And I was wondering, could you imagine to work in the games industry - you know, not as a hobby but as a breadwinning? And if yes, as what? The industry is big, there are many different people who do very different work - not like in the development of this game where everyone does a bit of everything.
Well, of course, it is always nice to spend most of your time on doing things you like to do (especially if you gain new experience and earn money by doing that).
>Well, of course, it is always nice to spend most of your time on doing things you like to do
I actually think that something like that may sound like real fun for the first few months - but later on it probably just gets simple routine, and even if it sounds like games and fun all the time, later on you will be likely to see it as any other job - you just get to do similar things all over again and again and you may have to accept decisions for ingame-content without question, even if you would approach it differently. I don't think that in the end you can be really satisfied with your work.
So in the end for me, it sounds like fun, but I don't think I'll enjoy it for very long.
Software development (fortunately) involves a significant diversity of thing you can do (for you probably won't do the same thing again and again - even if you must, you can just copy some parts you've already done). And in case of game development... you just create a game (with all the fun the development process involves). If you want to make a game you would like to play then... you probably have to work harder to one day become a person that actually makes decisions =).
Where / as what do you work?
Anyway, there is a plenty of work here and I VERY seldom get bored with uninteresting everyday routines =).
>but later on it probably just gets simple routine, and even if it sounds like games and fun all the time, later on you will be likely to see it as any other job -
No, when you really find a job where you can live out your passion then it gets never bored, that's the difference between normal people and the privileged ones (actually it's pretty tough to get a job where you can contribute fully in what you like). Why should something about a job change your attitude when you always involved in creative processes, when the actual field of work changes and gives you always new and interesting tasks. Architects, Artist and Designers e.g. have always fun!
The only job I might actually want would be the position to actually design games. But I guess that, again, everybody is aiming for that spot, and it's obviously a very tricky spot to be in, because the quality of your ideas has enormous impact on what the company might earn with the game. Because the company knows that, it is unlikely to give this spot to anybody that doesn't have a proven track record, which might take quite some time. The only straight-line career into that seat is roughly what matthes did: Design your own games, develop them by yourself, market them by yourself. Be hugely successful somehow (I don't think Clonk counts, sadly). But that's hard, and speaking about myself again, I'm much too disorganized and seriously lack talent in the artistic department to be able to pull of a move to indie.
Bottom line: I will keep it as a hobby, precisely so it can remain fun.
But as with any other company, it depends on the company very much, much more than on anything else.
a) Modern engines are ever-more complex. I doubt you can become a good engine developer nowadays without specialized training.
b) It doesn't really have much to do with games any more. You essentially built the environment for those that do the "actual" fun-delivering.
Which is related to the point above: When I think about what makes me have fun doing "programming" work - well, it doesn't seem too related to whether it's for a game or not. And the "game design" aspects that I enjoy are much more accessible on a hobby level. I actually prefer doing a small challenging map like Sunshine to building a whole game.
Okay, got another life dream I can rip through? I'm getting all warmed up ;)
(Btw: I'm now doing on a PhD on Haskell. Yeah, each his own definition of fun :) )
> You know, research also isn't what it used to be. Particle physicists now have to do ridiculous amounts of maths while arguing with the general poeple either about why exactly they need another TeV of energy in their rays (at best) or why they are producing earth-eating black holes (at worst).
Well, I don't know what research used to be :). But I've had a few insights last year at Duke and some more in my position as research assistant (Hiwi) now, and from my current point of view this is much more what I'd like to do than to write software all day long for some customer.
> Space flight also lost a lot of its flair since it's clear that manned spaceflight is simply very hard and not very cost-effective
Exactly this kind of challenge is what makes it interesting to me. And of course there is also unmanned spaceflight.
> (Btw: I'm now doing on a PhD on Haskell. Yeah, each his own definition of fun :) )
Cool. At which university? Is what your work is about understandable to someone who doesn't know much about functional programming? ;)
It's at the University of Leeds. And hm, let's see if I can explain this quickly in terms of where my personal hook is... Haskell is purely functional, which means that you won't have side effects and the runtime system can decide freely in which order or on which core to perform a concrete calculation. The easiest way to make use of this is to annotate points in the program where it might be a good idea to consider such a migration (called "sparking"). In theory, this is the optimal solution to the whole parallelism problem. In case the need for parallelism gets really, really bad - and it certainly seems to be on the rise right now - this is probably the direction things might go.
But there is a problem with the approach: As always, the flipside of having an automated mechanism doing really smart things is that you lose a bit of control over what actually happens. Now Haskell's all about that you don't need to care, but sometimes you have a program using copious amounts of heap-space, using each core only half - and no real idea why. It's probably a bug on your part, but that doesn't really help the situation.
What you need at this point is a good profiling tool, showing you what your program does and allowing your to trace the reasons behind it. As we're talking about massively parallel programs here, that's not really something where you are done with just a list of functions and runtimes - you need, well, better tools. There's already ThreadScope, but that's only a symptomatic view at best.
The PhD will be about finding out whether there are, well, better ways. Not very specific, but it wouldn't be research otherwise, now would it? :)
I think, the only area where there is still place for brand new ideas is various indie game development. But the problem for indie companies is the lack of quality/professionalism/marketing (even with the presence of an outstanding idea).
So in the end I have to agree with Peter - there is no big fun in working neither for big game development company (because of the fact that you make games you will probably not want to play afterwards) nor for indie company (for you will never reach the quality level of big software companies). So it is probably better to create something more usefull in different area of software development...
> But the problem for indie companies is the lack of quality/professionalism/marketing
Just as a quick side note: I don't think it's that bad. You can do good quality if you do a simple idea where polishing isn't something that requires a fifty-man team. You can do professionalism if you have the right attitude. And the "marketing" aspect is shifting very fast these days, with "indie" becoming a marketing brand of its own in platforms like Steam.
The main problem I see is that you have to be/do all of that at once, or have at least one other person that's equally committed to your project. And that with almost no financing and huge amounts of risk. That is pretty hard.
> ... do all of that at once ... with almost no financing and huge amounts of risk
Yeah, that is what I wanted to say (but my thoughts went too far away while I was writing my post :-) )
So, do you think the situation for us is better now?
> That’s probably why the indies seem so happy whenever you see them all together at GDC, and why one of the only things that seems to make them mad is if you tell them they’ll be working for Zynga someday.
Heh.
I somehow felt sorry for Matthes while reading this article - the image of the gamer how it is described in the article doesn't seem to be too different of what we know from the clonk community. After all, if commercial or not, often there is a lot of Herzblut (~commitment) in a game and of course it will hurt the developers to only read gamers bitching about the game. I can imagine that it is much worse within the "core gaming" communities than with an indie game like Clonk though.
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