Here’s a talk I do about professional game development.
If you have questions I haven’t addressed here, get in touch.
Hello!
In the next 30 minutes or so, I will attempt to prepare you for a career in the games industry.
Your time is precious, and I want to answer any Questions at the end so I’m not going to talk about who I am or what I’ve done because you can find that stuff out yourself and besides, you won’t have my career, you’ll have yours.
The only constant in the game industry is change. What do I know that will be relevant to your studies, and to your careers? Well, the details will change, but the principles endure. Working in industrial Game Dev is fundamentally different from school, or academia, or game jam indie projects, and I’ll tell you how.
Because I’ve sort of seen both. I had it easy. Back in 2002 when I joined the industry, it didn’t feel like an industry, it felt like an ongoing game jam. We didn’t know how to do our jobs professionally, and the industry was so young we didn’t have to. At first. You don’t have that luxury. There’s much more competition, for one thing. So I’m going to talk about how you can stack the deck in your favour and stand out from the crowd.
I appreciate, there’s so much going on in the world affecting your future that you can’t control. None of us can. So I’m going to focus on things you CAN control.
The three things companies look for when hiring are:
Skills
Experience,
and Mindset.
I’m not going to talk much about specific skills or tools, because your course will take care of that, nor about Experience, because you’ll acquire that yourself. I’m going to talk about Mindset. Mindset is absolutely a thing you can control right now. You want a Professional Mindset, and you’re going to get it in three stages:
- by getting Disillusioned
- by acquiring Professional Habits, and
- by taking on Two Secret Missions.
I should say this is all going to be advice I was incapable of taking when I was your age. It felt like enough of a struggle just being at Uni and keeping up with coursework, let alone working on myself. But I wish I had. It would have made my life easier, I’d have way more stuff done, to a higher standard, and I’d have been happier. So please let me save you some time and tears.
Disillusionment
First up, I want to Disillusion you. It’s always bothered me that “disillusioned” is seen as a bad thing to be. Why would you want illusions?
Why wouldn’t you want Realistic Expectations instead? Don’t have Dreams. Have realistic Plans and Goals.
My toes curl every time I hear some bright young hopeful explain how they’re going to light up the games industry because they’ve got this great idea for a game, and all it would take for them to become the next Miyamoto is for a studio to hire them and then do what they say.
Yeah, No.
Let’s get rid of this illusion first. Whether you want to make games on your own or as part of a studio…Nobody cares about your ideas.
Ideas are easy. Ideas are ten a penny. Being able to implement ideas, on schedule, on budget, as part of a team, that’s what will get you hired and promoted. Originality is over-rated. Work is respected.
And nobody is going to hire you from this course as anything other than a very junior Junior. If you think you could be a Lead Anything after this, or any university course, you’re wrong. Or you’re working on your own stuff for no money, in which case, good for you. But employers won’t employ you as that, not until you’ve shipped titles.
You are NOT going to be the Next Big Star.
Because there are no big stars in game development. There are people who get interviewed about games, but they’re getting interviewed, not making the games. Who’s the biggest star the UK games industry has produced? Phil Harrison. Anyone heard of him? Might be worth looking him up.
Kill your Passion
I keep seeing the word “Passion” applied to games careers. I hate it. “Passion” is for players.
Passion doesn’t last. Passion burns out.
Passion means you don’t get paid properly for your work because you’re just so excited to be there, right? And then when you’ve burnt through your Passion, they can replace you with someone younger, who still has all that…
Passion.
What you need is Professionalism. Professionals last. Professionals keep getting stuff done.
Nobody cares that you care deeply if you can’t do the work right. So start practicing being professional now. Your course is the start of your career. Act like it. If you wait until you’re hired to develop your own projects and workflows or start dealing with timekeeping, you’re reducing your chances of employment.
So here’s your professional mindset:
You’re not a programmer. You’re not an artist, or an animator, or a level designer or a writer.
You’re a GAME DEVELOPER. You’re there to DEVELOP the GAME, working as part of a team.
You’re not there to Do Your Speciality, or produce stuff for your portfolio, or hang out laughing at cups of coffee like in the PR photos, performing the Game Dev lifestyle. You’re there to make the best possible version of the game you’ve been hired to make.
Some people really struggle with the realisation that it’s not enough to be talented. You have to be talented at working together. All the bits of a project have to fit together. It’s not what you can achieve on your own. It’s not an individual competition. It’s a team effort.
Studios can’t afford to hire people who do amazing work, alone, on their own projects, but just can’t work to a deadline, or a poly count or memory budget, or just work with other people in an office. They need team players.
Illusion v Reality
Look, it’s a business. It’s “The Games Industry”, not “The Games Games”.
You probably won’t get to make your dream game working for a studio. You’ll get to work for a business, in a corporate, professional setting, making a game for an audience, done to a budget, on a schedule, for directly paying customers, or via a publisher. Your boss will have a boss. And your boss’s boss needs them to know how the work is going.
Managers can only manage what they can measure, so you’re going to have to spend time filling in task tracking software. They’re going to need you to do your work a certain way, so it’s consistent across the whole team. They’re going to have to make decisions on how they allocate resources. They’ll have to Plan stuff. Planning stuff is REALLY HARD. It might not make sense to you.
Developers Developing
What does everyone do? You can’t do better than to check out Liz England’s brilliant “Door Problem” blog post. It’s the best description I’ve seen of game design is, and what all the different game dev specialities and disciplines actually do.
