If you ever could have known how much work it is making games, would you still have pursued it?

I forgot to add, an example of truly inspiring-looking indie ambition is Hello Games' move to making No Man's Sky, quite a crazy step up from previous work, small young team, making something truly impressive, and the artwork couldn't be more perfect, this coming from a big fan of 70s and 80s scifi films and books

 

As I always say, if worked on making a game instead in the time I play games, lay in bed farting, boozing and losing, posting nonsense on unity gossip forums, and otherwise wasting my time, then I would have 20 games finished all AAA quality and I would be able to purchase a small country.

 

You're skiled then! I do little but work and don't get to finish anything

 

Well, yes.

I am almost done after 5 years of learning math, programming, user testing/experiences and so on at University's, and the last two (my master degree) have been with a specific focus on games programming.

Besides that ive dedicated a lot of time learning how to create games, worked at a games company for free to learn even more, and now i formed a company with six others which will release our first game through Steam this year!

It has taken it tolls to be where i want to be, but i love creating games, solving all these small problems you bump into.

But it also depends on what games you want to work with. Some mobile games are rather simple - however personally i don't find them exciting at all, and that is why the first game we will release at my company is an online competitive multiplayer voxel engine based platform shooter crazy game - it has been really hard to create this game but i loved (almost) every part of it!

Will i be in the games business forever? Not sure. Got a girlfriend and is at an age where you consider starting a family, so if i can balance the two (it can be done, specially in Denmark) i will, else i go program somewhere else in the IT business

 

@BFGames

I'd go work in another industry, earn a crap ton of money and then come back to making games, there is nothing worse than working on a shoestring budget hoping you're going to make it. Chances are most won't and I also agree with Khrid it's extremely difficult but not impossible to make AAA quality games as a one man band nowadays. Thing is again you need a crap ton of money for all the tools to automate and speed up most of the process also you have to at least have a steady skill in every area.

I'd avoid going to work for a AAA company in this day an age, the IT sector will pay more / take up way less of your time and you'll be treated a hell of a lot nicer.

 

That will be because you're too obsessed with water

 

Haha, its okay, i managed to kick the habit a bit and in fact started researching things heavily that i thought would be helpful (and were) esp cause it helped me with the language needed to express, say, a shader implementation with a shader writer and stay on the same page

Still hoping to make the best goddamn ocean water ever conceived of but until reality stops working i'm getting a lot of education in new approach to shading,learning the language for each discipline it might involve, and finally after some years get stuck into 3D modelling like a mania, it looks a bunch of fun these days (That is, relatively, when i was at uni it could be a pain in the arse). One step at a time! Merging ideas as they get a footing towards further ideas and getting my art right up there in a quality i'd try to call likeable.I keep saying it though, Quixel, QuixelQuixel. Much more learning to do this year before anything solid transpires, but patience is a virtue and with the hope of the new suite coming out i can pretty much attack my intended art with confidence in great great tools

I wouldnt go anywhere near 'AAA' whatever that is really as a one man army, you will burnt out a long long time before you got anything worth anything done. With a strong spread of skills i think a one man-er can do some very surprising things, im hoping im one of these guys, sometimes i'm really feeling it, see the perfect image setup, then it goes, but i know it was there now time to read up about it

No real financial problems and freedom to do as i like has allowed me a pretty enjoyable ability for patience so long as i can keep working. Unity can make some lovely stuff and given i use timeframes of ten years since age 15 or so in terms of getting skills for a result far in the future (I deliberately based my education starting 17 endig at 22 to cover theatre, sociology, language, computer science, psychology, philosophy), its just important that i keep my passion for my ideas.. theres another problem - as a one-maner, tell an adept programmer friend youre doing something cool and ask if he wants to help out, he might go sure until you tell him/her you're working on 3 seperate developments that are simply skillbuilding to become strong enough to take on the really ambitious ideas in bugger knows how many years. He'll generally go 'er, sorry gotta go do my hair' or something

Doesnt help when your ideas are mostly paper notes and directories full of white papers and books, and it's hard to impress anyone into your mighty ambitions when ive got very fancy looking stuff but absoutely no point showing anyone (This is classic motivation obliteration if you do this), and as a one man thing, no colleages to discuss things with (as mentioned before) - i think thats where i fare worst, colleagues are going to help you out a bunch more than trying to figure something out from a cold start

 

If you wanted to make serious games for a living wouldn't a AAA studio expose you to the people/skills you need to build? Don't get me wrong, I've worked in IT my whole life and my "crunch times" are few and far between once I reached a certain level of seniority, nothing like what I read about in games industry. But it seems like if your goal was to start or join a small studio the AAA experience would be invaluable, much like how many senior IT people end up as consultants in later years.

