Career as a game developer

Hey there!

For nearly the past 4 years, I had the pleasure to work at Zynga, a leader in the social gaming industry, on projects like FarmVille 2, Fairy Tale Twist, Mafia Wars, and Hidden Chronicles. Although I graduated from college with no game development background, I did learn these few things:

First, you must LOVE games. If you are going to develop games, you must love playing and understanding games. If you don't, how could you make games that others (like you) will enjoy and LOVE? So that's the first and most important point.

Second, if you love games and want to develop games in the future, seek out a college or university with a focus on game development. My colleagues are from University of Southern California, Carnegie Mellon, and George Tech who came from game development background. With these skills in place, you can land your job in the game industry arena. Of course, most companies now require a computer science degree. It may be hard but it's worth it at the end. If you decide to the game industry, a computer science degree is helpful in the long run -- get it.

Third, if you have a great game idea, consider creating a startup and learn programming on your own. Who knows, you might create the next big hit!

Sincerely,
John Vu

Hello!

John's answer pretty much hits the nail on the head. However, you're talking about being both developer or a designer. Those two are typically split into two separate jobs in most big companies. That being said, these two roles aren't mutually exclusive, and I'm actually a designer that enjoys programming as well. However, for the purposes of finding a job in the industry, you may want to focus on one or the other.

If you're interested in doing the programming side of things (writing the magic that makes everything work), then John's answer is dead on. If you want to focus on design (figuring out how to make the game fun), I have to go ahead and recommend the college I went to, the Savannah College of Art and Design in Atlanta, GA. They have a great program where you're able to take everything from color theory and traditional art classes, game art (modeling environments), level design, game theory, programming, user interface and user experience, and everything in between.

To get started, though, you can check out some free resources like GDCVault.com, where you can watch presentation from people in the industry where they discuss what they're working on and their opinion on certain topics. (you can check out my answer at https://careervillage.org/questions/1835/how-to-become-a-game-designer to see other free resources that you can look at, and some books to check out).

The best advice I can really give anyone who is looking to get into the industry boils down to this: Just do it! Make something! If you're looking for something to start off, check out Game Maker and start playing around with simple level editors like Little Big Planet. The mod community for many games (for example, Half Life) is also a fantastic place to look.

If you have any other questions, please don't hesitate to ask me. Hope this helps!

Cody

Having spent much of my career as a Designer, I understand the thrill of creating new gameplay and watching others enjoy it. If you want to dabble, just to get your feet wet, I recommend starting easy with a free tool such as Scratch from MIT. https://scratch.mit.edu/ This will get you introduced to some Very high level programming methodology, let you author complete games, and share them with a community to get help and feedback. It is free and I still sometimes play around in there to prototype a thought within about an hour.

Then, I would look at getting a slightly more advanced tool, such as Gamesalad (silly name, fun package to learn on). http://www.gamesalad.com/

When you get some programming experience and want to delve into professional packages, I would look into Unreal and work your way through their tutorials. These are serious tools, meant to make sophisticated games, but the scripting language is relatively easy to pick up for most people. You would benefit from learning an object oriented programming language to give you more power over how things work. A designer who knows programming is highly valued because they can pick up any scripting method almost instantly and contribute from week one.

I hope this helps.