I've been considering taking Computer Science as a minor in addition to my major, English. I was considering this move primarily because I wanted to get into the gaming industry, particularly design. I chose this course of action because I have 1. held lifelong ideas of such a career and 2. been looking for a day job in addition my pursuit of being a novelist. From what I understand, it's generally best to have some sort of programming capability in game design.
Unfortunately, my Computer Science entry course is really sucking for me right now, and I'm seriously considering abandoning my idea of taking a Computer Science minor. Is there any particular minor that I should take that would allow me to get into such a position, without programming experience? Or is my idea already destined for the scrap pile?
Posted by Bokonon (Member # 480) on :
You'd really need some programming ability, whether school or self-taught. Not necessarily hardcore stuff like graphics and the like, but most designers still do scripting in a programming language to create behaviors/triggers within the game environment.
-Bok
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
Learn to program.
Posted by pfresh85 (Member # 8085) on :
From what I hear (talking to various industry people), game designer positions are harder to get into, but there are multiple routes there (and not all involve programming). Most times it seems like someone who has been part of a team for a while (either in programming, or art, or music, or whatever) will get promoted to position of game designer (or at the very least will get to contribute to the overall game's design plan). It seems like you have to be part of a team for a while though to get to that point; there's no way to jump directly into that position. That's why a lot of companies laugh at these programs that offer degrees in "Game Design" that don't teach a whole lot of value, as most times to get to the game designer position you need to have skills in another area that the team needs. That's not to discount all of these schools or programs, as there are some good ones, but most are of poor quality.
Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
I'd suggest either partnering with some programmers at your school to design some small games, or trying to find and build connections to people in the industry (attend conventions, talk to the alumni association, talk to professors, et cetera). Both would be good.
It might be there's already some project on your campus; for instance, here at IU there's the Synthetic Worlds initiative, which is getting a fair bit of interest in the gaming industry: http://swi.indiana.edu/ Several of the people working on Arden (the project mentioned on that page) have been hired by game companies for positions doing programming and art design (none as yet for game design, but I think only one of the Arden designers is job searching right now).
Posted by pfresh85 (Member # 8085) on :
A good place to build connections is the IGDA. Most large cities have a chapter, and they typically have monthly meetings where you have food/drinks and someone makes a presentation about some topic related to game design. Many people from the local game companies attend these meetings, so you can make connections. It's mostly where I met people in the industry and got good advice about it.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
Oh dear, an English major? I'm afraid you're too late; the easiness of such courses have poisoned your brain, and now you can't handle anything even remotely tough, like computer science. (I advise you not to even audit any physics courses; your brain would implode. (English majors' brains cannot explode, they're too soggy.))
With that said, however, if you're really set on this: You will not find a job designing games at entry level, but you can find a job designing game content and work your way up. Designing games is like being CEO; everybody wants the job, nobody gets it out of college, short of starting their own company. Now, this is actually possible, but you would still need programmers and artists; and to get programmers and artists to work on somebody else's idea, you need one of two things:
a) Money b) Something to bring to the table other than the Greatest Idea Evar! (tm)
In other words, you need to be able to either program or do graphics. If you can't do either, why should anyone work on your Great Idea (tm) instead of their own Great Ideas? Ideas are cheap, code is expensive.
Finally, you'd likely be better off asking for help in this forum. Posted by Belle (Member # 2314) on :
777, what is it about your computer science class that is giving you problems? Is it the content? I would think a background in programming would be essential to working in gaming, though I cannot call myself an expert in the field.
Posted by Icarus (Member # 3162) on :
quote:Oh dear, an English major? I'm afraid you're too late; the easiness of such courses have poisoned your brain, and now you can't handle anything even remotely tough, like computer science. (I advise you not to even audit any physics courses; your brain would implode. (English majors' brains cannot explode, they're too soggy.))
