How Game Devs make money (and how much?) - Q&A

we're going live all right looks like we're live hey out there um I guess first to say welcome to everybody glad people showed up hopefully a lot more come in and we'll just give talk about game salaries and just programming jobs in general programming salaries game design salaries and haven't just make money as a game developer we're gonna do a full video about this later a nicely edited one we'll go over stuff with a lot of details and all that but I wanted to just kick it off with a little live stream and see what kinds of questions people had first see what um people are really interested in and just kind of practice and go over I said talk about these things a little bit before we actually do a fully edited video so I'm gonna be watching for questions in the chat I'm gonna be flipping over to screen sharing and back and forth a little bit playing with the stream deck but if you guys have questions feel free to just drop them in chat I'll try to hit them as they come along I do need to mute you've my desktop so it doesn't keep beeping and closed Skype real quick so it doesn't just keep popping up over everything after that and be ready to go let's see you just said that to invisible hopefully that does both Skype Windows to me nice guys so he's fine anyway um how's everybody doing out there don't forget to hit the like button by the way before we get started just so more people come in and ask interesting questions and we'll get more ideas of things to talk about so yeah if you got a question feel free to go ahead and start off with it otherwise I'll just get going with some of my thoughts on game development pay career salary stuff and maybe talk a little bit about like when I started out when I started out at and how I increased my salary continually that kind of that process see I'm gonna watch real quick and see if a question pops up here and if not then I'll just get to blabbing and I'll just watch questions constantly back and forth I do need to move oh yes super distracting watching yourself talk okay Oh somebody asks is it possible to work as a game programmer in a triple-a company without a bachelor's degree oh definitely what waited doubted without a doubt I mean I'd say most of the game developers that I've known personally who worked in a triple-a company either didn't have a bachelor's degree at all or had a degree in something unrelated or relatively unrelated generally like they had a degree in something really we're not studying economics we're just self-taught at home learned on their own which is really common as well is there bad echo somebody said echo it's not terrible oh well let me see what I can do about that I'm gonna get the echo gone okay let me see if I can figure out why there's an echo okay tell me if the echo happens to be completely gone oh I see it nevermind okay sorry I had two microphones on at the same time hopefully this is much better one microphone is good two is definitely bad it looks like the main ones on now so hopefully everything sounds better okay um let me take a quick look at these other questions so I'm currently working on a project that has an expected timeline of 18 to 24 months I was wondering how do you keep motivated through the entire project you've got to enjoy it right you gotta have goals that you're hitting constantly and I'd say you got to be making progress constantly for me at least if I'm working on something and I'm not seeing constant forward progress it can be a bit demoralizing what I like to do is just make sure that I'm constantly updating things getting them out and showing people as well as showing other people what you're building what you're doing and how it's going tends to help a lot at least for me motivation wise I don't know that I'm the best motivator or anything but it was kind of the general rule that I try to stick to also if you're getting stuck on things try to not like dig in too long on a single problem hit some other problems like when you're stuck that let you kind of I guess refresh your brain reset and start thinking about other things and then it makes the the harder parts a little bit better let me see what other questions we got where do I get an internship in game development oh that's something we'll talk about I'll talk about that a bit when we get a little further on and how do you know if you should test no slash test if you should leave your day job to become an indie dev ah well that's an easy one you should do that if you can't afford it and you really want to be an indie dev I would say don't just go quit your job and think that overnight you're just gonna like what it was like you don't want to quit your job and then go hey I'm gonna make this game and this game is gonna make me this much money and that's gonna be the solution for things if you're expecting your indie game or I guess if you're counting on your indie game to fund you completely before it's out there and before it's actually doing that you're really taking a big risk so you want to make sure that you're financially stable that not making any money from your indie game even if it completely flopped you'd be okay now that doesn't mean that you have to save up a ton of money before you can even start on it you can always make a kind of a partial transition maybe switch your day job into something working part time switch to doing some contracting they do contracting with your day job and then take your you know once your contracting part gets up to the point where you can you can do that enough to make enough money to survive then start doing the indie thing and doing your contracting as well so we have a steady revenue source or even just like a part-time long-term contract would work too so you have a steady revenue source but you can still build your own stuff and not have to worry too much the other thing you had to do is just really cut down expenses a lot I remember when I quit my day job for for good the main thing I did first was just cut down expenses to the bare minimum go hey what do we need to pay for living food electricity and just the basics let's get down to that figure out what that number is and then make sure that we can at least get to that and then not have to worry about all the excess spending and stuff that comes along with having a full-time day job as a programmer where you generally make a good amount of money which is again what we're going to talk about to I about actually a bunch of game dev jobs up on a tab that I'm going to share in just a little while and just kind of talk about those oh and let's see what was this one how would you recommend building a portfolio to gain experience um well I guess I don't know better how but I definitely would recommend doing it build even if it's if you got like no experience you haven't really built anything just take a lot of take little games little mini games and build them out and then add your own twist to them make them different and unique so make it like one of the coolest ones I saw somewhat recently from one of the guys in the architecture meetup was a asteroids game so he cloned asteroids but then made it unique it had all these differences so it seemed like at first the first minute you're in there you're playing it seems like playing asteroids and then you get in and it starts to expand and things get crazy and complicated and really interesting and fun and it was just a portfolio piece that it didn't I don't think you spent too much time on it but I'd recommend doing the same kind of thing just build up little games and put them up since we can do WebGL builds it's really easy to make them publicly available and let other people play them so put them up so that people can play them and actually see what they're like and just build a bunch of them if you can't you don't even have to be a bunch just has to be you know okay enough that you can showcase the best ones if you have like two you're probably good two good ones that you can demo that and again they don't have to be giant full games they're gonna be little clones that are interesting to play that's all you really need don't build something that plays bad you want to have a good interaction and some good polish there but um don't go crazy with like I needed all these complex systems and stuff otherwise you'll just never be able to finish it and it's not really a portfolio piece then it's more just you don't have to explain it you want it to be easy okay let's see um what other questions is hololens gonna make new opportunities for the future I don't know I always thought hololens would be awesome it was really cool when I played with it I thought it was the neatest device ever I'm still waiting for it to become sunglass sighs what's it's sunglass size I think it would change the world when that's gonna happen I don't know I used to try to predict these things and I just gave up because I've never been right about any of them so it seemed like kind of a bad idea um are you still planning on doing a video focusing on Odin yes I am actually I was talking to Brian a couple days ago I need to do that it's just been so there's so many other things going on I haven't gotten around to it it's definitely something I want to hit soon and how much time do you reserve for planning before coding that depends dramatically on the project that I'm working on if it's a big giant project I'm building an MMO lots of planning or a building like something that I'm gonna work on for years I'm gonna do a lot of planning before I code if I'm doing something that doesn't last very long something that's a short-term project a to three months little thing I don't plan too much at all maybe an hour or two of figuring out what I want to do and a lot of it is a mix between planning and coding so I'll plan a little bit and then code a bit and then plan some more and code some more and try to keep really agile with it because one of the problems I've seen myself do dozens of times is over planning and over preparing and building out like I've written down I'm sure everybody has done it before or at least a lot of us have or I like wrote out all my classes on paper architected the entire thing and then when I actually build the thing it's nothing like that because when you're writing on paper it's so easy to just not think about all the intricacies and the ways that things need to connect and how we want to do them it's good for a general big-picture architecture drawing big blocks but when it comes down to like writing out classes and interfaces and stuff it just becomes wrong every single time let's see how do you keep code clean and customizable when reusable that a lot of practice keep things simple following the solid principles is the easiest thing to do it's like the easiest thing to say just go look at solid principle videos watch those in look at where they apply to your code and where your stuff is is messy okay so I want to talk real quick just about job stuff there's a still a ton of questions on a pause on them for just a minute because I really wanted to just briefly discuss pay rates in in job and in the game game jobs if from programming and design and also the um oh thank you for the soup chat also for the non game programming stuff because I've done a lot bouncing back and forth between the game industry and working on enterprise stuff and web stuff and then back in the end game industry and I've also talked to dozens of game designers and developers and stuff about this and I think that it's something that a lot of people get confused on so a lot of people tend to think that you know I want to be a programmer I kind of want to be a game programmer but I don't want to be poor and broke and I heard that game programmers don't make any money so I'm gonna go into regular programming and work on what I would call less interesting projects sometimes they're really really boring projects sometimes they can be fun and interesting but they're almost never as interesting as a game unless maybe the game you're working on is something terribly boring to work on but most of the time when we're working on games it's a lot more fun so when I started off programming I think my first actual programming job was at Intel and I think I started off just on an hourly basis and it was like $15 now or I think it's been a really long time so it was it seemed like great pay at the time you know it was early 20s working as a programmer dint I was like oh this is freaking awesome like I get to get to code stuff and get paid and it was it was good enough I liked it and