People are always asking me about getting started with making video games professionally, and so I’ve written up some thoughts on this in a series of posts.
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Careers in Video Games
If I had a penny for every time I’ve been asked this question… Game developers have only a few broad types of employees. Excluding administrative ones like office management, HR, and IT, broadly the team has Programmers, Artists, Sound Engineers,…
There are a couple of broad categories of programmers working on video game teams. If programmer is your player class, then the following types are your spec. Programmers are all warlocks and mages so instead of “demonology” or “frost” you can choose from below. This is the real world however, and many programmers dual (or even triple) spec — i.e. they handle multiple specialties.
This post is a sequel of sorts to my How do I get a job designing video games. The good new is — if you’re a programmer — that nearly all video game companies are hiring programmers at all times. Demand is never…
Some kid is always asking me, “I love video games, how do I learn to program them?”
First of all, a warning. Reaching the skill level to be a professional video games programmer takes years. There are no shortcuts. You can not possibly go from nothing to professional grade skills in less than perhaps 2-3 years — and for that you’d have to be an uber-genius — usually it takes 5-10.
There are two basic approaches: home training and school. Personally I’d recommend both.
Let’s talk school. In my day (1980s) pre-collegiate computer classes barely existed, and if they did they were mostly about Pascal programming and data-structures. They often used p-System pascal, an old-school predecessor to Java!
This post is presents an algorithm of sorts for learning to program. It applies not only to the fundamentals, but to all aspects, including the acquisition of small component skills. Thirty years after learning, I still follow the same basic procedure. To tell the truth, modified, it works for leaning most things.