I know i am still young, only 16 years old, but i would like to know, how does these things work? Like how does a studio/company find me? How can i find them? Do i have to go around and ask for every company if they need me? Could anyone experienced in that subject tell me how you got your first job ? And with job i mean real job, not a quick project, i mean like for example work for big companies such as , Activision, Ubisoft, Blizzard, Riot , etc…
PS : i am not looking for a job, just curious about it.
Produce something outstanding and then shop it around like crazy. Don’t wait for people to come to you. If you want something then don’t waste your time waiting for it to magically fall into your lap - be proactive and work towards it yourself.
Make a portfolio, stick it online (you’ve already done this - rad!), and reference it in your resume. Keep adding to it, show progression.
Preferably working with a team, do and finish projects that are releasable in their own right, reference them in your resume, and stick them in your portfolio.
I wouldn’t recommend specialist gaming courses or institutions. If you want to gear your education towards this kind of thing get a computer science degree or similar. They give you fallback options in case you don’t get into a stupidly competitive industry, and they also give you options to branch out should you decide that the incredibly stressful games industry isn’t for you after all. (And from what industry critics of such courses say I get the impression that anything specialist they teach you regarding games is stuff you’d learn anyway by making your own games on the side, which you’re already doing.)
‘Developer’ is too broad a definition to use when seeking a job in the industry. Assuming you mean programmer, be active in development forums ( engine companies often recruit from well known accomplished forum members - Unity do just this ) and work on games that demonstrate commitment and ability to tackle complex programming challenges that you can list on resume and at interview, and learn C++ ( and to a lesser extent C# ).
It takes time. Especially now with industry as big as it is and with so many people interested in being part of it. Walking into a engineering role at a big company is highly unlikely without a very strong portfolio and experience. Being a great programmer and being a great professional programmer can be two very different things. Start where you can, application/enterprise development, testing qa, etc. In fact QA is a great place to start. It often involves a lot of engineering and knowledge, but it still has entry level access. Virtually every where I have worked, we have drawn some great engineers from the ranks of QA. They use it as a way to get in and then really show their stuff. Get in where you can and then show what you can do. The best way to get a job in the industry is to be in the industry.
Personally, I always had a passion for coding. I went to college for graphic design, and paid my way as an industrial engineer writing voice recognition software for UPS. I did of enterprise development and eventually became a senior engineer/architect. But I always made games in my free time, and I always let people I worked with know that it was my passion. Eventually a company I worked for got the opportunity to write educational games for the state and NASA. I was the perfect fit for that, and I have been doing it professionally ever since. (almost 20 years).
Even if you can’t jump right into making games professionally, make sure you are in a place where opportunities can arise and you can take advantage of them. And of course, while you are working your way up, always try to excel even at the stuff that isn’t as fun. I have known too many folks over the years that slacked and did the minimal amount of work possible because it wasn’t what they really wanted to do. And when opportunities came up, they missed out because they had a rep for phoning it in.
Make no mistake, its hard, often infuriating work in a constantly changing landscape. The higher you go, the more challenging it can be (both in terms of expectations and environment). But when all is said and done, you spend your day making games, and it really can be a lot fun. (between crunches).
Keep at it, keep learning and take opportunities where you can. I know it sounds generic, but most everyone I know have pretty different different backgrounds as to how they got here. I do agree with angrypenguin, game courses/schools aren’t really the best route. They are generally for people who couldn’t figure it out for themselves. General CS or art background/education is a much better path.
While I agree that you definitely want to be more clear about your skill set, that term is a hold over from good old days (a few year back). It can also be used (or not used) regionally. I started my career in the Great Pacific Northwest, (OR/WA), and developer used to be more common term for a coder. I still use it occasionally out of habit. Now days, it is generally used to refer to most everyone on the production side of things. You are right, probably a good idea to avoid using it sell one’s self.
Produce cool stuff to showcase and you’ll get new friends.
That’s it.
There is no age to start, you’re lucky to have 16yo and able to post on forum already, then find a small idea and produce as you can.
Do not repeat the last step until it is done o_<.
And are you sure that you really want to work as game developer? This is a thing to consider for it is different to work with passion in your personal projects and to work with pressure on a piece of someone else’s game idea, mainly on our country. Speaking about Brazil, there’s a huge field of opportunities for programmers and system analysts, mainly on SP. So a possible way would be professional application programmer on some company and go indie game dev on spare times.
The nice thing here is that the path is the same as all said above: work on your projects, games that you would like to play, release it, get feedback, improve it. Learn all aspects of programming, optimization, code patterns. Find some artist for graphics, music, or learn how to do it. Avoid the use of ready things, try to assemble it by yourself or at least learn how its made. With enough skill, motivation and time you’ll be able to create nice indie games to sell or put online for ad gain.
^^ This! Focusing on one outstanding product is a fools errand. Make LOTS of games, FINISH them, show them to friends, post them, … That’s the best deliberate practice there is: “practice things almost beyond your ability”. And, know, from the start, that game development is like the music industry. Everyone wants to be a rock star. Few are.
Figure out what part of the game industry you want to be part of, game developer is a very generic title, is it programing, art, sound, game design(much harder than you think). Find out where you interests lay and start practicing in that area. Keep practicing and post your results, make a webpage and post everything you do like a development blog. Over time if you get good enough people in the industry will take notice and you might get a job offer, otherwise apply to jobs and use your site as your portfolio. The best way is to make contacts, if you get on a professional team make contacts with everyone over time that’s how you will find the majority of your jobs from someone who knows you and tells you about someone who needs someone like you.
thank you all for your advice, and also @agrypenguin, thank you, i was actually looking for the name of the course " computer cience " , I do have 1 question for all you programmers out there, I would like to expand my knowleague about programming, and that means i don´t wan´t to only know Unity programming since that is a great tool i perheaps may never be able to use depending on what company i work for, so what language and how can i make a computer application? for example a simple calculator, but not on CMD , but as a application ( .exe ) with my custom design.
once again thank you for all your opinions i´ve read all of them and thought you guys gave me a great feedback, thank you!
A lot of languages can do this. C# is used within Unity and can also be used to create standalone applications. If you learn C/C++ you will not only know how to create applications but you will also gain a lot of general knowledge about programming that will allow you to easily pickup the newer, easier languages like C#. I like C/C++ as a learning tool because you learn how things work beneath the hood, pointers and memory management for example.
cool so i should first learn C and C++ , then go over to C# , now how about engienes? how can i turn the C++ code into a application? is it with visual studio ?
Visual studio is indeed a popular C++ compiler, it takes the code and generates an exe.
One thing to note is that I am extremely biased regarding C++. C++ was the first language I learned, and it is the language I use every day for my job.
C and C++ are important because so many basic things are written in them, even the compilers are interpreters for higher level languages are written in C or C++. The Unity engine itself is written in C++.
HOWEVER
Not everyone is going to agree with me. Would anybody else like to chime in regarding what language to learn first?
I can see an argument that an easier, higher level language would be better to start with, because it is less scary, has an easier learning curve, and you will more quickly be able to generate interesting programs. It is frustrating to spend a lot of time learning before you can even get the simplest program to work. If you want an easy introduction to programming but you still want to learn a language that is useful for real-world programming tasks, python might be an excellent choice. The simplest python program is literally just this:
print “hello world”
The similar hello world program in C or C# has a bunch of extra stuff that is confusing at first.
cool, i think i am going to start off with C++ , my brother learned it and i took a look at his codes, didn´t seem complicated at all, i also do have a good knowleague in Javascript, which means that i already own the basic idea of programming. I am downloading Visual Studio , thank you all for your help, good luck to all of you!