Intel was the kind of place where you'd get raises relatively nicely so I get like I think by the time I left I was almost at 20 and I didn't even say therefore I mean it was a little over a year and then immediately went to start working on games so I went from Intel to I'm still wearing my shirt again went to sigil and I had applied there a couple times or at least once before at for a game design job that I was really excited about because I wanted to do game design at the time I kind of knew how to code I understood my way around but game design was what I thought was gonna be super fun and really really interesting I didn't really want to do programming I thought it was just kind of like a means to an end and a fun little way to make money and it was also like a neat way that I could prototype out some of my game design ideas I like made a little class tester so I could like design classes and then run them in this little fake text-based setup to see what it was like to play him anyway I got the job there well I applied for a design job the design jobs were paying like twenty four thousand or thirty two thousand I think for there were somewhere in that range and it wasn't super amazing you know in in the area it's actually really really bad because it's in a San Diego area so it's like way below the cost of living because the cost of living here is extremely high but I was I would have been happy to take it anyway didn't get that and what instead happened was I stumbled into a tools job at the same company doing tools programming which if I remember right I started out at oh I think it was right around 40,000 so it was really really I'd say low pay for an entry-level program or job if you look at regular entry-level program or jobs in the area you're gonna find that they're usually around probably sixty to seventy-five thousand dollars a year again this is all in just a Southern California San Diego area it's gonna balance out depending on where you are so it was when I went in it actually started off quite a bit lower than I'd say the industry average for that kind of a position but it was also kind of a mix of a position because building tools for the QA department at first and that's where the pay was low almost immediately within I guess two months I'd switched over to a job where I was doing actual tools programming for the design team instead of for the QA team and that jump alone put me up over 50,000 I think we're gonna put like fifty five thousand just doing tools the it meant and as you know I was like oh this is freaking awesome like I jumped right up and I was still extremely junior at the time right like I didn't really know what I was doing I could build these tools the code was terrible things worked but they just kind of barely worked right and that stayed the same for quite a while so I stayed in that position and even transitioned from doing tool stuff to gameplay things building server code and all that and I got small raises along the way now with any of these big companies they tend to see like a small annual raise like two three percent it's never very good and the only time that you really get any kind of a bump at least from what I've seen is when you get a new promotion so you go up like go up a level as a developer as I go from junior to mid-level or whatever they've called it you know a lot of places they'll number them like one two three and then they'll go to senior one two three and stuff like that every time you jump up there you get a small small bump I wouldn't say it's a huge bump though but maybe you're looking at 10 to 15 percent increase instead of that annual increase so really when you think about it it's like a 8% cuz you're losing the 2% on that annual one not really exciting right cuz like it builds up slowly but it's not a good way to actually increase salary overall so I stayed there for quite a while and by the end of it I think I was up to I don't know 70,000 ish which is about good for a junior level or entry level in any other industry right or any other software industry so I was at the time of course getting paid a little bit less but there were some other benefits that I was getting that other places weren't getting like we were getting annual bonuses so as long as we shipped things if you were on a team that shipped things and this happens it depends a lot on the company but depending on the company you may have shipping bonuses and with MMO companies they tended to be pretty common so to get a Bennett a bonus every every year that was like 10% so automatically getting a 10% bump which helps a bit the other thing I wanted to say though was it like even though sorry Skype is popping up again I thought I that skype go away let's see I got one more those are another Skype window there must be yep I'm okay I don't know it's marked as a way on both I'm just gonna kill it okay so anyway small increases along the way and I tell this to everybody staying in one job is a terrible way to increase your salary raises often are just generally not good even if you get a raise like people get all excited I am getting a raise and then you find out like okay making like a couple hundred bucks a month extra it doesn't tend to be very noticeable or very big the bigger jump happens and this happened a lot after I left here is going from one company to another so my recommendation when you leave a company is never go to a job that doesn't pay you know at least 20% more ideally go for more than that so keep you want to keep kind of leveling up as you switch jobs and that just means like doesn't mean like hey you know you have to get this job has to pay you that much more if they're not gonna pay more then keep looking until you find something that's gonna pay more and by the way I'm all talking about just full-time career stuff here I'm gonna jump into contracting and all the other things all the other ways to make money if you can't find jobs locally or there's not available yeah I'm just a little bit after this I just kind of want to run through the strategy that I like to use to just increase that pay and increase the salary so once once you make that jump though or once you're ready to start looking at new jobs just start looking at positions that pay a good 20% or more more than you're making ideally I you know shoot for the moon go for like 50% more and that's kind of what I did after when I left there immediately went to just about a 50% raise switched switched engines switched jobs and started working remotely at a higher rate and it was awesome right like okay this is great starting to actually get up to a level where like things are really really nice really cool and then I just continue that path so I jump back and forth so that when I left Sonia went to another game company making mobile games and it was a big pay increase after that jumped over to actually working at Qualcomm which was also a well it was about about an equal level on the pay except the benefits were dramatically better and that's something that you'll find a lot outside of the game industry with software's the benefits can be really really nice like fully paid medical you don't have to pay for anything which you know if you're in the u.s. is great because medical costs and insurance costs and crazy in the US if you're outside may not apply as much but here you know if you go from a game job to a non game job you tend to find really good benefits and stock options and things like that I'm not a big fan of going into those just because stocks always just confuse me but you'll find that the pay doesn't really change much once you're at that level so around the hundred thousand dollar level or when you hit about six figures to pay between the two jobs that's you know about a senior level game developer or mid to senior level game developer and amid the senior level engineer outside in enterprise stuff you find that the pay is generally about the same in fact I'm I've got some examples of that up on my screen that we can talk about in just a moment but so going going back and forth then once you get up to that point it doesn't make a lot of sense but you can keep getting these these benefits and bonuses as you kind of level up in them the other thing that was really different about working in enterprise development versus game stuff is you know I always see people ask about degrees in fact there were questions about degrees here degrees in game development tend to not matter people care if you can code and that's about it right they care if you can make the game if you can do it right and it works that's good get it having a dream can push put you in the door it can it can help there it's not a limiting factor though and it almost never impacts pay in a big enterprise situation because they're generally so big they have pay scales based on you know very specific criteria and one of those criteria is often degrees so like when I was at Qualcomm an option to increase my pay in fact the easiest way to increase my pay would have been to go back to school and get a degree in something that wouldn't have really helped me at all it wouldn't have helped me like learning wise I wasn't gonna learn much at all it wasn't like new information I just would have getting that paper or would have given me like a 20% increase which to me seems crazy but I completely understand where they're coming from because it's just to keep everything level so that there's no favoritism and no you know legal issues that they have to deal with when you have kins of thousands of employees so when you're in those bigger companies the degree can matter a little bit but for game companies specifically almost I've never really seen it make a difference actually I can't think of a single time where I've seen a degree make a difference in game development of course learning the stuff that you learned but getting that degree you can make a difference on whether or not you get the job but the actual specific paper or where it's from nobody cares you know demos like somebody just mentioned demos are more important than a degree your your experience in your portfolio dramatically more important than a degree I've met plenty of developers who came fresh out of college and couldn't create a simple flappy bird clone right they're like I know how to code I know the fundamentals I've never actually made a game that's not nearly as useful as somebody who's like hey I've been making these little games for the last two years none of them are amazing none of them are great whatever but they work I can build them you can see them and you can learn things because they're actually doing the code struggling with the problems um no and all that stuff I think oh stop blabbing about just enterprise and uh and that corporate game development and I wanted to answer some more questions and just talk about you know working with contracts and other ways that you can make money as well so one of the things I've seen people do a lot and I've done myself is do some contract game development or contract non game development in a game engine specifically in unity I see some of these appear in unreal but most of the time they tend to be unity and I think that's just a side effect of its being in c-sharp and those companies are used to C sharp and it's an easy transition for them these jobs tend to be things like I'm a buddy Rick who's always doing these jobs with museums so they'll be able to build these Interactive's if you ever go to like a especially I could kids museum you see the touch screens and things where you drag stuff or swipe them or you go and you interact with a Kinect right like there are little games that you interact with the Kinect and they're usually meant to be like a learning type experience or some information and fun mix together and those are I'd say amazing opportunities because they tend to be really easy to do contracts like imagine you've got a you're building a game you've got dozens of systems you've got high scores you've got leaderboards you've got you know levels and powerup you you basically have to build these around people playing them for a long time right to monetize you either have to be able to show ads or you have to get people convinced that hey this games a lot of fun and you should share it with these little apps these little interactive type things it's really about just nailing down a 30 second or 60 second experience you don't have to do much more than that you don't have to worry too much about things like memory management or performance the system is known every the hardware specs aren't