For those in the industry...

[NovemberMike]

how did you land your job?

I still have a lot of college to go through (looking at two engineering degrees and an MBA) so I have a lot of time to worry about getting a job, but I was interested in how some of the devs here got into the industry.

 

[me2]

how did you land your job?

I still have a lot of college to go through (looking at two engineering degrees and an MBA) so I have a lot of time to worry about getting a job, but I was interested in how some of the devs here got into the industry.

It depend on what you are trying to get into, any idea?

 

[NovemberMike]

It depend on what you are trying to get into, any idea?

On a personal level I find AI work to be interesting, but as I said before I have about 5 years to go before I am seriously looking for a job. This thread is more about personal experiences than advice.

I am trying to get a job with a company that creates database software (with at least some game use in it) right now though, so that is the angle I am looking at right now (have a fair amount of programming work experience before I graduate).

 

[nAo]

how did you land your job?

Once I got my Laurea (physics) I started to send out some CVs, had a couple of interviews..and that's it (obviously I joined as a junior programmer not having any videogames programming experience)
This happened in Italy where there's basicly no videogames industry, it should be even easier in other countries (UK, France, USA, etc.)

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Competition is stiffer in other countires though! Insomniac have an interview at GameTrailers. They're suggestion is get maths/physics at college level (which of course differs from country to country in meaning!). You also want to get 'out-of-hours' coding time. Create a little game of your own to show you know what you're doing. All the theory in the world can't replace real experience. Computers aren't anywhere near as straightforward and logical as theory would have you expect!

Note I'm not in the games industry. Other than a consumer

 

[Graham]

http://gamedevmap.com/


You will be surprised what you learn when you start sending off expressions of interest, applications, etc.

I've applied to a number of places, and researched a metric tonne more. All over the world, big and small.
Of the companies I got really excited about, one was really, really nice to me and one in particular was utterly hopeless. It gives you an insight into the inner workings. You may think 'wow, that place could be so awesome' then they turn out to be utter incompetents, or another you may put off because of a uninspired website, only to find they are actually really good.

I'm currently waiting on a NZ company to give me the ya/nay (interview seemed to go well). If not, I'll be off to the UK.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Here's hoping you get the NZ place. You don't want to leave that wonderful nation to come live here!

 

[archie4oz]

Being an art student at the time, juggling part-time jobs as an assistent in a friend's father's photo studio, ramen delivery, and a record store (vinyl not CDs), it was actually quite easy fall into a job doing menial tasks at Hudson (actually quite a few of the students either worked in the videogame industry or for animation studios). Eventually you moved from digitization, to cleanup, to sprite monkey. Then somebody figures out that since you used to mess around on a C64 (not very common in Japan), an MSX, as well as Amiga (imported from US) and Sharp X68K (a friend's drool worthy machine) that you know you're way around a 6502, and it's close enough to a HuC6280A that you can be tossed various little bugs that the programmers don't have time for or want to deal with (sometimes it pays to chat about bugs with programmers over late night meals at oden carts).

Then you get lucky. 3D shit takes off like crazy both in the arcades and home consoles, and suddenly those hours with offline rendering tools in school put you at an advantage. Now there's even more demand for artists, and since you're familiar with CG tools as well as optimizing artwork for console games, you started becoming a valuable resource. Plus NEC all this time has been doing cool shit like releasing homebrew kits for the PC Engine and PC FX, so meanwhile you've been making you're own little console demos (the PC FX was rather cool since it'd do double duty as a SCSI CD-ROM drive as well). Then Sony does the same thing with Net Yaroze. While during all this time, hang out with folks from other studios (usually checking some shit in Akiba (back before it became a hip tourist area)), so you tend to make if a few connections with folks from other studios (this is a lot harder for folks in Japanese studios, since there's nothing like GDC, and Japanese studios tend to hold their eggs close to the nest).

Then school is over, and suddenly it's time for you to either go home, or convince somebody to give you job (or convince some lady to marry you so you can stay (unfortunately the GF isn't willing to go that far )). BTW, the work you've been doing is technically shady anyways since you're not supposed to be "working" on a student visa, so that makes it hard to use your "jobs" as references as well. But you get lucky, and some folks from a large geometrically named studio happen to like your silly little Yaroze demo. More importantly, one of the silly blokes you've been geeking out with in Akiba happens to work for said studio, so you're lucky to have a personal connection (worth their weight in gold in Japan), happens to put in a good word for you.. I think that just about sums it up.

