I worked in the industry for many years, almost certainly I’ve worked in a very minor way on some games you’ve heard of. If you’re curious about the reality of game dev or anything about my experience then shoot.
I worked in the industry for many years, almost certainly I’ve worked in a very minor way on some games you’ve heard of. If you’re curious about the reality of game dev or anything about my experience then shoot.
How did you get started in the industry and would you recommend it as a job?
Like pretty much anything else, a ton of it is who you know. People knew me as the guy who was always doing the crazy Linux stuff, and so a little games startup hired me as a sysadmin initially because no one knew anything about how to make the servers run. But sysadmin is basically a part time job if you’re doing it right so I started taking on parts of our programming contracts and learned how to do a good job with it. Then once I had some “I know what I’m doing” evidence to point to and a bunch of people had worked with me it gets a lot easier to tell people you’re worth hiring.
I don’t actually think the “who you know” thing is some bad thing; it’s just people wanting to work with someone who’s proven or who they know knows their stuff. But for me it was a lot more that I was working on hobby projects a lot and tried hard to do a good job once I got hired than that I’m a real people person or anything.
Oh, and to answer the second question, which I neglected: On the whole no I wouldn’t really recommend it as a job.
Working with creative people and on something that (in most cases) has some genuine fun associated with it, is a big plus. But, the minuses of overwork, underpay, steady undermining of the creative soul of the whole endeavor, are starting to be joined by the looming threat of getting kicked out of your career entirely in 5-10 years when AI starts being able to do it all itself.
Was going to ask your opinion on AI and there it is.