changing nothing is changing you don't have to worry about many variables and the gameplay tends to be simple enough that a toddler can handle it so those things tend to be amazingly good for just contracts and there are a lot of them out there if you just start looking around they're government contracts to do these kinds of things and there are a lot of them at nonprofits and things like that and you can find contracts for these online as well I'm not great at finding these I know a lot of people who are and I think that anybody who's really interested should be able to find a lot of these opportunities available they also don't require you to relocate you don't have to be there so if you're in another country or you're in another state in a place where there's not a lot of gamedev opportunity it's a great way to find or a great way to work on the game engine in the game engine with jobs that pay really well for the amount of effort so you know you can charge you know five ten thousand dollars on some of these and do them in maybe a couple weeks some of them could be as simple as like a one week project depending on your experience level obviously that's somewhat of the extreme but I've seen plenty of them like that also with virtual reality when VR first hit there were a lot of these where people were paying ten fifteen thousand dollars for these little virtual reality experiences and it was something that you could put together in a week or two you just if you knew enough about VR II had built a little bit of VR stuff and played with it you could probably build it relatively quickly and again they're very profitable and a good way to subsidize income while you're trying to build up your own indie games or build your own indie game studio by the way I'm gonna just ask again for everybody to hit the like button so can get that number up and just get more people in here and then I'm gonna jump over to questions and then start looking at some actual software engineer jobs cuz well actually let me look at the software engineer jobs and then I look at questions because there are a lot of questions coming up and I want to talk about these before I forget so let's see let's hit the button to show the desktop so people ask a lot like where to find game dev jobs and I was just going to share some of the places that I like to look the best one that I've used in the past was this cyber coder site I used to use it because it was a good place for c-sharp development so they had lots of c-sharp jobs on there and there weren't a lot of unity jobs and this is like six seven years ago so when I was looking at other options outside of the game industry thinking like hey do I want to do non game stuff this was a great site for those those kinds of positions but now it's also just a good spot for unity jobs they're like 31 listed here but you can see just to get an idea of what senior level jobs tend to pay and then also I want to note that a lot of these are not game specific there are unity jobs that are not really in games like think of you click on a couple of these to see that they're like working on simulators and other apps some of them are games but a lot of them are more interactive apps that tend to be I'd say easier to build a lot of times they'll have like some little hard component that's very complicated and hard to figure out but most of the thing is very easy to build or here working on casino games I've never done that before but I've seen casino games it's mostly a lot of flashy stuff and then I assume some security on the base level to get stuff down and you know make sure people aren't cheating and stealing a bunch of money but beyond that I think that the majority of what you'd be doing in these kinds of games is relatively simple I don't know the pay there but I would guess it's over a hundred thousand and if we scroll through like yeah here's another casino 100 120 and this was kind of an interesting one so an unreal job in San Diego I wonder if I know anybody who's working here but their pay was actually lower than all of the Unity jobs which kind of surprised me when I looked the Unreal jobs tended to pay less than the Unity jobs which again I was shocked because I expected you know normally there aren't as many Unreal developers out there as there are Unity developers so I assumed that it would be kind of the opposite but it's not and I mean it's still not bad like the money is good 102 120,000 the other thing to note when you see these job postings like this a lot of the time they're trying to go for the low number so just expect that they are shooting for the low number and if you want the high number you're gonna have to tell them and you're gonna have to be somewhat forceful on it in fact even going above the high number and maybe negotiate back down to whatever their max is don't don't go in saying hey I'll take whatever going saying hey on this like I'd like 130 maybe we can do 120 and some benefits or something and then negotiate down instead of up of course if you're just coming in and you're not really senior and you don't feel comfortable at it it might be harder but if you're at the senior level I'd push for that yeah here golf enthusiast right one hundred and forty thousand and then you go to the Unreal one that's just surprised well this is also in Florida so that's the other thing you're gonna see a lot of is that a lot of the jobs in California in general are going to pay you know fifty percent more or even higher although this is a manager job I don't think that counts so anyway you get the idea there are a lot of a lot of these jobs out here and I'll I did research for unity and almost every one of them pays on average a hundred thousand or more so there's definitely a lot of money in the industry and a lot of money just in unity development if you can find these positions but I want to look at a couple other ones which one was I which ones did I have pulled up here ah skip this Oh gamma Sutra so the gamma Sutra jobs board is another good place that I always would search so just look on here there usually aren't as many jobs on here anymore I don't know if it's just that the board's kind of dying or whatever but it's a search and find a lot more there's still some unity jobs so if you search and here's a place where you might actually find some design jobs on the cyber coders you're never gonna find game design jobs at least I can't imagine you would because it's called cyber coders it's programming you know it's um not it's not a design type thing but here you might find artists specific jobs or game design jobs I don't see any game design ones up here available the other thing I don't particularly like about the gamma suture job board is that they don't just list compensation almost ever it's very rare that you find it like go click on one yeah there's just it's very rare that you'll see the info there so I don't know what these positions are paying but I would expect them to pay about the same again depending on the area I would bet the ones in California are paying quite a bit better than the ones in Chicago but let's look at where was the other spot I was looking LinkedIn so I did a quick search I was kind of curious what LinkedIn jobs were like and I actually saw game design jobs on here so they had game design positions paying around 50 to 60 thousand and that's about what you can expect as a game designer and as you level up as game designer get more experience and get more contacts you can bring that number up and you can get kind of pushing into the six figures if you get to a creative director slash like basically like a studio lead who's like the main designer they're running things you can easily get into you know two $300,000 salaries I've seen that a couple times before I've also seen that for DBAs and game programmers who just stay at a company for a while and are really good and just kind of get to the top if you get to the top of these there's a little bit of space in there for ultra high paying jobs they don't tend to last super long you know like most the people I've seen fall into these that are getting paid to three hundred thousand a year and they're doing it for three or four years and then something happens and they change and everything goes away but then they just go on to the next one and then they use that previous salary as just why they should get the same amount in other places I was looking at these though like senior software engineer oh and looking at the base salaries here so these were more unity jobs and here it doesn't say what the job salaries are for these specific ones but I thought it was interesting seeing the estimated salary of senior software engineers in the area and that they were estimating these be about the same I would bet that it's actually higher so this job probably pays quite a bit higher than these values here just based on the area and the title and a little bit on the description now I'm gonna jump over to questions cuz I feel like I've been talking nonstop just I need to listen and see what everybody's curious about and starting answering so what about jobs in Europe I'm just gonna start reading them as they come pop up I don't know I would I've heard that the jobs in Europe tend to pay quite a bit lower and I don't know if there's a reason for that I don't know how accurate it is I've never had a job in Europe and I only know a couple people who lived in England or Ireland or Germany who've told me what with their job salaries were they did seem to be lower but I don't know why that is specifically or I think it's just probably in the amount of money available plus the taxes and stuff I couldn't tell you let's see I'm living in Norway what's the process of getting a job in the USA I don't know I'm if you're doing contracting though so if you're doing contracting and set up your own company I think it's dramatically easier depending on how easy it is to set up your company because a company in the US can hire an out of out of the country company to do things as on a contract basis relatively easily but hiring an employee from outside of the country requires a big visa process that I don't know much about I know that it's expensive and lengthy and people generally try to avoid it unless there aren't better options so if you're like really good option then they'll do it but otherwise it's kind of hard to to justify it when I was at Qualcomm we actually had a lot of people there on visas who they just had a program that made it relatively easy for them to do it but as a giant mega corporation in the smaller places I've seen I've almost never actually experienced that where anybody came in from another country unless they were being contracted and we've done that quite a few times sort of contracted out to other people either through a site like up work or through their own companies usually it's through their own company they've set up some whatever the version of an LLC is in their country and they work through that so let's see as a recent grad with a CS degree what's a good way to get some experience in the field start by just building some things on your own I'd say like just build a little bit you know get used to the idea of building a game when you go in for a junior game dev job you want to be able to say that you can put together a small game on your own and contribute to a big game that's kind of what people are looking for from a junior developer you want them to be competent enough and driven enough that they can make their own little thing it doesn't have to be an amazing game but they can also be you know actual contributors to the project when they're coming in there with new ideas or new thoughts or just being able to get the work done let's see I'm trying to catch the questions as they come by I'll just read them as I see them and what kind of thing would you make for a portfolio to make it very attractive to employers I think I hit on this a little bit earlier but I'd make small games that are different so take an existing game and modify it a little bit make it start seeming a little bit normal and then get cooler and more interesting and I'd probably stick with 2d games or small mini games you want to do things that the people can play in 60 seconds and get an idea of coz when people are looking at your resume they don't have 15 minutes to go in and play your game and understand all the intricacies or read a crapload of dialogue and quest text they're not hiring game programmers to write quest text and your quest text is not going to be exciting your story stuff is probably not