Is learning game development or working in the industry all fun?

#1 Learning game dev as an indie is fun, well IMO anyway :)

#2 It *can* be fun. When I'm doing it as a pure self-funded indie, then it's a blast - no politics, no 72 hour weeks, no getting laid off when the title finally ships.

When I was working on the Compaq/Fisher-Price Wonder Cruiser, it was a little more stressful, but not as bad as it seems things have gotten some places. You want to get info on the dirty side of the business, check out the IGDA Website and look at the various quality of life threads and papers. Like in any industry - there are nice places to work - and there are sweatshops that treat you like a slave. Not everywhere is like EA seems to be (lol).

Just my experience. :)

#3 A lot of places aren't fun to work at all. It really depends. It's wuite common for a small core team to develop the bulk of a game, and then hiring takes place in the last 6-8 months when crunch is starting. So often the first 6 months to a year is actually pretty cool, with short crunching to meet a milestone, but generaly regular 10 - 6 working hours.

But most commonly less experienced artists get thrown in at the deep end towards the last stint of production when things get stressful pretty fast and no one has time for training.

Also the majority of game jobs are not that stable, and it's not unusual to have to move around from job to job at least every couple of years, unless your fortunate to fit in a core team.

Most smaller developers can only afford to create one product at a time, and will often reluctantly lay off staff and stick to a core team simply because they can't affort to keep a large team running for the first part of development.

Larget companies can often transfer you to another team working on a second game, but then you often can be crunching indefinately, as you may find yourself working the last 6 months of each and every project. Very stressful but you can learn a lot in a very short time.

Naturaly they are going to advertise a institute as being as appealing and fun as possible.

To be honest I really prefer making indie games, and currently after finishing 2 were getting a fair few offers of small commercial games for other industries, which pay quite well, have a short turn around, and fit somewhere inbetween the quality of an average indie game and a commercial one. So none of those horrid flash type affairs you commonly see.

#4 The games "industry" is an interesting choice for a career. It is fun, but it is also stressful, and you may for the first few years feel more like a factory worker. At the big shops, it often does not feel like you are making a game.. you are making product, to sell, and it feels like it when you are making it.

The cool factor wears off after about 2 years.

The really cool part is when you are playing the final build, and it is fun to play and looks good. There is a sense of satisfaction I cannot describe. Day to day though.. it is mostly sitting in a cubicle doing hard and often tedious work for really long periods of time.

#5 It is fun if you can stand math and logic, otherwise it is dreadful, at least that is the look I get from people when I show them how I do what I do.

#6 "Fun" depends on what you do (art, programming, design, etc) and who you work for. If you're doing what you love and working on a project with great people, then game development can be a lot of fun.

As an artist, I have actually had it pretty good as far as working in the game industry goes. I started off in a corporate environment, then moved to a combination of education/indie/freelance/commercial work, and now I'm back in a corporate environment. Almost all of the projects I have worked on have had people who were talented and who genuinely love what they do. And I almost always had something interesting and/or fun to work on with those projects.

Working with good people is one of the most important factors for me. A so-so project can be fun or at least bearable if your team is made up of good, talented individiuals. One of the projects I worked on at Dynamix was Trophy Hunting 4. Not only was it a hunting title (sitting and waiting isn't exactly my idea of fun) it was a sequel. Hunting wouldn't be my first choice for a game project, but the team was great. I had fun working with the people on team even though the game itself wasn't all the interesting to me. Also, because it was relatively low brain power project, it afford me some time to experiment with different workflows and techniques. In the end, I got a shipped title under my belt and some good practice with game production processes.

Obviously, experiences will differ from person to person and company to company. In general, though, most people I have talked to who work in game development enjoy what they do. The people who don't enjoy it usually leave the industry and move on to something else.

#7 A friend of mine in the game industry had a signature for his emails that read, "Work's not all fun and games. Sometimes it's just games."

I worked as a pro for about six years in the industry. I've been doing the indie thing as a serious part-time venture for a little over a year.

I'll still refer you to the friend's email .sig

I have some VERY happy memories of my days in the big, AAA games industry. It was a valuable experience that taught me an awful lot (and not all of it is obsolete by now, either). I had some VERY fun times doing games. Some days I'd pinch myself realizing that I was being paid to make games. But after the initial rush (and initial releases), the thrill of 'making games for a living' wears off, and you are left with the real work behind it. Then it really depends on who you work for and what the environment is like, and what it is you are doing. Just like any other job.