 

The game I'm making now is taking longer than I wanted to. So yeah sometimes I wish I never started. But other times I look at it and think, "this game is amazing!" if i do say so myself.

 

most likely on an AAA game you will have experience of building one very very tiny part of the game. If you wanted experience of building a whole game, better to join an indie or app company. But it depends what you like doing.

For example you might get put on the team responsible for databases for the high scores. That won't teach you much about making a game.

 

@lazygunn

I agree it is nice to have someone to talk to, when I first left "that company" to pursue my own thing I did it all on my own and then finally poached another guy to work with me. I agree it's easy to get burnt out with what's in front of you, but I'm still saying it's very much possible.

You just have to learn to swallow your pride and accept as much help and / or develop a skill of quickly and effectively reverse engineering other products to get where you need to get quickly. I had to expand into a team due to the sheer scope of the game I'm planning to do, that's not to say I couldn't of done a smaller version by myself because as it stands right now 90% of the game is built by me. That's coding / tech / artwork and storyline.. In the early days I just bought as many assets as possible and modified to suit, now I have the chance to do a lot of it from scratch with a team.

@tiggus

That completely depends on the person, when I was working in IT a lot of the Cisco Exams / coding examinations and just coding by itself were all self study I majored in game design and computer physics though. I learnt how to use the OpenGL API by myself and I also learnt how to build engines and do artwork by myself, don't get me wrong it took a long time and I did work for a fair few AAA companies in my time. But I don't feel working for a AAA company helped me in any respect, in fact in a lot of ways it restricted. If I could do it again, I would of just earnt more money out of IT so I could of built a bigger team.

 

Interesting, I guess it is similar to most large companies in that the larger they are the more specialized/restricted you become in responsibilities.

I feel IT has generally adopted this model in the last 10 years or so in that they have created such specialized roles you now need to walk in being an expert in a particular product and a small slice of a certain technology. It's very sad talking to guys who make high 6 figures but can't explain what a packet looks like because all they do is "web security" and their only qualification is how to use a particular set of premade tools.

 

Is this a self fulfilling prophecy kind of question, most of the people here are currently in the trying to make a game set. But the people who would say 'No I wouldn't have tried' have probably already left Unity and the forum. You probably need a leaving Unity exit pole or statistics on people who used unity then stopped using it.

 

To be 100% honest... I know I keep on doing this because I've gone too far away down the path already to even think about going back. But if I knew, back in 2001, how hard would be to become a 'decent' developer (still trying) I would've stayed with my Magic cards and comic books.

 

Pretty much what Bruno says.

I started in the 80's, and by the naughties I fancied getting into VFX. But when your job is in your blood, and the years encroach (mid 40's now), you sort of get on with what you're already in the middle of and forget the other stuff. Speaking for myself anyway.

I can't imagine having a job that *isn't* hard work, so that aspect has never really occurred to me. I'm more bothered about time sat watching paint dry (currently watching Beast, 3 hours in, ~2 to go. Yawn.).

 

For me, I am flying solo on my game design and I do it because it is something I enjoy, it keeps my mind going. It also keeps me out of trouble at times. I would never give that up for the world.

 

I have a good career, currently, so money isn't my only aim. But it is one of my aims. I just don't understand why every game I see is always trying to compete with what everyone else is doing, while classic genres are completely ignored.

I angry birds, then mad birds, then angry bees, then mad bees... then bee madness... it's like, it's worse than unoriginality. Worse than having no ideas at all to just try to kinda-copy, try to trick a few people into clicking download for 1,000 bucks in ad revenue or something. Whats the point, I make more than most indie devs at my day job.

So if I'm going to spend the time, which I have little of these days, I'd rather make something that will stand up to honest scrutiny from a broader audience and deliver an experience people will genuinely enjoy. I'd also prefer a scientific approach which is replicable, derive formulas and continue making games at a faster and more consistent pace as I mature.

 

This is just World-meets-Videogames.

Look at other industries, they all do the same, whether clothes, watches, sunglasses, furniture, soap or fruit & veg.

It's like those birds that sit on crocodiles, pecking at the morsels. The croc doesn't care. They eat flies, while he eats bison.

 

But it's the same with anything, right? Being "good" at something is based on how skilled you are compared to some average level of skill. As long as there are other people who also want to be good at the same thing, the level at which people are considered "good" will be constantly rising, as the people getting "good" will be pushing the average up.

Doesn't matter if you're making video games, music, writing books, cooking... if it's competitive, it gets hard. If you want to be "good" you have to work at least as hard as everyone else who wants to be good, and that's going to be harder in some respects than the people you're looking up to had to work (except I guess where you're in the adolescence of a field... by hunch is that second generation pioneers in a field are the ones who have to work the hardest, as there are people before them they need to improve on but they have the least prior knowledge available to learn from).