I’ve been working on a game these past few months in order to improve my portfolio with the hopes that it will help me get my foot in the door, but I’m just wondering if anybody here knows if recruiters just look at your degree and a few keywords and ignore all sort of games that you may have made.
I’m about to graduate from a Bachelors’ in June and I’m wondering if I should continue to work on this project or just spam my resume everywhere.
I’ll post the link to the game here upon request, I don’t want people thinking I’m spamming.
Making portfolio is much more important than some degree. Companies (especially GameDev) don’t really care about your degree at all. If you are good at coding and know how to make games you can be 16 years old for all their care.
Yes, making a simple but polished game would definitely help you to get a job in the game industry. Results matter more than anything when looking for employment in game development. Having a game, or even a presentable prototype is one of the best things you can bring to the table in a job interview. Bringing actual work to a prospective employer is going to matter more than anything else.
Having a degree isn’t a bad thing, certainly. And it can potentially help make a difference if the other candidates don’t have degrees. But work experience, even on personal projects, trumps everything else. If one of the other applicants has no education but a finished game under their belt, and you don’t have any development to present, that degree-less candidate will likely be given the job over you.
Get cracking on a prototype post-haste. Actual development is job #1 for selling yourself to prospective employers in this industry.
Your degree can help you to get the day job, but the portfolio will immensely help you in getting that game developer job.
I have heard that there are some in the industry who do not even have an Associate degree in game development, but most of them are in graphics design and modeling. The coders mostly have degrees in programming but it is a general programming degree and not a focused video game programmer degree. On the flip side there are some whom went to school; got a Bachelor degree in game development and still had a hard time getting into the industry.
Yeah, I say do both. The degree itself isn’t that important in my experience, but the formal learning you’ll do while getting the degree is really, really handy. Plenty of self-taught people miss things which makes life far harder than it has to be. A quality formal education on its own won’t make you an expert in anything, but it will at least mean you’ve got a solid foundation to start from.
Actually, let me revise that. It’s not so important in making games, but it can be important if you want to apply the skills you’ll learn more broadly. Don’t limit yourself to game jobs. It can be a great industry to work in, but it can also be a demanding one, and it’s one that often doesn’t pay as well as using the same skills elsewhere. Those things may not be a big deal when you’re young, passionate and relatively free, but you might not like being locked into it when you’re trying to pay off a house and raise a family or whatever you might want to do later in life.
I think the main issue/blessing concerning a degree in game development is that 99.99% of the knowledge you can get from getting that degree can be gotten on the internet. As for connections? A degree will be a huge waste of time in that regard. Googling the next game dev event and showing up earns you many more valuable connections than smoking weed and playing SC2 with your roommate (not that this this isn’t AWESOME).
Btw, show us the game whenever you’re ready! We don’t bite (too hard).
There is far more information available online than there is in any course. The vast majority of it is junk.
The problem is that if you’re teaching yourself you first up don’t know what you don’t know (see: Four Stages of Competence), and secondly have little or no experience with which to sort the good material from the bad. The idea of doing a course is that people who already know what they’re doing select the right stuff to get you started, and teach it effectively so you actually understand it.
I think the type of education best for someone depends on the individual (cliche, I know, but true imo). For example, I find it a lot easier and more satisfying learning on the run which might not have been possible 20 years ago but sure as hell is now. Other people might seek a strong foundation to build on which is perfectly fine as well. Actually, their foundation probably looks a lot prettier than mine but foundations constantly shift and corrode anyways.
For me, the price is the bottleneck. While I would love to go to college and have some fun experiences, being $120-240K in debt my first year out in the wilderness is just not a risk and burden I want to take on.
Of course, money might not be a problem for the OP so my considerations might not be relevant. If money isn’t an issue, I think that ultimately college (for game development) is about having that 4 years to still be a kid and get treated like an adult at the same time before taking on the responsibilities of a full-time adult. Anyways, I haven’t had the big C experience yet so this is all theory. What do you think about the experience?
You guys have got to overthrow that government of yours and get a decent social programme running. Student debt is essentially risk free here. And no where there that amount. My four year engineering degree left me less then 20k in debt, and that was paid of in the first year of working.
Viva la revolution! I love my country though, with or without college. Only in the U.S. can everything I love about this world be invented, created, or first applied (Steam, computers, electricity, Internet, Unity, Starcraft, etc.).
We’re not only the center of the universe… we’re the creators :O. In all seriousness though, thanks for showing your game. Looks sweet :). I’m stuck on the first move though. Movement and fireball are stuck at “2”. Sorry I’m a noob. Wait… I just don’t read instructions. Okay, onward!