When the employer's policies stank and all I was doing was churning out ports of games I didn't personally like to other consoles, I decided to get out. A couple years later I came back in as an indie.

News flash: Creating commercial independent games in your 'spare time' is no less work than working 9-5 (or 9-9, or worse, as the case too often was) making a living building games for major publishers. It's hard work. I often ask myself if it's worth it. Based purely on money I've made doing it so far, if the measure of 'worth it' is purely based on dollars and cents, the answer is a resounding no. I'm not about ready to quit my day job. But I guess there ARE other rewards, convincing me to keep at it. Fun is part of it. Satisfaction at seeing something I'm proud of going out to be played by others - and HOLY COW some of them are actually willing to pay me money for the privilege - that's another.

But in the end it depends on what you want, and where you work, and what you end up doing.

#8 In addition to some of the positive aspects mentioned already, I enjoyed seeing the products I had worked on when visiting retail stores.

#9 I work in the mobile game industry at Gameloft Montreal, a first party developer/publisher with strong ties to UbiSoft : to paraphrase Jay's buddy .sig file, it's hard work, it's all games, and it's not just fun, since it's also work :)
If you have the right inclinations, there is a lot of fun to be had, a lot of challenges, and of course, tediousness to deal with.
I wouldn't do anything else, btw.
I also don't think I'd work at just any studio or company...

[sorry for the off-topic]
Hey, Jay B., you worked at Acclaim in Salt Lake City, right ?
The game designer on the project I'm working on at work used to work there too, and is also a Salt Lake City native.
Small world, heh ? :)
[/off topic]

#10 Been doing hobbyist game programming as part of an indie team. It is fun, but also a lot of work. It's not the game industry, per se, but it's close. Lemme put it this way...

I spend 40+ hours a week at my paying job.. then I spend another 40+ working on the game. Sure it's fun, but it takes a lot of devotion. And you have to be willing to sacrifice. Now if it were my day job *hint* *hint*, I'd be able to stop at the end of the day and have a life... well, at least until crunch time.

- Brett

#11 @Brett - The fun center of the games industry is Eugene, Oregon. The indie segment at least. We need to get you a road map... ;)

#12 Yeah... It's really hard to find help in Wishek, ND. I believe there are 12 kids in this year's senior class. We may try though... I can't help but think it would beat working at the McTwist... which is a rip off of McDonalds and Dairy Queen... and now much more famous than they ever thought they would be ;)

We may move to the Bismarck/Mandan area at some point... being the only game company gig for thousands of miles can't hurt... and there are colleges and people there...

In all seriousness, this is an isolation tank!

-Josh

#13 Hey Nicolas!

Yep, worked briefly at Acclaim in the SLC studio. Saw the writing on the wall when they had 2 rounds of layoffs within 4 months of me being hired, so I took a non-game opportunity as soon as my project shipped. Lotta good folks there, but I really only knew a few people. The management did NOT impress me though.

I spent the previous five-and-a-half years at SingleTrac. That was a really wonderful place to work at first - the workload was psycho, but the attitude and environment there rocked. And there was never mandatory overtime --- people just did what they had to. Later, as we got bigger and people started feeling less personal investment in the company and the games, morale dropped a lot.

#14 Oh sh#t!! SingleTrac as in Twisted Metal 2 SingleTrac!? WWOOOOOWW.......One of my favorite games of all time. Who did the music for Twisted metal and War hawk? And what was it like working on TM2? I imagined ST would be a very cool company to work for because their games always seemed home brewed to me. Fun as hell but their games never quite felt like true AAA titles made in a large factory setting. Well anyway, now you have a new fan Jay. :D Man I need to send you an email!(if you'd take the time to talk with me)
-Ajari-

#15 Ajari - feel free to email me. jayb (at) rampantgames dot com. Or just visit the forums at rampantgames.com

Ayup. That SingleTrac.

Music for those games was done by a studio called "Big Ideas" - basically three musicians / composers, though they actually used lots more musicians over the Internet - they'd contract with a drummer to lay down the drum track, etc. Pretty advanced stuff for the mid-90's.

I didn't work too much on TM2 - I was on both the TM1 and Warhawk teams, but during TM2 I was actually working on Jet Moto.