This is rude, trolling behavior. These statements are not based in fact, and the insults here are completely gratuitous. This behavior violates the Terms of Service here, and that is why I whistled your post.
-o-
777 keep in mind that a computer science minor isn't necessarily about learning how to program. It's not a programming minor. After one or two introductory courses, the focus will be on theory. That may or may not be helpful, but I wanted to point out that a lot of people who take computer science courses because they want to learn to program get frustrated because of this.
[ April 05, 2007, 03:30 PM: Message edited by: Icarus ]
Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
Luckily for you, KoM is partially incorrect . Many of the major (and minor) game companies hire people with no programming or artistic ability to work on games, for instance to work on story and dialogue.
He is correct in that you won't be the one doing the full fledged design of games any time soon, but I wasn't assuming you wanted that, since "game designer" is a title that doesn't mean that. That job title includes things like writing content for games and developing interesting mini-quests.
In fact, I expect to see the number of job openings for non-programmers/non-artists to skyrocket in the next few years. MMORPGs are increasingly having to keep things interesting for players (in competition against each other and other ways of spending free time), which requires increasing amounts of content.
edit: and I agree with Icarus, though I only received perfect scores on two sections of the GRE and a near perfect score on the third, so I'll have to yield to his greater expertise .
Posted by Belle (Member # 2314) on :
Icarus brings up a good point - are there programming classes that can be taken, even if they don't lead to a minor?
Are you required to have a minor with your degree? If not, can you just take a variety of classes that would help you in your search for a job and work on getting some experience (even as an intern or as a volunteer) in programming to beef up your resume. I'm just grasping here, but maybe some coursework in art and graphic design would be helpful as well as programming.
Posted by twinky (Member # 693) on :
A good way to test whether the game industry really is for you would be to make mods for existing games. Plenty of both modern and older games offer robust modding functionality, so you could make something like a self-contained module for Neverwinter Nights or its sequel to experiment with storytelling in the game format.
Posted by Swampjedi (Member # 7374) on :
A good CS undergrad program will give you both practical and theoretical skills - but you have to take the initiative outside of class, too.
Posted by Icarus (Member # 3162) on :
I don't disagree, Swampjedi. I learned plenty of practical skills from my classes. My point is actually on the other side of the coin--not whether you will get useful skills, but what else you might find frustrating about them. I knew a lot of people who just wanted to learn to program and be programmers, and they hated the more advanced classes we took.
Posted by Will B (Member # 7931) on :
Building games needs 2 things: programmers and artists (including musicians). (OK, managers, but we won't talk about that.)
What's the problem in your beginning programming class?
Do realize that in programming, it's the beginning classes that are *hardest*. On the other hand, if you don't like programming, you probably won't like it the next year either.
Note about the minor: some minors actually are about programming. I believe that is true at 777's college.
Posted by Icarus (Member # 3162) on :
I didn't find the beginning classes the hardest. (But then, I already knew a fair amount about programming before I ever took those.)
Posted by Puppy (Member # 6721) on :
quote:Building games needs 2 things: programmers and artists (including musicians).
Er ... and designers. Isn't this thread about designers?
Game design is one of the hardest fields to get into, because there is no set career track for it. All of my colleagues in this discipline have completely different stories about how they got here. A few of the common threads:
1. Play a lot of games. Play games you don't like, then figure out why you don't like them. Play games you do like, then compare them to the other ones, and figure out why they work. Find people you can discuss them with, and practice deconstructing and analyzing game design. Notice conventions, and figure out why they work. Try weird games that freak you out, and figure out what they are doing, too. Basically, become a student of game design, whether or not you have a formal class.