going to be exciting show them interesting little gameplay things that you can demonstrate in a minute can get in and be like oh this is kind of neat and then go oh wow thirty seconds and this is really cool that's what you want to get you want to get that shocked that surprised at the 30-second mark that oh this is actually way cooler than uh than I thought it was let's see what other questions we got here should you make a mobile game or a desktop game I would go with desktop and you know if you're doing it for portfolio thing do like a WebGL one you want to just be able to send them a web browser you don't want to send them an app you don't want to send them an executable because 90% of people aren't gonna do it then if it's just a WebGL one and it's linked in your resume or your application and people can just go look at your portfolio and play the game they'll play it if you can't it probably won't and they'll skip it people don't trust random executables people don't want to grab their phone go search for your thing and install it on their phone so I'd say go for WebGL if you can I'm sure you record a video of your game maybe but I'd go for a playable version if you can how can we know if we have the programming skills required for a job is unity programming certification something companies are looking for I've never known anybody who looked at the certifications but I mean they kind of came out somewhat recently people may kind of glance at them I think that that would apply a lot more in the contracting sphere when you're doing contracts with people who aren't game developers as their primary role so you're working for those museums or other people doing the interactive things those certifications can help kind of sell you and push you over somebody else for an actual gamedev job I don't think that they matter too much but if you want to know like if you're qualified for it just I'd say usually what I what I recommend is look at the responsibilities part in fact like we could look at this one right here responsibilities and qualifications tend to be completely different the responsibilities often will tell you what the job actually does and the qualifications will tell you the list of stuff that people were able to think of when they were filling out a you list of qualifications and realize they only had two things there most of the time the stuff on the qualification section is just it's extra nonsense that doesn't really matter I've got a dog barking problem so but what I look at with the qualifications is usually the first two or three tends to be what people care about and then the rest aren't important in this case the qualifications aren't even like technical qualifications they're like hey can you deliver projects can you write and are you motivated like nobody is gonna disqualify themselves on any of these so you should look at I guess it'd be right here like on this one and I would skip that you probably us as ideally ideally means cut it probably in half like if you've worked a little bit on games and you have direct experience with unity and you have experience with iOS and/or Android development probably okay in this case I would say if you're good enough with unity like you built some games you can build mobile games and you're abled you've done some stuff for one of the two platforms probably apply a lot of time what I see is people self disqualified before you know even trying so they look at a job they'll say oh it's got all of these requirement like let's go look at another one like what do you need here optimization and you're like rendering in unity with shader lab asset pipeline emphasis on robust code mobile development there are a lot of things listed here I would say if you're at if you got that you're good probably like the the these a lot of these qualifications probably don't matter too much oh well in this one if you're actually improving the art pipeline then the shader lab part might be the most important part here and sometimes it's really hard to tell you just kind of have to guess what I recommend though is if you hit a third of the qualifications or you feel like a third of them are good just apply like go in there and give it a shot worst thing that happens is people reject you it's not like people reject you and then years later you don't get some other job because you applied for this other one so just generally if you hit about a third go for it and again worst case you have an interview interview doesn't go good and you learn and you get better in viewing the other thing I would recommend I recommend this to two people but it's kind of a I don't know if I should recommend it publicly but apply for when you're starting to apply for jobs don't apply for your dream job first apply for some jobs that you you'd be okay taking but you don't care if you get right like apply for jobs on projects that you might not find the most exciting because if they go bad and you're not gonna feel bad about it and you're gonna get better at the interview process while you're doing it so I find that if you're going in for a job that you really really want it's like the dream thing you really want to do this job you're gonna be nervous stressed and it's gonna be hard and difficult and you're not gonna have a great experience a lot of time especially if you don't feel overqualified for the job if you're going in for something that you don't really care about too much they like hey this would be a neat paycheck it could be a fun project but I don't really care it's not like the dream something like I'm working on whatever this game is go in there and just apply for it and go through that process because like said you'll be so comfortable because you don't care if you get the job so much and also don't this isn't like a if this is your only source of income this is like while you're doing something else you have some steady income go in for these other options and just feel it out and get used to the questions I've gone to so many job interviews that you just get used to seeing the same questions a lot of times people ask the same things people ask similar things and when you fail in the interview if things go wrong ask a lot of questions because what you'll find is you'll learn things that will help you in the next interview every time you go through that process you'll learn things that help in the next interview Alex just mentioned that he hates the coding part of interviews I hate the coding part of interviews too because it's always on a freaking whiteboard one thing if it is a job that you really really want to do one of the things I've done a couple times and I think it kind of works great is just figure out exactly what they're doing and see if there's something that you can provide code wise before you go in there like if they've got like hey we wanted like our big goal here is like to improve the art and animation pipeline in this case it's probably not a great example but say they've got a they want to do networking system build up a little networking system example and show it to him explain to them the cool thing about it especially if it's something that you're good at find the one of the things that you think that you're really good at that they can use and then build that up beforehand and bring it in of course you don't want to do that for all projects you know are all interviews do it for the ones word you actually find it interesting and you really care or you think that the topics fun and interesting another thing I've seen is doing game demo tests so like they'll be hey go build this little game as an example to show us how you would build it and submit that those tend to take some time but they're worth it a lot of people complain they're like oh I don't want to go build this this little demo just to apply it to come work at your job and like if you don't want to do it then by bringing on the next person who actually like wants a job and I know it kind of sucks cuz it feels like for some people feel like you're working for free but you shouldn't really think of it as working I think of it as I'm learning for free because either the thing is really easy and it's just brain-dead simple and I don't have to think about it and it's just like an hour or two of me you know screwing around and unity or something or I'm learning a new problem and finding a solution and taking it as a learning experience and also using it as a kind of a practice to hone my skills get better at it and clean things up so I can submit a really nice clean project to them and even if I don't get the job I've built this thing and it's something that I could maybe use as a portfolio item or just for fun a like a learning experience and learning new stuff is always good because it's gonna help you get the next job what do you think of socket IO suitable for transport layer and unity if you want to do an MMO in unity you need to be using UDP I don't know that I would use any pre-built systems right now I haven't seen any that that I think were perfect for it because you really want a garbage collection free UDP based system you don't want your networking layer causing garbage collection allocations on your server and freezing things up so it's not an easy thing to deal with I haven't used socket IO personally so I can't specifically speak to it but all of the existing network engines that our network systems that you grabbed for unity tend to be TCP based and they tend to allocate at least a little bit of garbage all the time so that it's building up and eventually you're gonna collect so I'd say if you really want to build an MMO first just build the game don't worry about the performance part from the beginning well if you have a team and you have the skills to do the performance part then get on it but otherwise don't don't spend all of your time thinking about the the networking layer too much if you haven't even got a game yet get the game going make sure that you're actually going to build it and then start working on optimizing it but just know that you're gonna need to swap to you probably a full UDP system that's probably custom-built and/or custom built on top of some existing libraries but I haven't seen any existing stuff that's just out there that is perfect for it there are a lot of things that will get you started this I'd start with something that gets you going and build your game make sure that it's fun and interesting before you dig in too much on optimization and stuff it's a lot of the like the micro optimization it's very easy to get into the habit of just you know making your code this low-level code really really fast and never actually building a game out of it and then the low-level code doesn't do anything just gets thrown away fund as a learning experience but not super useful as a actual gaming thing so let's see what's your experience as indie development in relation to payment versus oh it's like okay so a couple things here so there's indie companies like the smaller startups tend to pay pretty well if that's what we're going so okay compared to big corporations the smaller companies actually tend to pay well and I think that it's largely just because of supply the big companies working on super big triple-a games they have tons of people applying it's pretty easy to pick and choose who they want smaller companies are trying to get good developers and they're really fighting for it so the pay rates are dramatically higher I'd say 20 to 50 percent higher and a smaller indie startup a lot of the time working independently on your own though it varies dramatically so if it's your own game I would expect it not to make a lot of money at first especially if it's your first one it's probably not gonna make enough to sustain you long term if you have a new level of expenses I mean if you're if you're able to live cheaply you can definitely do it or if you happen to get lucky and get a big hit you can do it the contracting side of stuff also pays really well you just have to remember to negotiate your value and don't undercut yourself a lot of the time when people are contracting they will undervalue themselves under price themselves or underestimate how much work is involved in solving whatever the problem is or building the thing so you want to make sure that you kind of overestimate how hard it's going to be and maybe even overestimate your cost because it's easy to negotiate down it's a lot harder to negotiate up so start at a high point obviously if you're desperate for something you need the money then don't be so picky on it and just get the money