A response to Tequila that blew up into a full article, practically. This is by no means definitive and maybe not even a list of all the best ways, these are just possibilities that I've encountered in the short time I've been in the industry.
Quote from: TequilaClock;1260011(oh and Sage, any tips on what to focus if I want to enter the game developing industry? Is just one of my dreams is starting my own franchise and developer :3)
You want to become an Indie developer? Well then, I highly suggest picking up the "
Indie Game Development Survival Guide" and read just about everything on the
http://www.indiegamer.com forums (but especially the 'Indie Business' forum). It's heavily casual PC games/realarcade friendly, but there's some Flash game businesses and XBLA guys there as well. If you want to go the Indie route, though, you absolutely need to study Business and Marketing or partner up with a guy who can do that for you.
If you're not picky and just want in on the game industry, there's a lot of ways in, although there's stiff competition for just about each method.
1. Build a portfolio with game demos or full games, especially if you can show that you have experience with C++ (still very important in this industry. scripting languages are very important also. UnrealScript is verrrrry important for any company that uses the Unreal Engine to make games, which is most of the big ones). Go to
Gamasutra.com's job postings (everyone in the industry uses them), and contact whoever you think you might make a good fit for.
2. Move to where there are game development jobs. This is pretty much a requirement, since there aren't very many companies that are going to be willing to pay to relocate you or to fly you out to them for an interview. I've had my resume thrown in the trash a few times by the bosses of people I knew in the industry because I didn't already live where they were at. Keep in mind the industry is in more places than just the West Coast of the U.S. and Austin, Texas and Tokyo, though. There's game dev studios in London, Vancouver, Ukraine, New Zealand, Sweden, Malaysia, South Korea, India, pretty much all over. But usually in major cities, and also usually not a ton of jobs.
3. Attend Game Developer's Conferences, especially GDC, go to the recruitment booths with a resume, and you can try to sell yourself to 30 different companies in a single afternoon. They can even interview/hire you on the spot. It's possible sometimes to volunteer to work at these events to attend the event for free and get access to cheaper hotels, but the demand for this is high.
4. Make something that gets the attention of enough people in the industry, especially if it is on display at the conventions (the Indie Game Festival is checked out by a lot of people and it's not too expensive to enter (although you have to be selected as a finalist as well). This is the one that worked for me.
5. Try to network with as many people in the industry as possible, and if you stay friendly with them, they might inform you when their company needs someone and pass along your resume to the right people, and companies tend to prefer to hire people their coworkers refer anyway. Also, you might want to talk about your ambitions to anyone you meet, because you never know if they used to work in the industry. Six months after hanging out with a karaoke friend, when I told everyone I was going to start applying to get in the game industry, mentioned she used to work as a game tester for Bungie when she was in Seattle and she still knew some people up there and would pass along my resume for me. I had no idea until that point.
6. Get a job
related to the game industry in any way (game journalism, QA tester, PR), so you can start getting some real knowledge about how the industry works so you know what the hell you're talking about if you get interviewed. There's a LOT of shit about the industry you have NO idea about as a gamer, or have extremely little information on. For example, I met a guy a few weeks ago who was about 3 or 4 years older than me, who had a job doing public relations for game companies, who just got a job as the Production Manager for Capcom.
7. Work on or create a mod of an existing game. I'm not as certain about this, and I think this is more for artists, but I've heard multiple executives and recruiters in the game industry give me and others this advice (including Lorne Lanning, the creator of the Oddworld series), so apparently it's pretty important also.
8. Get a computer science degree. Work in the business sector for a little while if you need to to prove you can work with a team and have worked in a professional environment before. It's a lot easier to get a business job, and it tends to pay better and have better hours, but if you're not careful you can get stuck in that industry for longer than you like. Right now, a general computer science degree is still more important than a game design/development degree, unless you went to DigiPen, and that's mostly because they have a jobfair where that developers come to where students show off their products directly to them. That's how Valve found and snatched up the
Portal developers.
9. Make an artistic experimental mini-game, post a free link on your blog, and post to a social news site. The "real" game developers are going nuts for these right now. I saw the Shift flash game being demonstrated, and "Passage" was mentioned in several lectures, and the guy who made "The Marriage", which was basically a few colored circles and boxes moving on a screen and interacting with a simple set of rules (but representing his marriage), was there at GDC demonstrating his newest programmer-art developed-in-a-single-evening game. You'll get a ton of buzz amongst game developers overnight if you do it right.
10. Be persistent, don't give up, keep mastering new things and making stuff that shows off what you know, and don't get stuck on any single approach. Try multiple approaches, or try one for awhile, and switch to another for awhile, invent your own different approaches based on the information you accumulate, etc. It took me 3 years of really trying to find a job in the industry. I probably could have gotten one earlier if I finished my degree and moved to where the jobs were (there's some in Chicago, but not much, and a lot less now that EA Chicago is gone and Midway is hemorraging money), but it eventually worked out for me.
I was planning to look into this in the near future.
Thank you sage.
Quote from: SageClock;1260032UnrealClock is verrrrry important
You know you're going mad, when any word that starts with Un, you instantly believe to be refering to yourself.
edit: This is actually a fairly useful guide, for anyone who hasn't looked too far into it yet.
Great tips Sage. With the growing of the video game industry, i'm sure demand will be very high in the future, with many more jobs available due to new technologies coming out.
Quote from: DNAClock;1260220I refuse to read all of that, someone make it shorter.
Hahhahaha if reading a long post already demotivates you to break into the gaming industry, you're pretty much fucked in terms of ever achieving anything.
Quote from: SpringOnionClock;1260245Hahhahaha if reading a long post already demotivates you to break into the gaming industry, you're pretty much fucked in terms of ever achieving anything.
I'm studying medicine you idiot. I don't want to "break" into the gaming industry, I just want to read a post by Sage without falling asleep, that's it.
Quote from: DNAClock;1260220I refuse to read all of that, someone make it shorter.
Hey what's up Triangl-- Oh wait...
And great tips Sage, I think I'll pass these on to my friend who's going into video games.
Quote from: DNAClock;1260248I'm studying medicine you idiot. I don't want to "break" into the gaming industry, I just want to read a post by Sage without falling asleep, that's it.
Okay then, have a revision:
"Hahhahaha if reading a long post already demotivates you to
break into the gaming industry read it, you're pretty much fucked in terms of ever
achieving anything getting a medical degree."
THQ, Maxon, and two other computer industry headquarters are literally 5 miles from my house. I called THQ and they said that the summer I turn 18 they'd be willing to have me intern, although I wouldn't get payed. So, hopefully that will work out. I've forgotten most of the languages I've learned, so since yesterday (I started spring break and now have the time to do this) I've been drilling C++ and PHP back into my head.