I worked in the industry for many years, almost certainly I’ve worked in a very minor way on some games you’ve heard of. If you’re curious about the reality of game dev or anything about my experience then shoot.
As you say former game developer, I’ll go for the obvious question: why did you stop?
Did you feel like your work was rewarding? Were you proud of what came from your time, or did you feel the crushing weight of corporate expectations sucking out creativity?
I was blessed to be working at a startup with really good management that shielded me from a lot of the awfulness that is the reality of corporate game dev. But even then, I feel like aside from the time that I spent with people I worked with, a lot of it was wasted yeah. Aside from some indie games that are genuine works of art, you’re mostly just working on a pretty soulless product as your final output yeah.
That was part of the realization that led me to want to leave. I was watching this guy trying to get the hanging strap to animate under the gun with rope physics, so you could swivel your little dude around and the rope would look right, and he was taking like a couple of weeks on this thing, all this talent and genuine effort on his part, all these expensive tools and army of support to help him get it done, and I just wanted to start shouting DUDE YOU ARE WASTING YOUR LIFE. Like you could be using this talent for anything and instead you’re here with the strap hanging down to make one micron worth of this game that doesn’t need to happen in the first place.
Whoa I just got this little flashback to my frustration with the ultimate futility of working there. But yes I think the nature of big-money game development is pretty soulless yes.
How did you get started in the industry and would you recommend it as a job?
Like pretty much anything else, a ton of it is who you know. People knew me as the guy who was always doing the crazy Linux stuff, and so a little games startup hired me as a sysadmin initially because no one knew anything about how to make the servers run. But sysadmin is basically a part time job if you’re doing it right so I started taking on parts of our programming contracts and learned how to do a good job with it. Then once I had some “I know what I’m doing” evidence to point to and a bunch of people had worked with me it gets a lot easier to tell people you’re worth hiring.
I don’t actually think the “who you know” thing is some bad thing; it’s just people wanting to work with someone who’s proven or who they know knows their stuff. But for me it was a lot more that I was working on hobby projects a lot and tried hard to do a good job once I got hired than that I’m a real people person or anything.
Oh, and to answer the second question, which I neglected: On the whole no I wouldn’t really recommend it as a job.
Working with creative people and on something that (in most cases) has some genuine fun associated with it, is a big plus. But, the minuses of overwork, underpay, steady undermining of the creative soul of the whole endeavor, are starting to be joined by the looming threat of getting kicked out of your career entirely in 5-10 years when AI starts being able to do it all itself.
How does someone get into the industry nowadays?
I have a Bachelor’s Degree in Game Programming, experience in Unity and Unreal, C++ and C# expertise, professional level code, and all these recruiters keep ghosting or rejecting me. I’ve been rejected from entry-level jobs where I met all the basic and most of the bonus qualifications.
The industry is clearly changing a lot with AI now and it’s not clear where it’s gonna end up. Applying for jobs at entry level is gonna be tough, tough, tough when you’re competing against all these laid-off game programmers who are victims of the seismic shift in the whole tech industry in general. Applying as just one more resume on the pile was always a disadvantage but now I think it’s a lot worse.
I can only really tell you what worked for me in the past; I actually don’t have a complete answer for you. Having someone on the inside of the company who’s your advocate is key. I got one great interview because a couple of people who worked for the company had seen a hobby project I worked on when we were all in school together and so they knew I knew my stuff, another job came from people who’d worked at a client of my company and so they’d worked with me directly. I almost always got the job through “back channel” talking with people at the place I was going to be working, and then they put me in the pipeline as opposed to knocking on the door with resume in hand.
This is just guessing, but one idea if it were me trying to break in now, I think I would find an open-source project that’s games adjacent or that people in the games industry depend on. Start making projects with it, get involved in the development, become known in that little community as someone who knows their stuff. Contribute good stuff that takes the whole project forward. Then if you see a job opening at a company related to someone you have contact with from that whole endeavor, reach out to that person directly talking about the job. If they know you and that you genuinely know your stuff and they’ve worked with you and you’ve helped them, you are instantly higher up in the resume pile even than even someone who has a way more “qualified” resume.
You can’t fake it though. You have to actually be producing stuff that people can see the quality of, otherwise they’ll take away a totally different view of you. But idk, mess around with Gaussian splatting or an open-source game AI library or something, try to make something good and you can become known as someone who produces good stuff.
I’ve actually been away from the engineering world for some time now; it’s purely a hobby for me now so that’s just pure guessing. But that’s my thoughts on it for what they’re worth. And you wouldn’t have to stop applying for jobs or anything while you’re doing that; it’s just a way to progressively add some strength to your pitch over time.
In ylur opinion is it worth it ?
Artful indie games? Yes. I got genuinely emotional when the stag in Hollow Knight was talking about how when this whole task is done he’s gonna leave Hallownest and see if he can find some of his family.
Most games, no. The industry is changing so it’s not even a reliable money-and-comfortable-life ticket like it used to be. Games specifically always tended to underpaid and overworked compared with the tech industry as a whole. And, with rare exceptions, the “product” you’re working on is gonna be just an engineered dopamine-and-microtransactions machine which is doing more harm than good once it’s let out into the world.
Ask me if I’m bitter 🥲. I got to work with some really great people at times and I’m still in touch with a few of them, but for the most part you have to get incredibly lucky to find a job in the games industry that’s a worthwhile thing to do with your time.