Should You Be a Game Developer?

hey what's up I'm Jason and today we're gonna talk about why you should be a game developer I've been doing game development for about 15 or 20 years now and I really loved it and I've seen a lot of the cool benefits that come along with being a game developer and really experience what it's like and I want to share that with you and tell you why if you've been thinking about it thinking hey maybe I want to get into game development maybe that would be fun maybe I should change careers why I think you probably should and I'll knock out some of the misconceptions and things that people think might stop them from doing it so let's get going the first thing that I want to talk about because I think it's really relevant today is just job stability when you're a game developer and by developer generally mean the programming side of it where you're doing the programming and maybe a little bit of the design and stuff but when you're doing the code you are very stable in your job I've seen a lot of people getting laid off recently a lot of people getting furloughed and just being out of work game developers especially on the programming side are not seeing that problem there are still of course some that are getting laid off but most of those are related around existing business problems not stuff that's related to just the global economy when the economy goes bad people get laid off people go home people play games lots of people still have to build games I don't anticipate or see a time when building games stops happening now let's talk about stability though inside the company so say you're in a game company and this is a hundred percent from experience you're in a game company and the game company is gonna lay off twenty percent of the people that work there right they're like hey we need to do a big cut we're laying off twenty percent of our people first thing they do every time that I've seen it done is they exclude the entire programming or engineering team it might take one or two people that they've wanted to get rid of for a while and just kind of include them in there so they can get rid of that person but they do not generally pull from that pool of people pull from the pool of people right they're gonna pull the designers artists unfortunately in QA and staff and even management you're more likely I would say to see your manager get fired than yourself get fired as a game program or at least when it comes to firing because of financial reasons if it's bad performance or whatever obviously and get fired for that but you're still a lot safer as a programmer and the biggest reason there is that you're just hard to replace because the experience on the team pays and well makes a huge huge difference a programmer that's been on your team for three years is a whole lot more valuable than a programmer who's never seen your code so let's go on to the next thing though so what happens if you are working in suddenly you get laid off right you're you're working this awesome game job and there's only one game company in your city and you get laid off well not a problem because if you can code you can write game code you can write non game code and it's generally easier I wouldn't I don't know that I would like to say it this way but I would say the game programming is in general quite a bit harder than non game programming just overall obviously there are different parts you can have easy game programming and really hard high-level or hard core stuff that's non game stuff and it makes mesh but overall game programming requires us to do some things that we don't have to do necessarily in non game jobs especially around performance and things just get kind of easy so it does translate really well into tens of thousands a hundreds of thousands of millions of jobs out there that are for non game stuff web stuff enterprise jobs or even jobs that are doing enterprise-d things inside a game image and there are tons of them out there so you still have that extra layer of stability but let's say you're in the game industry and you're actually at a game job what's that like well it's usually a lot of fun and that's just because you're working on video games now if you're working on video games that you really don't like or you have no interest in there's something boring like it's a maybe it's a casino game or something I can see it's not gonna be nearly as much fun you're still gonna have a little bit more fun than I would say in a normal corporate environment corporate programming environment but it's not gonna be as fun overall though it's still gonna be fun right you're gonna have a blast just because you're working with other game designers and coworkers who have similar interests and this is I think kind of one of the other things that I really want to talk about with the people that you work with are gonna make it fun because you're gonna find that you have similar interests and this is a weird one because and think about when you go to work at I don't know some company that does health care stuff and you're doing web stuff for a health care company the other people that are there aren't there because they have this special passion about web stuff and health care they're not there because you guys share like this interest in like oh yeah we really love this webinar for this web framework and we really love health care stuff or you know whatever some kind of doctor there because it's a job and they're doing it because they want the money with gamedev jobs everybody generally tends to really love video games and you're gonna find that you have very similar hobbies and similar interests to people at least relative to non-game jobs I've worked a lot of non-game jobs and a lot of game jobs and I found that almost every time like at the game jobs almost everybody is kind of like a group of people that hangs out they know each other they kind of are pretty friendly and then the enterprise side it's these very small little cliques or like two or three people that hang out and then nobody else talks to each other cuz they