2. Learn the tools of the trade. If you have the temperament to program, then learn to program! It's a valuable skill for a game designer, and if you like it enough, you can program for a living and get paid 150% as much
If not, that's not the only track to take. I can't program at all, myself, and I'm doing quite well as a game designer Other skills that are just as valuable include:
a. 3D modeling. Most game companies require or look highly on experience with Maya or 3DStudioMax. Even if you're not an artist, you'll use it to whitebox levels, prototype objects, etc, and many level design tools are based on conventions established by these pieces of software. Both have free editions available. Get one!
b. Common level design toolsets. Unreal, Source, Crytek, Aurora, and a bunch of other industry toolsets are available for amateurs to build their own content for PC games. Unreal is the most common, and has the most vibrant community of modders who will look at your work and tear it apart for you Aurora/Neverwinter is a great one too, if you prefer RPGs to shooters. If you can tell a prospective employer that you are skilled with the Unreal Editor, and have some good multiplayer maps to prove it, you'll receive serious professional-level consideration, since you've basically developed and used all the technical skills you'd need on the job.
c. Writing and diagramming. Learn to express yourself well on paper, in a lot of different ways. Learn to use Photoshop, Visio, Excel, and Word like a pro. Write up concise five-page documents about your story and game ideas, draw maps and diagrams of complex locations and concepts, and give them to people you trust to evaluate them critically. Communication in document form is one of the key underappreciated skills of a professional designer.
3. Practice game design. Orson Scott Card learned to write by writing plays, and then rewriting them as he saw them performed and watched audience reactions. You can do the same thing with game design. Get involved in communities that will evaluate your amateur work for you, and take their reactions seriously (even the stupid ones — a lot of your audience will be stupid when you're a professional, too). Start a roleplaying group, and learn to gauge the fun level of your players, then improvise and adjust accordingly.
On my last project, we hired two totally green level designers, based in no small part on their stories of running D&D campaigns
4. Know somebody. I don't know how this one will work for you, in particular, but most of the people I know who joined this discipline straight from nothing were given a shot because someone knew and trusted them, and thought they'd do well as a designer
Anyway, programming is one way into game design, but it's not the only way, by any means. The problem is, NONE of the available ways is a sure thing. They're all long shots. The key is to find what you're best at, devote yourself to it seriously, and do it really well, so that you stand out above the crowd. If it's not programming, then it may well be something else.
Of course, if you can't find anything in the list above that works for you, then maybe you shouldn't design games Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
quote:Oh dear, an English major? I'm afraid you're too late; the easiness of such courses have poisoned your brain, and now you can't handle anything even remotely tough, like computer science. (I advise you not to even audit any physics courses; your brain would implode. (English majors' brains cannot explode, they're too soggy.))
The tragic result of having one's grammar corrected one too many times?
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
quote:On my last project, we hired two totally green level designers, based in no small part on their stories of running D&D campaigns [Smile]
4. Know somebody. I don't know how this one will work for you, in particular, but most of the people I know who joined this discipline straight from nothing were given a shot because someone knew and trusted them, and thought they'd do well as a designer.
*laugh* I read this, Geoff, and had to ask: "Hey, you need any game designers? I run a hell of a D&D game." Posted by Sterling (Member # 8096) on :
It seems that today the easiest way to get useful experience and credit in the games field is to work with existing tools; learn to design maps and models in one of the existing engines, like Quake, Half-Life, or Unreal, for example. Counter-Strike and Gunman Chronicles both started from such routes, and Nvidia hosts the "Make Something Unreal" contest, with a engine license as a prize.
Even if you don't design a breakthrough product, it's the kind of experience seems more likely to get a company interested in you. What I've heard, sadly, is there just aren't game design positions right out of the gate. Not unless you create your own team from the ground up.
As far as programming goes, the people I've spoken to and personal experience suggests to me that the best people in coding are self-taught. Frankly, if this is the field you want to get into, I don't think a minor is likely to get you what you need. There are entire programs devoted to games now, and you'd be competing with the graduates of those programs. If you want to get in, it's more likely to be on the basis of accomplishments than academic credentials.
Posted by Scott R (Member # 567) on :
quote:*laugh* I read this, Geoff, and had to ask: "Hey, you need any game designers? I run a hell of a D&D game."
