Average age of a successful game developer?

Community Community & Industry Discussion
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The thing is, most games aren’t developed like other types of software; most software is built to a fairly tight specification, as it sets out to fulfil a set of needs or requirements. Those needs and requirements might change, but you always know what you are building and what the intended outcome is. Generally speaking, generic software comprises of the software itself and the data it manipulates.

Games are weird pieces of software. In a large studio environment when you’re starting to develop a new game from scratch, you only have a very vague idea of what the end product is even going to be; over the course of a two-to-three year development cycle, it’s not uncommon for the pieces to finally come together and form a cohesive product in the last 6 or so months of development - I’ve seen this first hand working for people like Microsoft! Games are generally also different in that they contain colossal amounts of content that dictate how they look, play and ultimately feel. This is why big games have teams of specialist designers (design departments on some games can have as many as 40 people), often with narrow foci (e.g. economy, quests, weapons), and unlike other pieces of software, the design is dictated more as an art-form, than dictated by engineering - there can often be several different and potentially conflicting prototypes for different game mechanics in development at the same time, many of which may not make the cut (been there too). New formed by veterans of other industries often naively try to develop games like normal software, the result is usually much less than stellar, if it succeeds at all. A key habit of successful game development is iterating hard, and iterating quickly and early, and not being afraid to throw away everything if you find it isn’t quite working.

Games are also highly interdisciplinary. That content is produced by artists, animators, lighters, cinematic artists, audio specialists and more - these are all largely non-technical people that you need to cooperate with extensively on a daily basis - this means you need to understand what they do, how they do it, and all the associated lingo that comes with the territory. You don’t need to be able to do their job, but you sure as heck need to know what they are doing and why.

The nature of games being different like this tends to mean that developers need different habits - it takes a bit of experience to build something when you’re not sure what it quite is yet and only have vague notions to work with. You can be an excellent programmer and a superb problem solver, but often look for ancillary skills and practical experience. Writing an AI framework for a new game whose needs can change weekly requires experience with game AI and this is unavoidable - and part of why want people with 1-3 shipped games for non-junior positions. There’s a different type of creative thinking required even in the most technical side of games programming - general purpose software has very defined problems to solve, whereas the problem space for games sometimes requires not just solving the problem, but inventing the problem in the first place. I recall working on one game where we were required to make a horse as realistic and interactive as possible - in order to do so we created a new technique for rendering horse hair up close - allowing said hair to be brushed in given directions. The results were pretty glorious (and ran on the 360 to boot), but it’s the result of sitting two engineers and a designer in a corner for a few weeks and essentially telling them to ‘make something awesome’. You don’t do that often in regular software

Now, there are roles for non-juniors that are more engineering focused and where people with pure coding but no game specific experience can fit in. This is predominantly in tools or core systems - stuff like localisation systems, serialisation (savey-loadey) and all that jazz fit in.

TL;DRThis was a long-winded post, but I’m hoping you can see where I’m coming from. expect ‘1-3 games’ because they want people who know specifically how to make games. Programming skill is necessary, but just being able to program well is seldom sufficient in a creative environment generating unique products.

As an aside, I’ve noticed that people who are not game programmers (particularly those who work in scientific backgrounds) have a knack for horrible programming practices and writing nasty, sometimes fairly illegible code…

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Companies will often post the requirements for their “perfect” candidates but are always willing to compromise for good people. It’s usually enough to prove that you understand the pressures associated with working to a tight deadline and shipping a software product, and that you can learn the rest on the job, so don’t let that stop anyone applying. An ex-Microsoft employee will do just fine :slight_smile:

I used to work as a recruitment consultant and I now work as an IT consultant where headhunting is rife and people often change companies every 2-3 years, and I’ve never seen a successful candidate check every box like that.

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Thanks for the insight into the world of game programming. I should really go to these conventions run by Epic (when there is one in the UK) to discuss it more.

There are people in my world who are just the same, writing variables and properties as “a,b,c,d,e,f” is just irritating to read.