in and then work on getting it somewhere else they'll work on a higher paying one somewhere else but yeah just overall I'd say that smaller indie companies in my experience tend to pay most and they're usually startups that are well funded that's the way it usually goes is these yeah what is this like this one right here that pays up to 175 backed by notable investors we hit like a good feeling that they've probably got a good amount of money and there are a lot of those out there let's see what other questions we got here what's better a private website or social website to publish games private website for sure make one that markets yourself advertise yourself on the site you're the only thing on the site you don't want them being confused distracted or anything else just put it up you can throw up a website for like 10 bucks a year it's relatively cheap get a domain name for it too don't be like you know Jason dot myspace com just go get a little page set it up with a nice little theme it's not too hard it's gonna take you two three days maybe at most and then start publishing out WebGL builds is what I would do along with your resume and any other experience you can put up there how long have I been dead developer it's been a very long time I don't know 15 20 years or something like that it feels doesn't feel that long but it every time I look back I just get sad because I'm getting older let's see um do you feel still think that developing an MMO is a mistake for a solo developer and a multiplayer online RPG not massive I would say don't do it as your first game right like people underestimate the amount of complication and or just complexity that comes with making your game multiplayer and online making a single like a two-player game ten times harder than making a one player game it's just dramatically more difficult I would say for your first game if you're going to be multiplayer keep it super simple if you're gonna be anything other than super simple keep it single-player so that way you can build out a relatively complex game figure out all of the systems and the way things kind of work and build it out and have fun with it before you're struggling with every time I want to add something it's a multi-day process to put in this one little thing because I have to figure out all these other networking constraints and issues so I'd say yeah I wouldn't go for a solo MMO I wouldn't try to build an MMO myself solo cuz there's just too much work even a multi even a like large-scale RPG you're gonna need designers and artists and stuff probably there are definitely some cases where you could build the build stuff without but I would say stick with a smaller scope and you want to be able to build something that you can actually finish and release because building a game that you never ship it's just disheartening it's sad like it's it you can learn a lot from it but it's nowhere near as exciting as building something and getting it out there and it's definitely nowhere near as valuable as building a game and actually releasing it so shoot shoot for things that you can get done for sure and then kind of level up from there so besides battle Oh besides new grounds what other platforms can I put up for my indie game you can use oh if it's a WebGL you can use simmered I oh it's when I've used all the time Rocco runs it or you can just sell post them on your own site WebGL ones are pretty easy to do you could also publish to Steam if it can't be WebGL it's the only 100 bucks now to publish this team you just got to go through the process and could be worth it to there's nothing bad about saying hey I've got you know two games on Steam even if they're not great games the fact that you went through the process you got the games up on Steam you've got you know approved and everything and had at least a couple people buy it download it and review is good yeah each IO is a good one - I just use similar because like Rocco and I think the site's really easy to use which is nice okay so I'm getting about three thousand a year as a unity developer with one and a half years of experience what should I do the thought of switching technology I'm not sure I understand the question I don't think switching technology is necessarily gonna make you any more money I mean depending on your area there may be just non unity jobs out there I would look at other industries though that are also using unity so I mean a lot of time we talk about game dev for unity but they're also like enterprise applications that do this outside of the contracting stuff there are car companies now using unity in their in their systems there are normally I can think of like a dozen different industries but I see them all the time like underwater exploration stuff space stuff there are a lot of things where people want to visualize things biochem there's actually a good amount of that in the area where people are using unity to represent biology stuff or chemistry in VR or in 3d so they can see it all and interact with it and see how things are gonna work and a lot of times those are again relatively simple jobs there's one part that's hard like the hard thing that's already figured out and your job is to put a visual layer on top of it those jobs are great and they tend to pay really well because there's a lot of money in those industries and the people who are already working there don't have you experience they're not building games also real estate that was another big one especially with the VR boom a lot of VR real estate companies popping up and a lot of existing real estate companies wanted to do their own VR thing where you're basically setting up scenes that look around and look at pictures I mean there's a bit of work to it but getting a job in there isn't too hard because you don't need to have some advanced experience you don't need to worry about really complicated things and they pay great because they got a ton of money Oh Jason's got a question as a unity contractor three recent companies I worked for in the medical industry Aeronautics and Museum yep art installations I totally agree I've seen a lot of people do that that and like said real estate there they're big because there's there's just a lot of money there a lot of money and there's not a lot of people doing that there are people doing other programming but not that if you know modeling in blender and you know basic programming would you build assets for your game I wouldn't just because I like to focus on one thing and I'm not so terrible at it I do have friends who do that though who will occasionally build art for their own game they still don't generally do it like full-time what they'll do is maybe they'll throw something in or put something in or make tweaks to do a thing but a lot of times I still if they're doing bigger projects have artists that are going in and creating it because creating art is time-consuming creating code is time-consuming creating code is generally much more expensive you can get art relatively cheaply online you cannot get code that's good cheaply online it's a lot easier to plug in art so you can find an artist who can make cool things and you can make little tweaks to it to make it work way way harder with code so that's why programmers tend to get paid more let's see is it wrong or look down on to use assets from the marketplace nope if you're only using assets from the marketplace it can be bad but people use assets from the marketplace all the time I'm talking about the unity asset store I assume I don't know of a developer who doesn't have dozens or hundreds of things from the asset store a lot of the most experienced developers I know have spent thousands on the unity asset store I think that's a good way that unity makes a ton of money because the engines free but a lot of people use the asset store if you're relying it's solely for your code though that would be a problem so it's good for finding solutions to things or some pre-built systems things that are difficult to do that aren't a key or core part of your game the asset store can be a good fix for that you always of course have to look at things and make sure that it's not causing other problems but um no I would say don't don't just avoid it by default or anything definitely look at it and look at look at the code in there too you can use it as a learning experience let's see what do you think of hyper casual non core games trend I think it's popular for a reason because it's easy to just grab a phone play a game for a few minutes while you're sitting waiting for something and then skip you know get back to something without having to think about it too much so I can understand where it's coming from I don't know how you get successful in it because there are so many people doing it and they go so fast you can release a hundred games a month probably you guys couldn't do that much but there are thousands of games coming out every day on the on the mobile apps or mobile app stores and a lot of them are these hyper casual games that are small clones of things I think if you've got something that's a real passion project it's gonna probably do better than a hyper casual thing but I also think that building a lot of little hyper casual games is a great way to learn because you're trying things you're restarting over and over and over and you're practicing it's like intentional practice of coding and creating new projects so if you not sure about like whether or not you should build one I would say build a couple they're fun to build they're fun to share they're easy to share with people just I wouldn't expect to get rich off of them some people are but most of those people are spending you know fifty thousand or a hundred thousand dollars a day on advertising to get to that level they're big companies with a lot of money that build some things they take the best ideas build them out slightly a better polish and then advertise the hell out of them let's see what do you think about mobile AR I've never really been too into it like I've played with it a bit I just the idea of just sitting there like with the phone up there like this looking at things it just doesn't interest me too much a part of that is probably also because I almost never leave my desk I'm always here or very rarely somewhere else unless I'm like driving and then I I shouldn't be holding up my phone so it's never been a big hit for me I'm much more excited about the idea of hololens on sunglasses so I can walk around and just get extra info about whatever I want or ask Google questions and have an answer that's for my favorite things to do I'm driving just talk to Google when somebody has a question I'll ask Google and my wife go why do you ask every time she asks me something I don't know the answer to say hey Google there they go they all lit up got a lot of them in here okay what else you got here how long have I been doing this the game programming in general like 15 years programming like 20-ish and YouTube stuff a couple of years and currently I am working on games teaching people how to make games and doing YouTube stuff and just having a lot of fun with it the one game I'm working on actively is Pantheon by the way it's an MMORPG let's see what else we got for questions would it be a good idea to sell models on the asset store and is it easy to sell there yes if you're a good artist and you can make stuff or you're just consistent and you're willing to make things right you can make a lot of money I've talked to artists who make way over six figures with art assets that they have on the store they just keep putting up new things they put up whatever they want that they think will do good and that fun doing it and the money just keeps rolling in I probably wouldn't limit to just a single source like when you've got your art done put it on the unity store probably put it on the Unreal Store or maybe some other places to make it available in a couple spots so that you're not wholly reliant on one one source for it but definitely it's something you can do that can make money what I would do is look for what you want to find our assets that a lot of people would use right don't find don't try to make things that are very like niche type things like you don't want to make notebooks right like don't make notebook models or models of a mouse or something make models of things that people like to build a lot so funny animals funny characters interesting characters weapons tend to be popular there are a lot of them out there but it's just bill they'll build things that people are searching for