
So you want to be a video game programmer? - The Specs - agavin
http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/08/28/video-game-programmer-specs/
======
joelburget
I wish people would stop glorifying how many hours they work and how little
sleep they get, "You need to live without sleep (4 hours a night every day for
years baby!)." Sounds juvenile to me.

~~~
ajg1977
Read the last sentence before taking quotes out of context - "being a lead is
all about responsibility".

If you're the lead and things start going south on your project then you'd
better be prepared to start leading and taking on whatever is needed to get
your game shipped.

I know it's cool to preach about working smarter instead of harder, but
getting a game out of the door and into a box usually requires large doses of
both.

~~~
potatolicious
The game industry puts this type of workload on more than just leads and
managers - the rank and file toil for long hours with miserable pay (compared
to the rest of the industry). There are a few exceptions to the rule - studios
where life resembles something like normal, and crunch time is an anomaly, not
year-round.

They are few and far between though. I grew up in Vancouver where EA has its
largest studio presence, and the number of burned out game devs I've met is a
little scary.

Video games is like Hollywood - it's glamorous, and has the tendency to suck
in some great talent, chew them up, and spit them by the curb 2-4 years down
the road. And this will not change so long as there's a lineup of talented
artists and developers out the door and around the block waiting for their
crack at what may just be the worst working environment known to software-dom
in this country.

------
gfodor
Video games are an interesting phenomenon. They manage to pack many of the
most interesting problems of computer science into one of the most
superficial, yet profitable, applications. They're kind of like the warping of
space time, an anomaly of extremes that manages to relentlessly suck brilliant
minds away due to its siren call.

And yes, I love video games, and considered working in the field. But,
stepping back you realize there are more important things to work on, and more
useful ways to spend your time. That doesn't mean the temptation on both
fronts (playing and creating) ever goes away.

~~~
kiba
One game. Dwarf Fortress.

It is a game totally worth consuming your life. It have too much depth and
there's so much to learn. Designing your own defense system, figuring out how
to satisfy and juggle the requirement of your fortress, and so on. It's mind
expanding. Other than that, I like killing and skewing globins.

Someday, I'll be able to handle trapping globins and use them to automate my
fortress.

~~~
5hoom
Right on!

A game like dwarf-fortress is a 6+ year labour of love from its creators (and
its players!), and screw anyone who says dedication like that is wasting your
life.

And more broadly, a game is as artistic & life-changing as the developer is
able or willing to make it.

------
acgourley
It's worth reading this even if you're not interested in games or the industry
that makes them. The game industry is one of the most mature industries in
software and it offers a possible future for YOUR corner of the software
world.

Besides being one of the longest running industries in software, it iterates
teams and products rapidly.

Because of this it has performed a gradient decent more than any other
software industry, and I would argue it is is sitting at a local minimum.

From that perspective it's very interesting to study.

~~~
kabdib
Most games are trainwrecks inside. They are /just good enough to ship/ and
often no better. They are fragile, fickle things that for the most part have a
market lifetime much shorter than the time it took to develop the title. You
get your money back -- _if_ you do -- in the first few months of sales.

Games are pragmatic and hard, cheap bastards that chew up teams and spit them
out.

It's fun. :-)

~~~
michaelchisari
I wonder if it's a different story with longer-running MMORPG's like WoW,
FFXI, etc. Wouldn't the situation force the development process to be more
stable and follow best practices?

~~~
SoftwareMaven
I worked at Riot Games (makers of League of Legends) for a while. In some
ways, it was much better: good, iterative practices, tracking technical debt,
etc. In other ways, it was no different: long hours, little regard for
anything but the release, etc.

Now that they've been released for a while, it would be interesting to see how
things have changed.

------
SoftwareMaven
I've worked for a couple of game studios over the years. Unfortunately,
conditions were atrocious at both, something that seems to be fairly common in
the industry. My hypothesis is so many coders spent their teen years playing
video games, wanting to write them, that they are willing to work in sub-par
conditions.

I won't work at another one, unless it's my own. Sadly, I'm not skilled enough
to start my own.

