HACKER Q&A
📣 NotAnOtter

Former Video Game Developer wannabies, where are you now?


I used to dream about building games professionally. Now with a handful of years in Front End engineering, the idea sounds absolutely painful.

Long hard hours, less pay, probably a lot arguing about the same mechanic for months on end, your contribution is overall meaningless unless you go indie, in which case you adopt even more risk.

Anyone out there still holding on to hop of becoming a game developer?

  👤 brezelgoring Accepted Answer ✓
Hearing stories of crunch time took the love of development away from me for a number of years, ended up going into InfoSec. I realized going indie is the way to go, make a bunch of money and quit to dev on your own for a while, or find a low-responsibility job that gives you enough hours to pursue your passion while living frugally.

Musicians and other artists have known this is the way for a long time, and right from the beginning they learn to accept it for what it is. We game devs are, in a certain way, artists too, and our job is no different from those of the classical artists.

👤 tompark
Let me pose an alternative universe where you got a job in the games industry early in your career. You'd be on a team so you'd work only on some piece of the game. Until you got a lot more experience, you'd be working on "junior" stuff like UI, tools, gameplay scripts, or something like that. Over a decade could go by and you might never build the majority of a game yourself.

I had a career in the game industry, and it was just like that for me. When mobile games became a thing, I quit my job at EA and built a whole game by myself for the first time.

If you want to build games, give yourself permission to just do it. I suggest you start on something really super simple and small that you can do by yourself, and finish it. Then keep iterating, or start on something else slightly more ambitious, and do that over and over. Force yourself to finish each one, even if you have to cut scope.

Recently I've been building a multiplayer online turn-based game. It's nothing fancy, just a card game with video conferencing, but developing it myself is way more satisfying than a job at a game company.

👤 JasonCannon
I first learned how to program when I was 9, my dad bought me a copy of this programming language / ide called Dark Basic and he taught me how to do some basic control and loops and made a square bounce around the screen. My dreams of becoming a game developer were born!

I'm 29 now, still haven't made a game. I'm the Director of Engineering at my current job, which has me involved in tech a lot, but not doing actual coding anymore, so I'm feeling like now is the time to start working on something. I've been learning C lately and will hopefully be getting started on it soon.

👤 arsenide
I work on slot machine games for a smaller company.

Good work life balance, no crunch time, and decent pay especially when compared to the video game industry.

I’d probably be able to transition to the video game industry, but I don’t really have a desire to.

👤 l-albertovich
That or you could go the concerned ape way which is way cooler IMO.