Name: Anonymous 2013-02-10 21:26
No four-year college degree. No portfolio. No demo disc. No accomplishments to point to. Whatever this wannabe hasn't done, he has an excuse.
"There was no game school near me." "My parents couldn't afford a game school."
"I read where all the colleges were starting to teach about games, so I wanted to jump into the industry before all the grads started sending in their applications."
If you want to work in games, you have to prepare. You need a solid educational underpinning - if you want to program games, get a programming degree. If you want to make game graphics, get a graphic degree. If you want to design games, study writing, psychology, history, and earth sciences so you know how worlds work, and prepare yourself by other means as well. See Lesson 3 and Lesson 4. If you want to be a game designer, you have to have some skills and talents that are valuable to a game company so they'll want to hire you - either as a programmer, artist, project coordinator, marketer, whatever. First you have to get hired at a game company - nobody just hires neophytes and gives them the title "game designer" right off the bat.
Once you've gotten your degree, you still haven't prepared enough. A lot of people are climbing all over each other to get those game biz jobs.
If you want to get into a game company's graphics department, you need a great portfolio and/or demo reel. And I mean GREAT. When somebody opens your portfolio or watches your demo reel, their jaw should drop and/or their socks should pop off. It's stupid to walk into an art job interview without a portfolio or demo reel, or with a bad portfolio or demo reel. It's not easy to make a great portfolio or demo reel, but what have I said elsewhere in this lesson about "easy"? Anyway?
If you want to get into a game company's programming department, you probably ought to have a demo disc and you definitely need to have some sample code. They need to see that you can create solid code - they need to see what your code looks like because on a game project, the team members have to be able to read each others' code. It would be stupid to show up for a programming interview without good clean readable sample code.
"There was no game school near me." "My parents couldn't afford a game school."
"I read where all the colleges were starting to teach about games, so I wanted to jump into the industry before all the grads started sending in their applications."
If you want to work in games, you have to prepare. You need a solid educational underpinning - if you want to program games, get a programming degree. If you want to make game graphics, get a graphic degree. If you want to design games, study writing, psychology, history, and earth sciences so you know how worlds work, and prepare yourself by other means as well. See Lesson 3 and Lesson 4. If you want to be a game designer, you have to have some skills and talents that are valuable to a game company so they'll want to hire you - either as a programmer, artist, project coordinator, marketer, whatever. First you have to get hired at a game company - nobody just hires neophytes and gives them the title "game designer" right off the bat.
Once you've gotten your degree, you still haven't prepared enough. A lot of people are climbing all over each other to get those game biz jobs.
If you want to get into a game company's graphics department, you need a great portfolio and/or demo reel. And I mean GREAT. When somebody opens your portfolio or watches your demo reel, their jaw should drop and/or their socks should pop off. It's stupid to walk into an art job interview without a portfolio or demo reel, or with a bad portfolio or demo reel. It's not easy to make a great portfolio or demo reel, but what have I said elsewhere in this lesson about "easy"? Anyway?
If you want to get into a game company's programming department, you probably ought to have a demo disc and you definitely need to have some sample code. They need to see that you can create solid code - they need to see what your code looks like because on a game project, the team members have to be able to read each others' code. It would be stupid to show up for a programming interview without good clean readable sample code.