 

[DeanA]

When I got out of college (with barely an 'A' level to my name), I worked as a programmer/analyst in the financial sector for 5 years. In that time, I also did a lot of programming at home.. primarily on the Amiga. Prior to that, I used to hack copy protection out of titles for fun, and further back than that, I worked on a reasonable number of pokes/cheat apps that were published by Your Sinclair. Anyhoo, I joined Commodore's registered developer program, and paid to go to a number of Amiga developer conferences. Got to be friends with people working at Millennium Interactive (which later became SCEE Cambridge) at that time, due to the fact we were all in the bar most nights. In 1993, went to the (last?) Amiga developer conference in Orlando, Florida. In the airport on the way back, friends from Millennium suggested I applied for a job there. A bizarre 'pre-interview' exercise involved having to write a sprite editor running on the Amiga that they could use to automatically cut/format images for SNES/Genesis titles in development. Was my first C program, my first proper windowed Amiga OS program (before then, I'd just written directly to the hardware), and was completed in just over a day.

4 weeks later I'd moved down to Cambridge, and started on 'James Pond II : RoboCod' for the A1200 and CD32.

And that's how I landed my job.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Robocod was cool. Great use of the Copper.

 

[DeanoC]

I starting making games at a young age (about 5-7 for me first zx81 program) by the time ST and Amiga were around I had done various little games etc. Failed A levels, got into the worse uni in the country, did nothing cos it was too easy and I was either having fun or writing game, no time for the crap they teach about computer in uni's.

By now I had a pretty much complete PC DOS and Windows game framework and a number of demos etc. During the 2 year of uni they had a thing where you dry ran sending cv's ready for the real thing the year later. Unfortunately for the uni, my second interview got a job at NMS in Aldridge, so dropped out of uni and worked there.

 

[Fafalada]

I got into programming primarily out of curiosity how to make games, and later on (around 12years old) thanks to my brother's teasing I started learning about and writting first 3d renderers.
At some point it looked all of that would be relegated to hobby stuff - I just about gave up on ever making games for money - working for awhile in a company doing business/internet apps(for realestate, hospitals, travel agencies...)... when a friend(with whom we used to make tech demos and stuff few years before) contacted me about coming over to Japan to work on PS2 (that was in 1999).

 

[dnavas]

Anyhoo, I joined Commodore's registered developer program, and paid to go to a number of Amiga developer conferences.

In 1993, went to the (last?) Amiga developer conference in Orlando, Florida.

I was there! With Ty and Kent ... we did a networked, distributed signal analysis demo there, iirc. I remember San Francisco and Denver, too. Missed Atlanta. There was some kind of Commodore show down in LA after that, but the only clear recollection I have of that is the demo of mpeg-I on CD32, and wondering how they thought they were going to sell enough of those machines to avoid going bankrupt Darn shame, would have liked to have continued the signal analysis work, especially on the backs of a DSP-enabled box. Anyway, don't think that was a devcon.


Note: I don't work in the game industry -- not sure I'd fit in, exactly, but I think my point is that there's an element of chance involved. Just keep putting youself "in the way". And *definitely* get your feet wet. If I wanted to enter the market, I think I'd grab a PS3, install Linux, and start playing around with Cell [and probably start a blog whinging about not being able to bang on RSX ].

Good luck,
-Dave

 

[xmu]

Not sure if this qualifies as industry, but I got my first job back in 1997 making web games (in Java) through friends in the demo scene. So I spent a few years doing that, then took a 5 year hiatus in new media & advertising doing all sorts of rather boring things - paid well though. In 2004 I got lured into the mobile games industry, which turned out to be a good choice - I'm really enjoying this.

