more (especially for a video game startup, the capital involved with publishing alone is massive, you expect to be able to pay the employees you've hired to do all the programming, artwork, etc. for you?). You think business owners have time for sleep? Not until they are successful and well-entrenched, the first few years are a sleepless blur and much more stressful than 4 years at MIT.

Most any college here in Scotland that teaches IT (as in almost all of them) has a game design class as part of a second year HND software developement (or whatever a particular one is calling it) course. Its purely optional mind, but as far as I can tell its the reason why the majority of my class is bothering to sit the course. =P

dogma wrote:

bombboy1252 wrote:
My bad, I've been up for what seems like days and can barely remember what I post. But how do you know that gearbox wasn't just a bad company? Besides I hopefully plan on starting my own company.

I would recommend reading some of the "Tales from the Trenches." at the link I posted, its hardly definitive, but the rigors of game design are well known.

There was also a big story a while back about terrible working conditions at Team Bondi, better know as the people who developed L.A. Noire.

Edit: Here it is.

Edit 2: This is also a good read.

Brendan McNamara was my old boss when he was at Sony.

I don't know what happened at Team Bondi, but I can believe the complaints based on what I observed at Sony during his tenure. In general though, working conditions seem to have improved a lot in the past 10 years.

It's still a fairly badly organised industry, however if you learn programming you will be able to turn your hand to all kinds of programming; social media, embedded systems, banking.

Also, the advent of smart phones and the App store has opened a new era of minigame programming which can be done as a hobby. You don't need a big team to make an app.

Well, I'm going for a New Media degree at my university (University of Lethbridge), and I'm focusing on artwork for videogames. But even if you want to specialize, it's good to develop skills that have a wide variety of applications. For example, with the things I'm learning/practicing, I can work in logo design and other promotional fields not just limited to game design.

Additionally, while programming is useful, it's not something that everyone in the game industry does. There are also people in charge of the actual design elements of the game as well (for example, I'm not studying programming, but rather aesthetic elements).

Sasori wrote:

I told you, from a monetary perspective, that it's not a good idea. I have a good friend who worked for Gearbox, and he always told me, the pay for the amount work he did was horrible, and often had to work a lot of extra hours, for seemingly impossible deadlines. It's also a very hard industry to get into as well.

This is more of a perspective of the software development industry in general, it doesn't seem to be limited to just one or two video game companies.

If you want my advice. Start learning a major language (or two, more languages is better on a resume/CV) like Java, C++, big software companies LOVE C++ and familiarise yourself with Microsoft-based developer suites e.g. Visual Studio, .NET framework, C# (it's bad to suggest this I know, but nearly every job I was going to apply for demanded .NET experience, it's a gak state of affairs but the big guys all love throwing money at Microsoft and there's nothing we can do about it).

So there is your universal skillset, so if the video game dream falls flat you can go into other software development industries.

As for getting into video games, why not try making flash browser games in your spare time to see if you like it, if you sign up with some websites you even have the opportunity to generate a little bit of pocket money from ad revenue?

Kilkrazy wrote:
I don't know what happened at Team Bondi, but I can believe the complaints based on what I observed at Sony during his tenure. In general though, working conditions seem to have improved a lot in the past 10 years.

Yeah, many have said that Team Bondi was basically a worst case scenario. A good thing to be aware of, though.

Kilkrazy wrote:
Also, the advent of smart phones and the App store has opened a new era of minigame programming which can be done as a hobby. You don't need a big team to make an app.

Or even "major" releases of significant quality. Bastion, for example, was very good despite an employee base of 7, and Introversion has also made good stuff despite the same. And, of course, the stereotypical example is Minecraft.

But yeah, apps have a built in form of distribution, which has many advantages.

The only person I know of personally who tried to get into the video game business failed because he could never get into it. He's not stupid, he went to a very good school, it just seems like a cluster F___ occupation, don't know if he was not able to impress people with his resume/portfolio or if he just lacked that character polish. He now uses his skills for the military.