What does an average day in Game Dev look like? It’ll probably start with a Stand-Up, a small, hopefully short meeting to discuss what work you’ve done yesterday, what you’re going to do today, and whether anything is blocking you. It’s a chance for your team or department to align on what if any priorities have changed, has anything broken overnight, and the general status and progress of the project.
You’ll probably be trying to hit a Milestone, an agreed amount of work done to a certain standard delivered by a set deadline. One way or another, you’ll spend a lot of time in meetings.
But how are you spending the rest of the working day?
The Most Vital Dev Tool
What’s the single most vital software in professional game dev?
Microsoft Office.
Outlook. Excel. Word. Or the Google equivalents. Maybe also Slack or Hipchat or Discord. But basically, Email, and docs. The more senior you get, the more time you’ll spend in the most basic office software. It’s not very sexy, but it makes the world turn. Offices run on Office.
The Next Most Vital Dev Tool
And what’s the next most vital software you’ll use?
Something like Perforce, SVN, CVS or Git. A tool that lets lots of people work on the same project without breaking it, as long as everyone uses it in precisely the same, pre-agreed way.
It’s called a workflow. You check out or create assets, work on them, test them, commit them so other devs can use them.
And this may sound insultingly basic but the one thing I keep being told is that new hires struggle with this more than anything else.
It seems boring and pedantic and the opposite of what they thought game development would involve. Well, I’m telling you now: you’ll spend more time updating asset trees in SVN than coming up with Great Grand Game Ideas in a storm of Post-It notes and dry marker fumes.
One of the biggest mistakes you can make is the easiest to get right: save your work to the right folders with the standard file naming conventions for your project, so other people can find it.
Apparently this is a known generational phenomenon: people who grew up with smartphones that let you search for stuff but not actually control how stuff gets saved have no familiarity with having to structure content folders, folder hierarchy, or consistent filenaming.
But bad filenames break builds. Inconsistently organised content is harder to test and bugfix which leads to late, bad, buggy games.
There’s no excuse for poor version control hygiene. Work clean. Don’t name anything “final_v2_third revision_thistimeimeanit”.
And don’t you DARE only have your work saved locally so it’s all lost when the power fails or you get a corrupted drive.
Tasks and Bugs: The Managers’ Measure
So you have to do the work, and then show you’ve done it, or flagged up that you need more time, or that you’re blocked, or the tool’s buggy, or the builds are borked, so that Production can escalate issues that need fixing and make their lovely smooth burndown charts that show how progress is going.
This is so that not only does the game get made, but management and maybe even the publisher know how progress on the game is going, and whether they need to change the scope or the budget or the schedule or the resource plan. So the devs making the game need to track their work. Or things go off the rails really quickly.
You’ll spend an awful lot of your day in Task and Bug tracking systems, like JIRA, Bugzilla and Hansoft. You’ll fire up JIRA, triage your Tasks and Bugs, do the highest priority ones first, fill out how long you took (which hopefully is roughly how long you previously estimated the task duration to be), close or re-assign the Task or Bug to the next department or QA for testing, and change the status flag: “Task Complete, Testable In Build # XXXX”, or “Functionality As Designed,/Not A Bug/Will Not Fix”, or the dreaded “Cannot Reproduce”.
I should say an EXCELLENT route into game dev is through working in QA Testing. You get to see all the systems of a game working.
Or not.
And in QA, mastery of Task and Bug tracking is absolutely vital.
So I want you to get into good habits now. If possible, get used to using version control, and task and bug trackers on your own projects. So much of your career in game dev will be spent using these tools: the more you’re used to them, the better.
The Bigger Picture
It’s very easy to get stressed about things you can’t control. Time spent on stuff you can influence or control achieves a lot more than time spent on stuff you can’t. But it’s good to have well-informed expectations of what’s going on out there.
On a wider horizon, learn about the fundamental realities of the industry you want to enter, not just the practice of your specialisation. Get a sense of the economics of it, because that’s going to define the climate you’ll be working in, not just the weather.
How does stuff get made? By who, for who? Who’s paying for it? Who’s the target audience? Why are movie posters and game trailers made the way they are?
Do you know which developers where are working for which publishers, on what, and where?
Is there a studio you’d particularly like to intern or work at? Why not?
What are Sony and Microsoft’s attitudes towards the Free-To-Play model?
Are they switching to a Netflix-style subscription model?
How is that affecting what sort of games they sign, and how content gets made for them?
You may not be interested in this stuff, but it’s interested in you. It’s going to have a much bigger impact on your careers than any dev tool you learn.
How do you learn about the games industry? Simple. Read the headlines written by actual journalists for developers, not PR fluff for gamers. MCV, GamesIndustry.biz, GamaSutra. Get into the habit of checking them every day.
And if you have free student access to the GDC talk archive, USE IT. Because it’s $650 a year once you graduate.
Innate Genius v Practice: How To Get Better At Stuff
Genius is overrated. It’s about putting the work in. The reality is, this is a lifelong process. You don’t get Good Enough and then stop, you should always be looking at ways to improve your skills, experiences, and mindset. You are a work in progress. So, do the work, and progress. That means not stopping when it doesn’t instantly get better.
It’s horribly simple. Don’t just do stuff you find easy. You’ll learn more from finishing a small bad thing than never quite finishing something “Great”.
When you start out, your Taste in ideas will be better than your Ability to implement them. Don’t get discouraged, Keep Making Things. Don’t stop. There’s one person who can guarantee you never work in games. And you’re wearing their clothes right now.
Next up, acquiring Professional Habits…