that you know people okay maybe we're back are we back on all right are we back sorry we got somebody's working on the internet here I can see him on the camera out there he's working on phone lines and stuff so I think it just dropped out for a second anyway yeah so work on things that people would that a lot of people will want to use don't work on rare little things and build a lot of them don't stop like don't expect the first one to be a giant hit I build just a ton of games or not ten being a ton of art assets and keep releasing them another thing that works pretty well for like the asset stores start off with a low price come in at a very low price get get a lot of reviews on it and then raise the price later so you know start with like an introductory price that's half or a quarter of what you think the actual price should be or maybe even down like 10% so you can get hundreds of reviews ideally or just dozens of them get them in there so that your asset shows up and is reviewed well but when you're doing it to make sure that you keep things clean so there's one thing I hate when I pull in a project or an asset and it's just a mess like the textures are all named weird the models are named weird none of the naming makes sense the folder structures all messed up the prefabs are missing the materials get all of that stuff right and go through the process of importing it into your project a couple times and ideally give it to a couple people and get some feedback on very specifically on the import process and the using of the assets so that you can make sure that that's as perfect as possible it'll just help with uh with reviews and purchases let's see do you think that it's better to use in-app purchases to make money with mobile games or just sell the game for an upfront cost I have no idea I've seen people do both and be successful the biggest companies tend to do lots of in-app purchases but they also tend to do lots of analytics lots of data tracking they know who's gonna buy what and what will sell and they have very specific systems built on top of that I have never been good at monetizing mobile games so in my opinion I just try to work on making the games fun and then when it comes like mobile stuff let somebody else figure out the selling because that that is very confusing for me how can I increase organic downloads on Google Play I have no idea I mean other than getting more people to install it and review it that's outside of my my wheelhouse for sure oh yeah and Jason mentioned people also prefer to buy packs of things so if you when we're talking about making art if you're building a thing and there's only one of it you don't remember like people can't use that necessarily in their game unless it matches the art style so if you build a lot of things that match and that have a similar art style it can be a whole lot easier to to sell them because I personally am the same way if I see a character I'm like oh that character is really cool but there's nothing that really matches it so it won't fit the theme or there's no environment that matches it if you can do environments and characters that match that's amazing because then people can just grab it and they can start and they start building and prototyping most people grabbing stuff on the asset store are trying to release a full game they're not trying to build some big published game they're building their own little hobby projects they're building stuff for fun they're building samples or other things that they think are interesting so you want to appeal to them and make it as easy for them to use your assets and their as possible so to start off with like a simple starter pack - that has like a lot of the fundamentals and let people buy add-ons - just keep expanding it out there's one of the things they do great at a bit Jim I always recommend their stuff - they have lots of little free things that are great but they have a ton of things that just really match with the theme so you can build an entire game around that whole theme and have it just work and look good all right let's see what other questions do we have in here all right with that internet disconnection that feel like I lost a couple let's see would you build two games in parallel one that would build in a short time and one that you put much more time into I've done that a little bit usually what happens though is that the the ones that I'm not putting a lot of time into the short-term ones tend to fully take over until I finish them and then I get back to the big one and it gets kind of hard to to manage them but I still do it it's really hard for me to stay focused on just a single project because there's so many interesting things like to do so yeah I wouldn't be opposed to it just as long as the important one is the one that you do first in the day try to get like the the first my general rule is like whatever the most important thing to do for the day is like do that first right eat shower all that and then do the important thing and then save like the the time when my brains shutting down a little bit and then work on the other things when I don't need to necessarily be at a hundred percent the thing that I can work on at seventy percent or whatever do you have a udemy course No and that's just because I know people who have stuff on udemy and it's been I've heard a lot of complaints so I never went with it it seems like it's just not an easy easier way to do it oh I've got games or courses up on my own site though it's just that game dot courses let's see um what other questions is it required to get a dev game or degree for game dev work nope not at all I think Jason answer that too like I said most of the people that I know who work in games do not have a degree in game development well what most I'd say probably half of them don't have a degree in anything the other half maybe a quarter of them have a degree in CS or something somewhat related and then the other quarter have a degree in something completely unrelated like liberal arts or political science or something else sometimes people with math degrees get interested in coding um it's in quite a few of those I got a degree in electronics it helped me when I wanted to wire up my little night so feel comfortable doing it but it doesn't help at all with the actual coding right it's not it's yeah or history or whatever like a the degree is don't tend to matter I mean and they definitely don't impact the hiring decision at least not for any game place I've ever been gang-du degree is a relatively irrelevant people care about what you've built what you can build and what you're actually going to contribute because is that before I've met plenty of people who had a degree in CS or game development or game and it never actually coated a game you'd be surprised how easy it is to go through get a full you can get a masters degree and never have written actual working code it's it's kind of amazing and just writing the code is so much faster to learn how's work/life balance as a game programmer that depends dramatically on where you are and what you care about so for me it's really never been a problem there are occasionally times when like some emergency pops up and you got a crunch on it and it can be distracting but there are also a lot of times when things are really really chill like yesterday for instance I spent almost the entire day trying to work out a couple semi emergency issues for a demo that was appearing some things popped up I didn't know about and I worked like from I don't know 8 to 8 just on fixing these things but most of the time that's not the case majority of the time it's a fun work environment where you like the people that you work with generally and everybody's pretty chill and really interested in their job it's one of the things I love working about game development or love about working in game development is that most people there really love their job and they're there not because it's some crappy job that they fell into that they hate they're there because it's the thing that they've always wanted to do and they're really excited about it and sometimes people get burned out and they don't like the project or they don't like the manager or whatever that happens all the time but you almost never find people who are in the game development industry and like oh man I really hate doing the job sometimes there are problems that people have with other things but not with the job in general usually people really are happy to be there they're excited to be there and they're doing something they love which is why I wouldn't want to do anything else right like I don't even see that with general programming with general programming I see people who like it they come in and stuff and there are occasional ones who are kind of crazy like me who just love it and would do it for fun but in most of the time you don't see web programmers going home and programming their own website just for fun game developers that's almost always the case you almost never find a game programmer a game developer who hasn't worked on some side project or isn't working on some side project for fun because they're excited or they're going home and they're just constantly working on their main project because they're so excited about it and love it let's see what programming concepts help the most when doing game dev they're a lot I mean really keeping things simple is probably the hardest one you know to keep things simple and keep things fast but not try to optimize too early and make sure that you're profiling but you generally you want to keep the code as simple as possible to get the job done and keep it clean don't don't put in hacks when when you see like quick hack here quick hack there this is another little hack like it's it's very tempting to do that and I see it all the time when people are coding it always bites you in the ass so just avoid the hacks and keep stuff clean and simple and practice a lot to have fun with the practice let's see what other stuff we got here Oh Alex mentioning it happens sometimes a standard programming kit where yeah you get into it you get really excited about it and then you fix the issue I totally I'm with you there Alex I've done that with like I said that most web developers don't do that in most enterprise I've done it myself though like where I'm like hey this is an interesting problem I just learned about this brand-new solution I remember I saw acha dotnet buddy of mine aaron was showing it off he built it on it's like a port of akka from Java and I was like oh man I really I spent a ton of time just learning it trying to figure out how how I could use it and how I could apply it to my day job I was like outside of work just constantly learning about it and can figure it out and building little apps around it because it was fun and exciting but most of the time that's not the case outside of game stuff with game stuff you'll see that for almost all of us how do you balance new learning new things and playing experimenting with things that you know I don't know I think like experimenting with things I know is a lot like learning new things that's the reason I do it I don't know one thing let me think about that I guess one thing I think is interesting with like outside of learning new things and just like building up existing skills is sharing the stuff that you're building sharing the code that you're building and getting actual feedback from other developers ideally developers who have more experience or around the same level if you're getting it feedback that like oh yeah that looks good then it's not really helpful you want to get good feedback where people are like that's interesting but I would probably do it a little bit different and then have them explain how they would do it different there's nothing better than having somebody explain how they would address the problem in a different way and then taking that and kind of absorbing it sometimes it's not always the right thing to do but most of the time you're gonna learn something there about how you're coding and maybe some shortcuts or easier ways to do things that you've been doing let's see what else we got here but if you have to choose between a solution that will work and it's messy should you just make it work that way or spend an amount of time designing a clean version it so there are edge cases where sometimes you have to have it working by five o'clock and there's no other option you get it working or it's a disaster in that case put your hack in and then clean it up tomorrow