I want a job in the game industry!

[Nemmerle]

Decide what job you want then you can find out how practical it is to go after.

[Admiral Donutz]

*thread moved from Pub to Tech forum* (which seems to come the most fitting, if you wish to talk about programming atleast, the graphics aspect kinda relates to other sections but meh).

[Yannick]

Originally Posted by missing.string

Don't learn C++. Learn to program.

And the best way to do this, unfortunately, is with tertiary education. Anyone can take an online course and learn any language, but professional programming is more about the engineering of a project rather than writing lines of code.

This is assuming programming is what you want to do. You'll most probably need a lot of C++, databasing and a little graphical (opengl is good) as well.

[The Soleutator]

I'd say it depends a lot on what specific field you'd want to go into. From what I've seen, it takes a lot of work to get hired, even by a smaller company.

[noobst3R]

It's very hard to do. Kelt here ( Kelt Knight) is a gamedesigner, and a pretty good one, but he hasn't been hired, although he participated in some mods and has an excellent education. Look at it, it's awesome.. Hunter May's Online Portfolio

[computernerd]

Wow, I love the F2000 there; one of my all time favorite guns

[kquaker]

Originally Posted by Veesaurus

I really really do. And I have tried to learn c++ on my own and it has been going ok i think, just c++ not openGl or sdl.
But many say you should go to a college or a university to geat an education for this and I have been counting that I leave my current school next summer and enlisted myself to the finland military, so I'll be 23-24 when I get the degree or game programming if I want it

And just seeing that people like CliffyB or John Carmack and almost all of these gamedesigners where very young when they started.So should i have started a long time ago or can i still make it?And then again at my age a year seems alot. hmmm.

I am just not sure what to do.

edit:// argh a small typo in the thread name

Okay, one of the biggest things is you will need internships! That's sadly all the advice I have.. but get your degree, learn some stuff, and get an internship.

[Red Menace]

I had a friend go to a trade school for game design and now he is kinda freelance, bouncing around companies doing temp work. Right now he is working on Bioshock 2, or so I hear. The pay isn't great and the job security in a temp job is as you can guess not the best. Working your way up from the bottom of the game industry is hard, it is a very competitive industry. But he enjoys it.

[The Soleutator]

Originally Posted by Red Menace

I had a friend go to a trade school for game design and now he is kinda freelance, bouncing around companies doing temp work. Right now he is working on Bioshock 2, or so I hear. The pay isn't great and the job security in a temp job is as you can guess not the best. Working your way up from the bottom of the game industry is hard, it is a very competitive industry. But he enjoys it.

Yea, I suppose that has to be a very key thing--you have to enjoy it enough for it to drive you to work harder to find and keep a job than you otherwise would have to in say, a 'normal' job. The fact that it often takes creativity also plays a role into how much you enjoy it. If you don't enjoy what you do, how can you be creative about it?

[Revenge]

I recommend doing it as a hobbie and seeing if you truly enjoy it. I thought for years that I wanted to do games design, but even the smallest projects, I found, were big undertakings with massive amounts of thinking and planning involved. It's worth getting a degree in Computing Science at least, since this is the kind of thing that will teach you the stuff you need to know.

But I went to university to do CS and found I didn't enjoy it as much when I was being taught it - it's much more fun to teach yourself and not have to do the crazy specifications and essays and such. I ended up doing physics, as there are lots of interesting applications computers have in that field, and they're crying out for proper computational physicists. If anything, the kind of stuff I'll probably end up doing will involve 3D animation and artificial intelligence, which is close enough to game design.