Yeah - the SingleTrac graphics always seemed kind of unpolished. Part of it was the background of the company --- the core of the company came from a commercial & military simulation company, where realism was top priority. Most games are to reality what Hollywood is to reality - very slick, polished, larger-than-life. Even when made deliberately grungy and lived-in. Our graphics pipeline even deliberately de-saturated and normalized colors. I think in the end we needed an art director with a bit more political clout and game industry experience from outside the company - but ah, well.

We did a lot of cool, genre-breaking (or creating) games mainly because we didn't fully understand what rules we were breaking. And we had some guys from Sony doing some remote guidance to make sure we didn't screw up too bad. They were often helpful - sometimes infuriating.

From what I recall, TM2 was a little bit more sedate than working on TM1. We were mainly just perfecting what we'd already done, instead of wandering off so much in uncharted territory. The environment at SingleTrac - at least in the early years - was always very professional. It's not very sexy, I know, and people there generally loved what they were doing, but it was also mainly an older company of seasoned professionals from other parts of the industry working their butts off to produce what we hoped would be a quality product. We did have the occasional clash of egos, the wild lunch-hour deathmatches, and at least one case of a chair getting thrown at another employee - and really fun late-night meetings discussing end-boss design (way more fun than the meetings I am involved with now) - but mainly it was professionals quietly hitting off their checklists of tasks.

#16 Hey Ajari, if you have a modded PS2 you can play the last game I worked on. Its WAY better than the twisted series of vehicle combat games.

I tried to make a PC version only with a lot more depth, but had trouble with the physics.

Motorsiege is the last commercial game I worked on, was one of 6 artists doing all the level design, environment and vehicle modeling texturing and particle FX.

We went out of business when our publisher screwed us 2 weeks before going gold :( but we did sell it to another publisher after going bankrupt, for penies though, you can pick it up cheap on amazon, need a modded PS2 as its only avaliable in europe.

Thought I'd mention it as you liked the twisted metal series.

Check out the movies at:

s93153354.onlinehome.us/MS/media.html

The games called Motorsiege:Warriors of primetime. I have the Xbox version too which was never published :)

OOps, that sounded a bit mean to Jay, and his games were the inspiration for ours. Unfortunately the game was hard to sell the last twisted metal game flunked, and publishers werent interested in vehicle combat games anymore :(

#17 @ Jay-B: Excelent! lol I wish I could have been there to see the chair tossing event. I love hearing about what it took to create some of my favorite games. That behind the scenes stuff. What went on and what the environment was like ect... Hey thanks for the reply Jay. I'll be shooting you an email soon.
-Ajari-

#18 @Adrian: I'll definatley check out your game on the internet through pics and movies but my PS2 is virgin so I'm afraid I won't have the chance to actually play it. Thanks for the heads up.

Yeah I was afraid TM Black wouldn't do so hot. I bought it though and loved it. What I think happened though was Sony jacked up Twisted Metal 3 and 4 so bad that there was no coming back for the series. Just give it time and innovation and old genres become new again. That's what I believe.
-Ajari-

Edit: Just seen the screenies of Motorsiege. Wow it does look great. Like a futuristic Twisted Metal. Seems more "sport" and less "psychotic". I would say that's the biggest difference looking at the pics. I'd love to be able to play it either on PS2 or Xbox. Hmmm...

Ah I didn't mean to jack this thread.

#19 Heh cool, some of the levels were over 270,000 polys and draw distance culling just per poly fustrum culling on the camera, and dynamicly sorted occluder planes.

Meant you could see from one end of a level to the other. Was a really nice engine particularly on Xbox with realtime cubic map reflections on the vehicles. Combined polysoup and BSP all designed and built from directly within 3ds max, same with particle sytems and effects. Best thing though was the AI.

Trying to build a similar cross platform engine at the moment based on a lot of stuff learnt working on that game.

Just give it time and innovation and old genres become new again. That's what I believe.

Yeah, I started an indie game based on these games, only with a lot more physics. I stopped working on it a while back due to wanting it MP over the internet with sopisticated physics kind of like Halo.

Might try again with our new engine. THinking of using TNL for the network side of things.

there's a video of FMC at: that shows some early weapon and physics tests. 14mb WMV

s93153354.onlinehome.us/FMC_Physics.avi

#20 I missed the chair-tossing event too - I was in another room. But one of my good friends (and occasional lurker here) was there - waiting for his job interview, actually. Surprisingly, he took the job anyway.