I talked with a few people at a E3 I went to back in 2002 and talked to them about getting into the industry. Although they all said they love it just about all of them mentioned stress, long hours and painful deadlines. I wanted to be a game designer for a short period of time when I was trying to find a career path and got quickly discouraged. But that is my personality I can be easily discouraged.

I think the best advice would be sit down and think about it.

Are you willing to put in long hours?

Is it something you enjoy?

Are you good at it?

Willing to improve?

etc.

If you want to do something with video games and don't think game designing is your thing, perhaps get into journalism? Work for a gaming magazine, start your own or a "e-magazine".

Youtube could be a good way to get out your video game reviews.

It is still a tough business to get into but if you really want to do something with gaming that is not designing, maybe that could be something?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Asherian Command wrote:]

Ya, I'm still thinking about where I'm going to go for a college for game design....
Art Institutes,
Do not go to the following
ITT
MIT (its a great school but you will quit half way through)
Tribeca Flash point
any school that only offers an associate degree.
Having researched it. Anything that offers you a masters and a bachelors DO IT!

I was seriously think DeVry or University of Phoenix Online.

dogma wrote:

Kilkrazy wrote:
I don't know what happened at Team Bondi, but I can believe the complaints based on what I observed at Sony during his tenure. In general though, working conditions seem to have improved a lot in the past 10 years.

Yeah, many have said that Team Bondi was basically a worst case scenario. A good thing to be aware of, though.

Kilkrazy wrote:
Also, the advent of smart phones and the App store has opened a new era of minigame programming which can be done as a hobby. You don't need a big team to make an app.

Or even "major" releases of significant quality. Bastion, for example, was very good despite an employee base of 7, and Introversion has also made good stuff despite the same. And, of course, the stereotypical example is Minecraft.

But yeah, apps have a built in form of distribution, which has many advantages.

Ya, I thought about just doing Apps as a hobby, but after thinking about that it didn't seem right for me.

The thing to keep in mind about working in the video game industry is that it's a lot like working for the movie industry. There's a million people wanting to be involved in something they love, so they all end up fighting for not many jobs.

As such, the entry level jobs tend to be absolutely terrible, if you can even get them. If you manage to stick it out for 10 years or so (not including 4 years at college), then you'll get to the point where you're actively desirable and things will get better.

So, go for it, but only if you're REALLY dedicated. If you're only doing this because you enjoy video games and you don't have any other plans, find something else.

bombboy1252 wrote:Ya, I thought about just doing Apps as a hobby, but after thinking about that it didn't seem right for me.

Why not? You need something to set you above other people - so why not start with Apps? At the very least you could do some graphics work. Or volunteer for some open-source work, I'm sure there are always groups wanting graphics assistance on their projects. Try LINUX forums.

Also, learn to program. It's really not that difficult if you're analytically inclined. I think BASIC is a good place to start (and lots of people still use visual BASIC) as it introduces you to top-down programming.

From there it's only a short step to learning C and C++.

Also, note that if you do get involved in videogame design and theory, games will tend to lose an aspect of the fun involved in playing them. That's not to say they become a chore to play, but you tend to look at them with a much more critical eye, and flaws within the game become much more apparent.

As with anything, turning a hobby into a job tends to kill a lot of the hobby aspects.

Personally ,I'd go for more realistic goals. Like marrying a Nobel Prize-winning billionaire supermodel.

Good thread full of useful advice.

I'm in a fairly similar situation to Bombboy I suppose.

I did A levels last year but ended up being completely unmotivated and having no idea what I really want to do, career wise, with my life. I ended up dropping out and after much musing decided I just wanted to make games.

Last september I started a two year Art & Design course which should hopefully get me into uni. Alot of stuff on the internet seems to say that most Game Design courses in the UK don't really give the nessicary skills needed for the industry but hoepfully I can get on a good one.

I'd like to go into level design, but i'm not sure apart from that really.