Still haven't finished Uni though.. it's been only 10 or 11 years, no hurry

 

[joker454]

Wow, some of you guys are old school! My first paid gig was around 1993. I was selling games at a computer store at the time, from the looks of things selling games that some of the regulars here worked on We had a job fair at school and the compeition was fierce. So to try to bypass the compeition, I wrote Ms. Pac Man for Windows, borrowed a monochrome laptop from work, put it on there, brought it with me to the fair, showed it to the people at one of the booths and said "I wrote this". It was enough to get me an all day interview after which I was offered a job. Things are somewhat different today. It's a weird chicken and egg situation where companies prefer to hire people with shipped titles, but you can only ship a title if you have a job so it can be a bit frustrating for newcomers ;(

 

[archangelmorph]

Well I'm a bit of a newcomer myself..

Finished my bachelors in software engineering last summer.. My Uni was kinda sucky cuz they didn't teach us much in the area of real-time application and we never touched C/C++ from start to finish..
After starting learning C/C++ in my second year of uni I started playing around with directX8.0 in an attempt to ease my way into games programming..

Put together a few demos and a few 2D games here and there but nothing particularly interesting until I moved onto directX 9 and 3D games programming..

After graduation I spent the better half of four months sat in my room (in my parents house) working on a DirectX 9.0 based strategy/board game.. I'm sure my parents thought I was wasting time and just using it as an excuse for me to not get a job..

Anyway once that was done I started applying to companies directly in the UK and registering with a couple of agencies... After about a month I had two interviews (one for Sony and one for my current employer)..

A few weeks later my current employer offered me the job and basically that was it..

:smile:

 

[Graham]

Here's hoping you get the NZ place. You don't want to leave that wonderful nation to come live here!

Just got word today. Looks like I'll be starting in about 3 weeks or so
Absolutely awesome salary as well



Can't talk about the projects of course.

 

[Rys]

Sweet, congratulations!

 

[cloudscapes]

From an artist's point of view.

The closest thing to an education in the field was general multimedia (basic flash, basic html, basic photoshop, and basic 3d crash courses for 9 months) and some Visual Basic back in high school. Made some cheap little 2D games with it! After all that, I was shifting between part-time web jobs and grocery store stuff for a couple years. During my spare time, I was expressing my love towards realtime 3D by messing around with the Q3A engine and Radiant, making some maps for the community and whatnot. They weren't very good at first but it was fun! I did it out of love mostly, I don't remember at all thinking I'd like to work in that field. I also had the chance to teach myself Cinema4D durign that time. A free older copy came with a magazine.

Then I got a lucky break! A local multimedia/web company wanted to start up in educational games as well. They were looking for about 15 interns. I was thankfully chosen. Even though I wasn't formally educated in one of those really expensive 3-year courses, I had a little portfolio with Q3A stuff, C4D things, doodles and photoshops. The small multimedia company had a vision to make a 3D sequel of a educational game they had done. Those of us interns who didn't know 3dsmax were crash-course'd on-site (that was my case) and we started production. It took two years and a lot of ups and downs to release it. We were bearly-paid interns for the first few months (paid for by a goverment program). I wish I could say it was a smooth ride, but the company wasn't prepared for the extreme hurdles they needed to jump to with a limited team, transitioning from 2D Director-style game to full 3D. Anyways, we managed to push it out eventually, with only a quarter of the original artists remaining.

After that game came out, it was clear for us individually that if we wanted to stay into game dev, for a veriety of reasons, there was not the place to do it. Now that I had a much more interesting portfolio abd an actual "game" under my belt, I applied to the big boys. All it took was an emailed CV/resume with a few zipped screenshots to Ubisoft montreal for them to ask for a phone interview. I was then hired. Then came the.... uh... interesting experience of moving from one city to another and finding a new appartment in little over a week.

So, while a big expensive 3-year course in max or maya or whatnot might get you several important contacts that would be willing to hire you right out of school, it's definatelly not the only way to get in! I know several coworkers who went through more-or-less the same steps as I. Employers are impressed with dedication, passion and willingess to learn, as well as a nice portfolio. If you're artistically talented and willing to waste a few months researching realtime 3D and making a great portfolio, if you have passion, and if there are dev houses nearby, then you have a good chance. Be persistant too! Although it wasn't applicable to my case, often seeing the employed in person to hand in cv/portfolio makes the difference than just emailing. Call them a week later to ask if they've seen it!

 

[NovemberMike]

What is anyones experience with using a non-gaming related software development job as a stepping stone towards something in the industry? It sounds like I have a decent shot at getting a job with a company that creates database software for the summer, and I was just curious if that would help with this kind of stuff.