like don't leave it messy and dirty because it's just gonna exist it's not gonna save you time it feels like you're saving time you save a little bit at first and then it's gonna cost you a ton more time later I wish I had my little technical debt chart got it printed out somewhere I I think it fell I don't know but I have this little chart just shows kind of the downsides of technical debt because you know it's easy to put it in hacks early and stuff goes really really fast but as you put in more hatch things flatline or things slow down or things even start going backwards where your code just gets worse see there's that technical debt this is a really cool little chart that showed it ah this isn't it is it Bob Martin I can't remember I have to find it images yeah like this this is the one you can pull it up here okay terrible at making an image fullscreen let's see let's just save it and open it way too many button clicks here just to get a big picture on here but here's that here's that charters talking about so see like the what is this this is the I don't even right this is the speed basically so I'm doing a terrible job of explaining this I knew Chris on here to explain it I'd basically what happens though is that as you build things and hack stuff together you can put things together really quick your your speed goes up fast and you're getting a lot of as you're building up technical that you're getting some business by this is not the image that I was looking for where's that where's that payoff one I don't know there are a lot of them out here just read about technical debt I'll do a video about it I feel like I'm doing a terrible job of explaining it but generally as you put in the hacks stuff slows down where's the one that showed the oh here here we go technical debt and productivity so you start off with very high productivity and everything gets fast and then as the debt builds up if you're not paying that off and paying off technical debt is really just cleaning your code getting rid of the hacks making things clean simple and solid so if you're not paying that off eventually your productivity level starts to drop and like I said sometimes it'll leave and turn around and kind of go in reverse where you're losing more value than you're gaining as you're building things because everything that you do requires you to work in around some other hack and you've got to constantly add them in and every change you make requires a dozen more changes suddenly ideally when you're adding things to your project when you're adding functionality you don't want to have to touch any existing classes that's like the ideal situation is like I want to add new functionality create a new class implement some interface and I'm done that's it and that just works and as you know maybe a page and that gives me my new bit of functionality that's what you want to go for it's obviously not always the case or to make a lot of cases where you still have to go in and mildly adjust things especially if you're not in a released project but you want to shoot for that you want to shoot for there's a little technical debt as possible and constantly be addressing it if you're never addressing it it builds up and becomes a nightmare and everything breaks when you try to fix it let's see um somebody saying thanks you're very welcome thank you for that I'm an indie dev but I only made $100 I have no idea how to market what's the most important marketing strategy other than social media I'm not personally very good at marketing games but the best recommendations I've heard are to build up the audience long before the game is out build it up while you're working on it don't keep it secret so share what you're doing share what you're building get feedback early and let the community not just help you develop the thing and help you design it but also help you market it along the way if you build that following up for the game before it comes out it's a whole lot easier to market then you say hey I've got a game that's out along with the other 5,000 games out there again I'm not very good at it that's not the kind of thing that I'm experienced at but that's the best idea that I've heard the best recommendation is let's see what else we got do you have any advice on hiring freelance programmers to help build a game you're working on look at what they've built before okay there are a lot of options out there for hiring developers I would say if you understand the code and you can read code get copies of a project that they can share if they don't have anything they can share that's kind of a downside is probably an issue you're probably not gonna find great quality code if they have something they can share look through the code and see if it's something that you're gonna be okay with a lot of the time it's kind of a crapshoot you got to look and see like you could find a great developer who's gonna do really clean stuff that really works great or you could find someone who's gonna fill up your project with technical debt and make it impossible so that the next time you bring on another programmer they go oh yeah this all needs to be scrapped it's all not useful it's very very hard to hire programmers if you're not a programmer though I think it's hard to do a good job of it at least I'd also ask other programmers to vet them if you happen to know some that you can ask and have them just kind of vet the existing code or the submitted code that they're applying with let's see what else guy would you share your game development on YouTube when learning yes yeah I would share it there's no reason not to there's no downside to sharing what you're working on as long as you're not breaking an NDA or doing something that's gonna get you sued unless yeah most most people's code is all the same there's nothing special about it nothing secret very few people have something that's you know worth hiding and not sharing I would just share it share away let people see what you're doing let people learn from it and let people get excited about it let's see Jason's answering some good questions about a about working in EU which is great and mentioning meetups too that's another thing if you're looking for a job in the industry you just want to get into game development I I recommend it to people all the time most people still don't do it which is why it works so well go to meetups look for unity meetups in the area and don't don't just go once go regularly go every time by the time you become a regular you'll have a job there you'll know people that are hiring there you go there and just loosely get into conversations be nice don't don't overpower the conversations or anything just kind of listen ask questions occasionally talk a little bit but you'll meet people there who are hiring there's never a unity meetup where there aren't people who either their company is hiring or they're hiring or they know somebody is hiring usually it's all of the above the meetups that I go to there are literally papers on the table with all of the job openings at the place that's hosting it they're like hey we're hiring and they want developers who are interested enough to go to these meetups they want developer who are really into unity and want to learn these new things these new topics that usually you go there and it's like somebody's presenting talking about something the last one I went to I was talking about unit testing and they want people who are interested in learning these things and you'll pick up new skills you'll meet new people and getting a job is so much easier that way it's very very easy to get a job I turned down jobs that meet ups all the time because there's just so much opportunity there but you gotta go you have to go and you have to go regularly and you got to talk to people you can't just go sit there not say anything but you don't have to talk a lot just gotta go there and just know chat a little bit get into casual conversations you don't have to know anything about it sometimes a lot of the people that go there like fresh out of college are still in college and still getting jobs if the nearest meetup is far far away drive like this what I do right now I live pretty far away the meetups I'd generally go to a drive like hour hour and a half to get to because they were the bigger more interesting ones and I still do the same like it's it takes up time like it's not no time for you thing but it should be fun too usually they're a good time like you go there it's really interesting and you learn stuff also code camps in Southern California we've got a lot of those too a good place to meet people and meet other developers or less unity specific ones or game specific ones but they're they're pretty good it's definitely a lot easier to meet people too and get job recommendations out of meetup than it is at something like a big game conference where there's too much stuff going on in too many people so look for the smaller local things if you can find them would you take a job where you could not use unreal or unity and would be building games like casino games probably not I mean you could but I wouldn't want to kick a job in a custom engine just because you're gonna spend all of your time and years working on a scale set that's not really relevant outside of there there some places where it makes sense like oh yeah it's got their own engine daybreak has their own engine there's lots of places that have their own engines but if that's all you know it's a bit harder to transition and especially if it's not a big gaming engine your skillset it's you're just learning things that don't really apply outside of that job makes it a lot harder to transfer jobs and it I would go for something in a more popular engine if you can find it how do you calculate the value of your game how expensive should it be I yeah I think you just have to do a price comparison based on what other games are out there with average prices for things like that it's not an easy question to answer a game designer doesn't seem like an entry-level position what's an entry-level position that can lead to game design so game design is very very hard to get into at an entry-level and that's because there are a lot of people who want to do it and it's very very hard to practice and train for it a lot of the time people come in to game design through the QA department or something else similar where they want to do something in the game industry so they'd get a job that's easier to get there and then they just make it known that they're transitioning and a lot of the time people in the company will be looking internally for people who have those skills also work on you can practice some game design of your own design your own games and things like RPG Maker where you can build out a whole game and show the design and show the interesting things you also need to be able to talk really well about games but I'd say the best thing to do for a game designer is lots of networking you need to meet people talk to people play games with people talk to people about the games and how they work what makes them interesting what makes them fun and you got to know about a lot of things you can't just go in and saying hey I want to be a game designer I play these three games you should know about a lot of different games a lot of genres a lot of what makes them interesting and fun because if you can have those conversations with people it's a lot easier to get in also if you know where you're applying for a game design position figure out who you're going to interview with figure out what games they've worked on play their games I mean I'm the best game designers I know they go and they're applying for something not only are they gonna they're gonna look at what everybody on the team has worked on and play all of those games get familiar with them enough to be able to talk about them they're also going to play the crap out of that they're applying for they're gonna come in with lots of feedback that's logical and make sense not complaints but feedback on easy ways to improve things because they're gonna ask like how would you fix the game what would you change what would you make better and point out the things that people are complaining about and possible ways to address them stuff like that you really want to play them non-stop like my buddy Salim he does this all is that when you go in for jobs he plays play again for like a month and he'd play like eight hours a day all of his spare time getting good at whatever OS so he could really talk about the game beforehand and you