I’m not in the game industry but I would like to be. I’ve got about 10 years worth of web experience and I’m frustrated with my career.
What I want is to rediscover a passion fo what I do for a living. After all, we’re only on this speck of dust for a very short amount of time.
Are you in the industry? How did you get a foothold? do you love what you do?
Hey boojeboy
Interesting thread you started here.
I started out with an interest for game development which I luckily found I shared with some people I met at a nearby university. So I decided to let the university studies linger for a bit and join in on a cross-university project, the goal of which was to study the mechanics of creating a mmog.
Naturally we were not equipped to create a mmog, but we learned some valuable lessons on the way. After completing the project, I found myself more hot on the idea than ever. I therefore gathered two of my great friends from the project and shipped out to start a small game development company.
We wanted to start off easy as out experience was at best limited, so we created a company for producing childrens games. In doing so we needed to get some offices and once again we were lucky to find some government sponsored offices for rent for startup companies.
Sidenote: It just happened to be in the same building as then OTEE, now unity3d.
After a few months we had made good friends with the company across the hall - much thanks to the great nearby bar. This company was started by the author of a few of the titles in the Hitman series and we were soon tempted quite a lot by their game concept.
So we shut down our small business and merged with our funky neighbours. For two years we worked without any other pay than a shared vision and an urge to make this vision come true. We went from GDC to E3 a few times, closed down due to lack of finances a few more times and finally got the much needed investors.
After this, the company grew from the original lingering four people to 25 people on a full salary with multiple publishers engaged in negotiations. At this point things started to become a wii bit business like and I started to think ahead for once.
At the time my highest education was highschool and I found that a plan B was in order, seeing as the game industry isn’t exactly the safest one out there. So I left the company, confident that it would continue on a straight path to success, and started another university study.
And thats where I’m currently at. Working on game development in my spare time and looking forward to the day when I have my plan B in hand and will rejoin the industry.
Damn I miss it!
I’ll share my background – hopefully it will encourage others with modest backgrounds to share.
In high school, a fortunate turn of fate ended with me doing online marketing for a major video game publisher in California. My job was to create micro sites and online ads for new Playstation and PC titles that they released. It was a different side of the industry – I wasn’t creating games, but it was a great experience. I would be over at friends houses and they would have games where I had my name in the credits – which is really cool when you are 16 or 17 years old.
I went off to college and sort of left that all behind. A year later, after realizing that I wasn’t enjoying things, I came back to Indianapolis and started a design firm. Nine years later and I’ve been a small business owner, a college professor and a marketing director at an international multidisciplinary design firm. But I’ve missed the industry that I was (briefly) exposed to.
Well I can’t say I’m in the industry yet, but I’m hoping to go full on by the end of the year. Growing up I always did a lot of art work but after High School I kinda let it go.
When I started getting into computers in 01 or 02 I liked playing various games. I then started wanting to make my own mods and maps and my game of choice at that time was Rogue Spear. The maps had to be made in 3DS max and it was a total pane.
I ended up going to a trade school for 3D animation but came to the conclusion that I didn’t want to work for someone else. (I’ve always run my own businesses) So once again I got side tracked and have been running a web business the last several years and haven’t done much with 3D since.
I’ve always wanted to make a game but it always seemed kinda out of reach because of the various skill sets and the amount of money needed. That and with the typical CD game, you have no real delivery method because the big publishers control the marketplace.
I finally decided I was going to get into doing flash games and that’s when I learned about unity and it’s ability to do 3d content. After I saw it, I knew it was something I could use to publish games with and the web player fit right into my plans.
With the experience and what I’ve learned in the past 5 to 6 years from running my web business, I think I can make a real go on the games side. I’m planning to hopefully sell out of my web business this year and go full on into developing web based games.
I’ve been working professionally in the industry for almost five years now, working as an artist on PC and console games for a developer. I work as a games artist, mostly doing characters. I’ve always dabbled in creating games myself, and like a lot of people I’ve never managed to complete anything of worth. I recently moved over the mac and fell in love with unity, and I’m making a concerted effort to learn Unity for prototyping game ideas, as well as building small games.