~~~
agavin
All the studios that consistently turn out brilliant games: Naughty Dog,
Valve, Epic, Blizzard and many many others are really well run. Working there
might often be brutal because of how hard the job is and pressure, but they
know the process of making great games and the quality of employees is very
very high.

It's less so at the big corporate studios where marketing and big company
policy has heavily infiltrated the system.

~~~
_delirium
It could be the personalities of the people I make contacts with (I'm a
researcher who works with research-interested game-industry people), but the
burnout rate seems really high, even at the well-run places. More than half
the people I've met in the last 5 years have quit their jobs within that
timeframe! And a lot cited the working conditions: more or less that the
pressure-cooker environment was cool in their 20s, but not a long-term career
path. Some have gone the indie route, some to consulting, some back to grad
school, others just left the game industry entirely for a job somewhere like
Lockheed.

------
amcintyre
Thumbs up for telling people they need to know some math. Even if you're not
planning to work in the specialized areas that are mentioned in the article,
it wouldn't hurt to be more comfortable with math than most developers are,
because you may need to step in and help somebody in one of those areas, and
(for me, at least), learning stuff like that on short notice is really hard.

~~~
kabdib
You don't really need to know 3D math unless you're working on graphics.

It helps. But you don't /need/ it.

~~~
agavin
Physics, collision, animation, and certain types of compression also use a lot
of math. I also found that just plain gameplay programming in 3D games
required a pretty decent command of matrix math and analytic trig.

------
punyhuman
Seems like many people here enjoy playing video games but they do not like
that some very smart people chose to program them instead of "making the world
a better place". Hmm.. makes me think why do you consider it like that. Its
one thing to say that the gaming industry is bad because of bad working
environment (a new info to me) and quite other to say that its bad to work for
since it does not make the world a better place. A game is made because
someone wants to play it. Why do they want to play it? Because life is a bitch
and we get frustrated.(And I am fairly sure that people who are "making the
world a better place" also experience that). So they try to escape the daily
motions of life by shooting zombie faces or kicking someone's ass by making a
avatar of them in a wrestling game. That brings us a sense of relief and
allows us to fight another day or week or month (depending upon your gaming
habits). So why not? My puny human brain cannot understand all this bad rap
given to these poor game programmers who are maybe working in the worst
environment possible (according to some comments here).

edit: Reading this again I realize that some people will argue that they are
not against the therapeutic values of games but they get angry when people
waste time on it. Hmm... interesting counter argument. Lets see, I can cut my
hands with a kitchen knife so maybe I should throw it out right now. Dammit
punyhuman you may fry your brains with this mobile crush it, right now.
Punyhuman is surrounded by such things, they are all after me. Help HN people.

------
agavin
I posted a part 2 -- except I actually made it a prequel -- but it's new
nonetheless.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2937426>

~~~
agavin
And a part 5:

[http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/09/11/video-game-progr...](http://all-
things-andy-gavin.com/2011/09/11/video-game-programmer-method/)

------
richcollins
Should be re-titled to "so you want to be a video game programmer at a large
studio".

~~~
agavin
Why? I'm very NOT large studio oriented. I don't think anything stated in my
post (which is just part of a larger series I'm writing) is even about studio
size. In this particular post I'm just broadly breaking down some of the sub-
specialities inherent in the process of programming video games. In a web app
you need more network and database programmers, in a video game you need
graphics and sound programmers. It's just practical sense. The same guys might
do these tasks, but if you like advanced 3D graphics and get a kick out of it
-- get a programming job that involves graphics!

~~~
richcollins
Those technical specialties are specific to certain genres of games. You don't
have to learn all of them to get started and make good games. You probably do
have to shoehorn yourself into one (or a few) of them if you want to work on
big budget games.

