How I Became a Game Developer
I’m a game designer. Next year marks my 10th year in games development and I thought I’d start my Medium account with how I got into games.
When I meet old friends, I’m regularly told that I’ve their “dream job”; that I must be rich since Clash of Clans makes so much money; that it’s really my kind of thing since I’ve always “liked these geeky things” whatever that meant or that it’s so amazing I get to spend my work hours playing games. None of that is true -not even the dream job bit because I’ve asked if they’d like a recommendation and no one had taken up my offer. Videogames aren’t what grown-ups do. It’s what is cool but it’s not adult.
I fell in love with videogames at the storefront windows of the malls my mom would bring me to. My family didn’t believe in wasting money on consoles so I would play a lot of qbasic and DOS games on the 286 computer that could transform into a 486 when I hit the Turbo button. When I was 15 or so, I remember emailing LucasArts’ Recruiting about how I could work in games (or something like that, I can’t recall). I remember getting a reply which is amazing. My friend had introduced me to Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis some years back and I had worked my way through most of their adventure games library then. There wasn’t any games industry here in Singapore to speak of then and the internet was in its infancy so it wasn’t like I could just ask where I should start.
At some point after high school, I decided that I write better than a lot of people I know and hence, I could write professionally. I spent months in the library reading through all the game publications and books I could find and emailed all the gaming sites around. I became a walking games encyclopedia. At 18, I landed my first gig as a paid writer…which is amazing except for the fact that I didn’t own a console and I was working on an antique 486. The magazine loaned me an Xbox which I’m forever grateful for.
When the first games studios gained traction here, I was in my first year at university, juggling a Computer Science degree and a crazy writing schedule. I had also started writing for EGM back then after hunting down the editor at a function. I turned down a spot in journalism school because programming was more reasonable for game developers.
People usually assume I program games since I majored in Comp Sci and I work in games. If there’s anything I learnt from school, it was that I didn’t want to be a programmer. I even had a monologue in a play about how much I don’t want to code ever.
It’s not that I hate programming- I started with HTML/JavaScript at 12 — it’s that sleeping 6 hours in a week while rushing a last minute assignment in some obscure language you never learnt because you skipped lessons does that to you. Irony, I know.
I learnt in school too that most people don’t know what they want and those that do don’t really have any idea how to get that. I attended a lot of talks by local game companies. Most of the time, no one asks questions or speaks to the speakers. I hope that’s changed since my time. As one of the few, if not the only person who showed up with a resume, I was offered but turned down an internship at the best-known games studio here back then because it involved postponing graduation by a semester and I can’t afford the extra costs.
My first job out of school was in production at EA which was really a design position but that’s just how they named positions back then. One of the most common questions I was asked back then and still get asked on occasion is what I studied in school. No one believes me when I say it doesn’t matter because I’ve never had to apply for a job with my transcripts which are mostly Bs and Cs anyway. I’m lucky, they say.
I was retrenched after half a year at EA (assumedly because our project had so much potential, it made sense to outsource it somewhere cheaper-than-cheap). I cold-called LucasArts the day after (their games division had just started up) and started work in production a couple of months after before working my way into design by volunteering for work no one likes and doing a lot of work really really fast. I’m lucky, they say again.
We all know how that went. Towards my last year at LucasArts, I started reflecting on why I got into games. In my college years, I read that the average career length of game developers is about 8 years before they bail out. 8 years is a really short time, I thought then. It’s not that the folks really passionate about their craft are merely suffering burnout. I think at some point, a lot of us really feel that we aren’t working on the things that drove our passion to begin with.
Since then, I’ve been dabbling in the indie/mobile scene. A part of it has to do with a hope of making the same fun games I grew up with and loved. Also, everyone loves the mobile scene these days because that’s where the money i$ at. If you’re lucky, you’ll be rich like the Flappy Bird guy.
Well, let’s hope I’m third time lucky.