How did I get into the industry? Well, I’ve got a background of illustration, but that wasn’t sufficient for getting a job in games. One day I decided to teach myself 3D once and for all, and left my job (doing freelance stuff here and there). I started to teach myself 3D and built up a portfolio, and after six months or so I started applying for jobs… which is how I ended up here. ^-^
Doing games for a living is a mix of emotions. At times it is delightful, and awesome to be part of a large product with a lot of people involved. However, as you’d expect, I have a lot of game ideas that won’t ever be made by my company, and game experiences I’d like to have full control of. I hope that Unity will provide a smooth pipeline so that I can see some of my ideas through.
been in the industry for over ten years and worked on some cool games some of which got canned and a few that made it to be published but the advice
I would give any one if your a artist is get your online showreel rocking and make sure its industry standard dont settle for mediocre push your self to your creative limit and sooner or later you will get noticed ! Never give up competition is fierce and the roadside is littered with casualties!! qualifications are not important to most firms but if your showreel kicks arse it will open a few doors. development houses are usually looking for artist who can animate texture and model and usually want you to have a game published (which is usually the problem for guys trying to break in but a bad arse showreel will get you in sometimes)!! in the future i believe someone who can do all the above and code javascript and use a program such as unity will be worth there wait in gold hence the reason why im learniing it.
must have programs to learn if your serious to break in to the industry
3dsmax
photoshop
maya perhaps but not a lot of firms use it as a development tool
Hi! I hope to enter the gaming industry as a modeler/texture artist after I RETIRE form teaching next year. I’ve been both a traditional and digital arts instuctor for many years (34 years in education. . . 56 years old) and have spent the last few years using the digital tools I wil need in my hopeful new career (Maya, Zbrush, Photoshop, Illustrator, Genetica, Artmatic, Shake and now UNITY, et al).
To get my head in the game, I’ve been working as a modeler and texture artist for over two years with the Sector 13 team. Sector 13 (http://www.reactorinteractive.com) is an indie game in development using the Ogre engine. Working with them, I’ve found that my strongest skill is UV mapping by hand. Essentially , as most people find uv mapping tedious, I love uv mapping to the max!
So I’m off on a new journey getting familiar with Unity, scripting and developing new asset design skills ( I never tried modeling and texturing trees before Unity).
As far as being an old man in a young man’s industry. . . it seems that age doesn’t matter as long as one’s skills hold up. . . Remember The Incredibles? Those characters were the work of Bud Lucky, who was 72 years old a that time.
So, in my humble opinion. . .take the time to learn as much as possible and going the path of an indie is a good way to start. - paul
I came to the games industry (on the dev tool side) quite by accident. In college I studied Physics and learned a bit of programming as I did some work on numerical simulations of planetary systems. Specifically I worked on simulations of the new “solar systems” we were finding outside of our own in the 90’s, trying to help validate theories on why the planetary orbits were so elliptical instead of being nearly circular like our own. Doing that gave me a real desire to get into all things 3D but my programming skills just weren’t up to par.
I eventually found myself working at local hotels (car valet, then bellman/doorman duty) and the job prospects for physicists were rather grim. Living in SF and it having been the heyday of the dot.com boom I had a friend offer to help me get a job at Macromedia. I put in an application and happened to get dumped on the Director technical support team. From there it’s been a long and winding career covering the last decade or so, with increasing involvement in the games space in particular.
I’ve always been a game junkie, then it just happened to work out well that professionally I’ve found myself working on two products that have been key in the game dev space. 
Interesting thread, let’s keep the conversation going. But I’ll note that this is not a thread about finding folks to collaborate with so much as it’s a chat about what brought us all into this industry, therefore I’m moving the thread to the Gossip area in 3… 2… 1…
Hey Tom you completely forgot to link to this: http://blogs.unity3d.com/2007/12/06/one-year-ago-today/
Its a good read. Nice story with a happy ending and all 