What I would say though. From what you have written about game development cycle practices. It is no wonder that almost all games these days require a patch on release (day 0/day 1 patch), it sounds like a mess to me!

I get hassled daily by recruitment consultants. They all feel that way!

In my profession, most companies (in the UK anyway) do want blood from a stone! I have to know around 10 separate technologies and javascript libraries otherwise my CV is scrapped or the interview process fails. I wouldn’t of thought that the game profession would be any different in this aspect and judging by post, it isn’t.

Back to the original post. I turned down a junior-mid level position (working in Audio Tools Department) at Rockstar Games in Glasgow when I was about 24-25 because I was too afraid of the big change of moving 300 miles away (stupid mistake, hindsight is wonderful). Are you talking about developing an indie game for yourself or just becoming part of a games development company?

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What I would say though. From what you have written about game development cycle practices. It is no wonder that almost all games these days require a patch on release (day 0/day 1 patch), it sounds like a mess to me!
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To be honest, that’s an entirely different problem with a complex root cause. There’s a mentality in AAA game publishing to ship on a fixed deadline to fit into a specific release window (when you’re investing tens of millions into advertising campaigns that run for months, you can understand why too) - the trouble is these deadlines are often tight and the game just might not be ready to ship, but it ships regardless and gets patched later (patching is often at the expense of the developer too, which is a ****** situation). The thing is, publishers have been able to get away with shipping utterly broken products for a long time now, because consumer preorder culture is strong - there’s absolutely no point pre-ordering games these days, but people do, so much so that many games get the majority of their sales in the first two weeks or so of being available. If you’ve already sold the product before you’ve even released it, why bother delaying it to fix it up? What’s more, publishers control when reviews are released for a game, so there’s a heinous trend of embargoing reviews on a product known to be flawed or broken until after the game has been released, and ergo the preorder copies already long sold and in consumer hands. This particular practice really ****ing stinks, in my opinion -I’ve started boycotting companies that do this because it’s just pure contempt for the consumer (who surely have a right to make an informed opinion about a product they may wish to purchase).

Consumers have been slow to learn. So many games have released in the past two years or so in a truly horrific state, but people still preorder the damned things - and a sale is final because almost all retailers will refuse to accept a return despite this being a legally dubious thing to do. Steam’s new refund policy might do some good on the PC to mitigate broken releases - Warner have recently had their hand forced to fix their broken Arkham Knight release thanks to large volumes of players returning their games.

There are people in my world who are just the same, writing variables and properties as “a,b,c,d,e,f” is just irritating to read.
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This is exactly one of those practices. These people need a swift kick in the genital region.

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There are people in my world who are just the same, writing variables and properties as “a,b,c,d,e,f” is just irritating to read.
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I used to work for the larger consultancies, and often much of the technical work was outsourced to places like India. They have a lot of good engineers there, but they also have some really awful ones too. One of my first jobs as an IT consultant was to do Java code reviews. I sent one piece of code back explaining that it was possible for a null pointer exception to be thrown within a method under certain circumstances. The guy responded by writing an empty try/catch block around the method call to catch EVERY kind of exception, not only fixing the null pointer issue, but EVERY OTHER issue as well! Mind Blown

In my profession, most companies (in the UK anyway) do want blood from a stone! I have to know around 10 separate technologies and javascript libraries otherwise my CV is scrapped or the interview process fails. I wouldn’t of thought that the game profession would be any different in this aspect and judging by post, it isn’t.
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True, technical skills are a slightly different since if you don’t know it and they’re using it, you’re basically useless until you’ve learned enough to contribute. I’m thinking more about soft skills, such as knowing how to work in an agile environment, how to handle stress and manage your work effectively during tight deadlines and so on. Many companies will put a blanket statement in like “must have launched 3 large-scale products at a blue-chip company”, but if you can convince them that you know what you’re doing and can adjust quickly they won’t turn down a great candidate just because they didn’t check every box on their very specific criteria.