the-nicest-duwang asked:
Any advice for someone who wants to get into game development as a coder
People ask me variants of this question quite often and it’s been a while since I’ve given an answer, so I’ll try to be comprehensive with a few disclaimers.
Disclaimer 1: I entered the game industry in 1999, when the were very few academic game design or game development programs. I became a designer at a time when many designers had academic backgrounds in the humanities/social sciences. Most programmers had four-year CS degrees. Broadly speaking, the balance has shifted.
Disclaimer 2: I am most heavily involved in hiring designers, but I occasionally weigh in on artist, animator, audio designer, and programmer applicants.
Disclaimer 3: I do not have any experience with any of the academic programs listed below. I cannot recommend any of them. However, they often appear in the resumes of applications at Obsidian.
General: Any personal or professional work on games is a huge benefit. Modding existing games or writing your own small games shows that you have an understanding of what goes into putting a game together. Unity and Unreal 4 are two of the easiest platforms to dig into and both platforms make it easy to share your work with others. These mods or games do not need to be big. In fact, smaller mods that show a clear focus are generally preferable.
I cannot stress enough that when we receive 20+ applications for junior position and over a dozen of them have zero modding or game dev experience, we mentally de-prioritize them in favor of candidates with some personal experience.
Programming: About half of our junior programming applicants have trade school degrees from institutions like Digipen, Full Sail, or SMU Guildhall. The remainder have 4-year computer science degrees or are self-taught. Most junior candidates are more comfortable with C# than C++. Both are useful, and possessing solid skills in at least one is preferable to skills with scripting languages (LUA, Python, etc.). Critical thinking/analysis and communication skills are all incredibly valuable for our programming candidates.
https://www.digipen.edu/
https://www.fullsail.edu/
https://www.smu.edu/guildhall
Design: A large percentage of our design applicants have trade school degrees. Most of the candidates we are interested in have made school projects and/or mods/modules for existing games, especially RPGs with mod-friendly toolsets like Fallout 3/NV/4, NWN 1 / 2 (less common these days), Dragon Age, etc.
Most designers at Obsidian begin as general designers and move into system, narrative, or area design over time, but there are exceptions. Candidates interested in a specific sub-discipline should tailor their game/mod content toward that field. E.g., a candidate interested in system design should focus on things like balance mods or small, mechanically tight games. A candidate interested in narrative design should focus on reactive dialogue, item and quest descriptions, and branching quest lines/resolutions.
Even more than other disciplines, designers must have excellent critical thinking/analysis and communication skills. This is one of the reasons why designers who do not come through trade schools often have 4 year humanities (English, history, philosophy, etc.) or social science (anthropology, psychology, poli sci) degrees.
Art and Animation: For these disciplines, the portfolio/reel trumps the resume when it comes to junior candidates. Even so, most applicants have some formal art/animation education, typically from a game dev program, because those programs help artists understand the constraints of working in a game dev environment. Some artists study at art schools without a game dev program or at an atelier.
Concept artists typically work within Photoshop. Our texture artists now almost exclusively use Substance Designer/Painter. Our 3D artists and animators work with Zbrush for detail work, Maya for almost everything else.
As always, applicants who contributed game art or animation to a student project, mod, or private project will have a leg up on other candidates.
https://www.gnomon.edu/
https://www.risd.edu/academics/digital-media/
https://www.scad.edu/academics/programs/interactive-design-and-game-development
http://www.artcenter.edu/academics/undergraduate-degrees/entertainment-design/game-design.html
Audio: Most of our audio candidates have four-year degrees related to audio or music. This is a field where game dev-specific education is less common and less important, but still valuable. Again, a portfolio of work is incredibly valuable. In the last 3-5 years, Wwise has become one of the most common audio development environments, so familiarity with it is helpful.