Me too.
Posted by Icarus (Member # 3162) on :
To say nothing of Slash.
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
Slash is already working on getting into the game industry, so I figured he didn't need the shout-out. Posted by Will B (Member # 7931) on :
quote:As far as programming goes, the people I've spoken to and personal experience suggests to me that the best people in coding are self-taught.
If "best" means "writes it in a way that is reasonably quick to get running, easy to maintain, easy to extend and reuse," I can't disagree more strongly. Self-taught programmers miss the conventions, the organization, and the clear and extensible coding style that ordinary programmers have, and cleaning up behind them is commonly a major undertaking. Game programmers are notorious for this, often rejecting methods that would make upgrading their code quick and easy. They *think* their code is good, but they don't know what they're missing. They're often brilliant, I think -- they'd have to be, to get it working without the tools of a regular programmer -- but they'd be able to do so much more if they were brilliant *and* exposed to these methods.
(There could be exceptions to this, of course, especially if "self-taught" means "taught, with textbooks but no class." I haven't met such a person, but it could be.)
Posted by MrSquicky (Member # 1802) on :
There's a lot of really bad self-taught programmers out there. A lot of times, they are not unintelligent, but rather lack the distilled decades of experience and training that comes from a formal program. Thus, they do a lot of things the intuitive but very wrong way. They fall prey to the very sort of common traps and mistakes that a formal program trains you to recognize and avoid. They also are often oriented more towards making something that works and give little focus to other issues, such as efficiency or scalability.
I don't know about the "best" programmers. Maybe they are all self-taught. In my experience, the better programmers I've known have had formal training and I've found that some self-taught programmers who are very vocal about their skills have made my life significantly harder because I've had to deal with their sloppy code and practices.
I knew how to program before I ever entered a programming class. Would I be considered self-taught?
Posted by Sterling (Member # 8096) on :
I think I understand what you're saying. A talented programmer could benefit from the formal coding framework of a class in much the same way a talented writer could benefit from a class on style: in both cases making the work more accessible to interpretation by those who have to read or edit the work.
And I know I've heard stories of programmers who had contests to make the most inscrutable and lengthy version of "Hello, World", or literally make visible mazes in their code.
"Clever" code is not necessarily "readable" code, this is true.
But it remains true in my experience that the best programmers I know are people who picked up the majority of their knowledge and experience outside of formal education. And many of the more innovative coders I read about didn't pick up a B.S. degree.
I suppose what it comes down to is that while, as noted, formal education might be useful in programming (especially in making code that's easily transposed, bug-checked, reworked, and the like), without the kind of passion for it that causes one to begin seeking knowledge and experimenting on one's own, one is never going to excel. Like so many fields, if one isn't genuinely interested, the end of the formal education is like the slamming of a door; without continued progression outside that formal setting, one is bound to fall behind.
Posted by MrSquicky (Member # 1802) on :
Yes, but most formally trained programmers I know (myself included) do have a great deal of passion for it.
Posted by Sterling (Member # 8096) on :
Good for you.
Formal education <> Bad or unpassionate programmer.
But if I were in HR for a game company, I don't think formal education would be my top-most priority. And when considering it, I would rate people who had attended game-specific programs first, non-specific CS degrees second, and a minor in CS a distant third (at least, without a strong indication that other fields of study would be solid contributors to the job in question.)
Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
The most successful criteria I had when hiring programmers was what systems they had worked on and what specific parts they had been responsible for designing/coding.
If they couldn't describe it in detail on a white board (confidentiality taken into account, of course), I wasn't interested.
The most successful ones would get geeky-excited explaining how they solved a particularly difficult problem or how they responded to totally changed customer requirements easily because of their core design.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
Sigh... would it have helped if I put a smiley on that? I must say I thought that patent absurdity would be flagged as a joke without having to explicitly mark it as such. Anyway, I'm sorry if anybody's feelings were hurt.