definitely have to get looks it's harder to get into if you go in through QA or something it's much easier if you go in through programming it's even easier but it's harder to make that switch from programming to design because the second you try to do it you realize that it's a giant pay cut and oh maybe I don't okay I'm gonna take a couple more questions and then I gotta gotta get rolling but I'm gonna do a full video on this stuff sometime this week too I think let's see would you build an on games and then put them in your portfolio um I say if you already have non game stuff done then sure put them in there but I wouldn't just go out there and build necessarily build non game things unless you're applying for something very specifically related to it like you're you want to build you know interactive museum things maybe make a couple of those as examples even put them on to a big display and show what that looks like and all that kind of stuff but in general I just built the games you know if you're doing new things but yeah and like Justin said everything you make should go on your portfolio as long as it's good enough if it's not good enough if it looks bad doesn't play well or it's buggy don't put it on there because you don't want to give a bad impression you want to give a good impression or just fix it up so that it is good and recommendations on clean code I like it all oh yeah and Jason also mentioned people get picked up from game communities where they're doing mods and stuff that's another good way to practice game design to doing game mods it's a fun interesting way to do it where you're gonna have to learn a little bit about coding but you're also going to be learning a lot of the practical implementation inside where you're putting things in you're changing the way that the game works adding assets adding new behaviors and functionality in there or just writing little scripts that change the way the game works I highly recommend doing that would you recommend learning graphics programming to make us a better game developer um yeah it definitely will make you a better game developer depending on the type of thing that you want to do it's it can be a big focus or very light thing that you do a lot of the time what I see for game developers just most are okay with the graphics I'd good with the gameplay side or really good with the graphics side and okay with the gameplay side it's rare that people are really good at both because they're somewhat different skills somewhat different thinking but you definitely can do it and I wouldn't I wouldn't say you shouldn't do it I think definitely should but if you want to do all like if you want to be just a graphics programmer who just focuses on that stuff those jobs definitely exist and they pay pretty well they're just less of them available because there's usually Oh one or two on a team and then there are a lot of other programmers doing the rest of this stuff so it's yeah it's a good thing to do it's definitely good especially if you're on a smaller team you definitely need to get really good with the graphic side and even if you're not really good with it you should still understand it and be able to work your way around it okay I would like to make a small game studio but I feel as though I would like to learn more programming knowledge well your mastermind architect course be a good way to start um I would think so I also have the game dev course that comes with that and I think it's a good way to start but you have to ask other people who've done it too I mean I know people who've done it and liked it and did well and got into the game industry started their jobs but yeah if not let me know if you sign up and it doesn't turn out that way let me know and that's then you refund see what other questions we got gonna go for like five more minutes and I think I need to hop in the car I think I'm already late for a meeting well totally lost track of time I realized when I talk on these things I'll just keep talking and talking you got any other questions Oh besides your YouTube videos besides your videos in YouTube how to stay motivated for solo devs for me it's all about just pushing things out releasing games and releasing things that you're working on showing other people what you're working on doesn't have to be on YouTube can just be your friends your kids whatever your parents whoever is available show them what you're doing and as you start to get the experience of oh that's cool Wow it's super motivating like that at least for me like having people play the things and seeing what you're doing it goes a big big way also don't don't try to build things that are impossible or too big I always try to shoot for things that you know you can get done and get those done first obviously big lofty things are great but you don't want to do big lofty things that you're never gonna finish you have to get the the things that you want to get done or that you can get done and can release those are what I'd work on ya and watching other devs that's always fun too and just chatting with other devs join some groups join some meetups talk to other people about your progress if you know a group of game developers or something I'd highly recommend if you happen to know no three four other game developers set up a weekly call where you guys hop on chat for an hour about game development how things are going how your projects are going what problems you're running into and help each other along the way it doesn't I would say keep it simple keep it short and low pressure you want to make it so that it's something you can keep doing I do these um I have a couple of these every week where there are calls I just get on I talk to people about things that we're working on that are related and we just discuss them and help each other out give each other advice and it also is a great motivator because like hey I want to have my thing to show at the at my next call next week I want to you know okay yeah I did this part and this is it and if I got stuck you know usually after a while people get comfortable start motivating you and talking about it if you don't know people that can do that just find some just start reaching out looking for people hop on discord I got a discord server I'll put the link in here something and then or hop on anybody else's game to court server and just look for people who you can set something up Oh with that like that's what I would do references and unities are a good way to manage it especially with the strategy pattern for non monobehaviour classes references so a lot of the time you recommend is the flyweight pattern there and we'll just reference back to a single thing depending on the type of thing sometimes I won't even reference a specific thing like thinking of MMO development specifically I don't even keep a reference to this specific thing ever I'll just keep references to IDs and pull those from a cache every time I need them because they'll change constantly and I want to be able to reload and modify them without having to keep a reference to an object around best thing though with at least flyweight pattern where you're not duplicating memory and not creating copies of everything for every instance of an object that you create I'm not sure that I covered the question great but what about building a free game and sell assets that you used in it I've seen people do it I think that usually it's because they built the game and the games not selling well so then they're trying to sell the assets it's probably not the most profitable way to do it you probably make a lot more money just selling the assets if you're making the art and assets I'd go that way and then maybe build your game for fun too but if you really want to make money off of the assets you've got to go in more of a you got to go in thinking about building things that people will want to buy for you know ten thousand games or a hundred thousand games not just for one specific type of game that you're building if you're building like a first-person shooter that's a common theme then maybe that just works but I wouldn't say that I would build the game first if you want to do asset sales thoughts on ECS I think it's cool exciting I'm interested to see where it goes in 2020 still not really using it in anything just because it's still changing still getting tweaked and I assume that by the time I actually start implementing ECS related things into a project it will be dramatically different than it is now I don't have any specific for it on anything that I'm working on and I said it's still a little bit early so I'm just not really diving too much into it played with it a bit I think it's neat the performance benefits can be amazing and I'm curious to see how much of that just gets wrapped into the engine as well so that I don't have to write any entity specific code or less entity specific code and it just kind of all works but I think it's an interesting thing to learn about I think you should be at least congenitally aware of how it works go through a demo or two or a project or two and just build something out like when we played with it and made like a really simple little simulator don't try to make a game I wouldn't necessarily go that way just make like a little simulation that shows things and shows kind of some of the neat things that you can do with it and some of the benefits of it just so you can understand it but I wouldn't think like hey I need to make a big switch to it yet and yeah it is hard to create interactions between things in ecs or at least it was the last time that I worked with it a lot of systems still weren't quite hooked up and they've they keep changing it because they're just iterating right there publicly iterating which i think is great like it's you know people sometimes complain like oh it's like alpha and I hate when unity releases alpha stuff I love it because what they're doing is exactly like what I would recommend with the game they're getting it out they're getting it in front of people getting feedback and adapting to that feedback and they're doing it relatively fast so they're making it better if they just built it you know in a silo buying in some cube and nobody saw it and tell they're like hey it's shipped it's done people wouldn't use it right it wouldn't come out the way that people wanted it'd be hard to use and it probably wouldn't make a lot of sense for most people's projects the way they're doing it now makes a ton of sense because everybody gets the opportunity to try it learn from it and see what other you know what changes need to be made let me see if I can switch my OBS back I'm not even showing anything on my desktop okay I'll read one last question and then I gotta get going is it possible to make money on a game that has no advertising until after a release oh is it impossible to probably not impossible I think it's just dramatically harder I think if you're advertising your game before release and you're building up the hype it's gonna be a lot easier to make money I mean I've released games with a really short timeline and had didn't even plan on really and maybe made plenty of money on them but it's not a common thing and those would be our specific so it was a nice niche market that made it simple to get in early yeah I would say try to try to get pre-orders try to get people if you can build it for Steam get it on the wish lists as much as possible and get the hype out there long before gonna do it a year before you're releasing don't wait until like a month before you release to try to build up the hype there just start working on it right away and that's what every big company does and they do it for a reason because it works so you want people excited about it you don't want people surprised like Oh some new thing came out never heard of it maybe I'll check it out later you want to be like oh this is coming out next week I'm excited to try it that's that's the hype you want to get going all right I'm gonna drop out I said I think I'm late and I gotta get going but I'm gonna say thanks for everybody don't forget to hit the like button on your way out or share it or something if you don't mind and yeah thanks again appreciate it I'll do a full video on this stuff later and just release it answering as many of these questions and all the salary related stuff as I can alright bye everybody

Channel: Jason Weimann

Views: 37,234

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Id: AmdvhhVMQnI

Length: 99min 6sec (5946 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 27 2019