Posted by Nighthawk (Member # 4176) on :
The only reason I'm not full-time in the gaming industry is because I live in Miami. I've had offers from Valve Software in Seattle (Half-Life), Raven Software in Wisconsin (Soldier of Fortune, Quake IV), Westwood in Las Vegas, and id Software in Dallas (do I really need to say who they are?). All of which are too far away for me to simply up and move, and even if I could they wouldn't be able to pay me right out of the gate anything near what I'm making now.
For all these places, I didn't go to them: they came looking for me. Why? I've been a community developer for nearly eight years, going back to mod development for Q2. I did a mod for Q2 (PainRift), did a mod for Half-Life (The Opera), and was actively doing the next version of The Opera for Unreal Tournament and later switched to Source. That, along with being active in the community, such as writing tutorials, offering development assistance to other mod teams (some of my code was in CounterStrike until Beta 5; I was even in the "readme"!) made me well known and respected.
So, your best bet is to become active in the community. Engines like Unreal, Source, Aurora (which I'm using now for a NWN2 add-on) and others are not only really easy to work with, but they're documented and supported like you wouldn't imagine. And if you're lucky to have a company like Bioware or Valve backing it, the developers themselves will assist you directly; I've had correspondence direct from Robin Walker, Yahn Bernier, Gabe Newell as well as from some of the leads at Westwood and Raven (I was a beta tester for both).
I even have a message saved somewhere from John Carmack himself; it was a two word response, but still. In my line of work, that's as close as I'm going to get to a celebrity's signed autograph.
quote:(There could be exceptions to this, of course, especially if "self-taught" means "taught, with textbooks but no class." I haven't met such a person, but it could be.)
***cough*** Nice to meet you, too.
quote:Formal education <> Bad or unpassionate programmer.
I couldn't agree with this more. I've been a programmer for nearly twenty years and I can count how many programming courses I've taken on a single hand. Everything that I've learned, everything that I am, I accomplished through my own interest in getting better at it, and going after the tools and the knowledge on my own. College curriculums are very "black box" in which they teach you a fix set of rules and way to do things; unless you're going to a school like Full Sail, it's not going to be enough to do game design.
The heart of game development is the ability to do what's not expected, or accomplish the expected results in unorthodox manners. If you look at the open-sourced Q1 and Q2 source code, it's sheer brilliance how they did things, and that manner of creating things can't be directly taught by any school.
I've always said that programmers aren't made - they're born. You have to want it, and you have to have the mindset to think in the manner necessary for this line of work.
Posted by Scott R (Member # 567) on :
Geoff, Nighthawk:
I find this discussion, and your personal insights into the industry very enlightening. Thanks!
Posted by JumboWumbo (Member # 10047) on :
Okay, the coincidence of 777's handle and the link JumboWumbo just posted is really freaking me out.
Posted by Nighthawk (Member # 4176) on :
quote:Originally posted by Scott R: Geoff, Nighthawk:
I find this discussion, and your personal insights into the industry very enlightening. Thanks!
If you have any other questions, don't hesitate to ask. I might not be in the industry as much as I would like for personal reasons, but I know a lot of people that are.
Posted by Primal Curve (Member # 3587) on :
quote:Originally posted by Nighthawk: I've had offers from... Raven Software in Wisconsin (Soldier of Fortune, Quake IV)
Oh man, you should have taken that one up.
Posted by Altáriël of Dorthonion (Member # 6473) on :
I think that the most important thing for you is to get yourself a damn good-looking portfolio. Show them you have the skills to take the job on.
Experience obviously counts, and so does networking but the single most important piece is your portfolio.
![[Smile]](smile.gif)
. Many of the major (and minor) game companies hire people with no programming or artistic ability to work on games, for instance to work on story and dialogue.![[Wink]](wink.gif)