just don't have these common shared interests outside of work there's nothing to talk about but in here in game industry you just talk about video games all the time and everybody's into it and speaking of just talking about work or talking to people about work when you work on video games you generally have cool stuff that you can actually share and show off like I've worked in enterprises before and I could build these cool little tools that do really valuable stuff that might save millions or tens of millions or whatever make us lots of money but I can't show it to my kids or my wife or if I do they're gonna know oh it's a weird-looking ugly form who cares but if I make a video game I can not just show it to them I can have them in there and play it I can show it to other people and people are excited and impress all the time and it's just kind of a fun feeling of course it's not the only reason to go do it but it's one of many now I want to talk about something that I think is really important and it's the fact that getting into game development is something that you actually can do it's the kind of thing that you can learn to do right now from home you don't have to wait you don't have to be a math wizard you don't even really have to pass the math class if you can multiply and divide you're good assuming you can add and subtract too you don't need to go get a big yes degree you don't need to go to school for four years or six years you can literally start today you can start just by building a game this afternoon or this evening or throughout the week I actually have a three hour tutorial we can go through and build an Angry Birds clone you can build it shoot your bird off go knock down some pigs and have a lot of fun you can really get started with this stuff at home there's a ton of information out there available when I got started it wasn't nearly as easy but I still did it kind of this way I did a lot of research a lot of looking online experimenting and figuring it out as I went and a lot of game developers are kind of the same way we just figure out what the problem is we figure out what it is we want to build and then just start searching asking questions searching searching searching and then figure it out as you go it's not like being a doctor where if you mess up or you want to experiment you might kill somebody or cause some serious pain or being a mechanic where you hey you might break somebody's car or kill them or cause a lot of damage the turnaround for our iteration and testing is instant we can test things and know whether or not it broke and if it breaks it just means that we got to restart our program that's it literally there's no harm there's no risk and it's really really easy to get started there's a ton of information out there you know I'll link some stuff down below if you want to go just learn more about how to get started but there's absolutely no reason that you can't get started at home right now as long as you have an internet connection and a computer of some sort that can run a game engine like unity now on the topic of being easy to learn I also wanted to mention that when you have a hobby that's also the thing that you're working on so you're working on like I really like game development and I work on game development like as a hobby and do it as my job you're going to get better a lot faster it's just like anybody who is like a mechanic and they like working on cars for a hobby and they're just constantly doing it if you're constantly exercising that skill even outside of work because you enjoy it so much you're going to get a lot better at it and this really just kind of leads into I think the most important thing which is that you're going to hopefully love going to work you should love your job as a game developer if you don't love your job as a game developer try to fix it a little bit and then if you can't fix it get a new one because there are a lot of game development jobs out there and it should be a really fun thing to do that you should get excited to go to work upon know on like when I've worked on non game projects it's extremely rare that I'm like excited to go into work and like do this commit or do this build and see what's gonna happen for the day there maybe it's some weird edge case where like I'm trying out some new technology and I'm excited about that for a day but with game development it's almost daily it's like you go in you make this thing you show it to people everybody's excited and you have a blast with it now before I wrap this up there was one last thing that I want to talk about but I wanted to just remind everybody to don't forget to hit the like button share this video and subscribe and all that stuff it really does help I really appreciate it and it just helps the channel grow and helps more people see this kind of stuff and learn and become better game developers I also wanted to say special thanks to everybody on patreon who will probably scroll here or somewhere I don't know I'll leave that up to editing but thank you very much or do appreciate it you guys are awesome and I want to jump into the last thing that I really want to talk about here which was remote jobs for game development have been really prevalent in the last couple weeks and just picking up but I would say over the last 10 years it's been a big growing trend where I've seen a lot of remote game development jobs just become available especially with the smaller studios because they don't want to have to pay for office space and they can save a lot of money just hiring somebody who lives somewhere else and don't have to relocate them don't have to bring them in every day and they can hire talent from anywhere in the world and it doesn't really make a difference having the person come in and sit in the seat there doesn't matter if everybody's got the hardware at home and hardware is cheap it's prevalent everybody's got it so there's no reason that people need to go in for some special thing anymore and because of that I think that no matter where you are no matter what it is you're doing if you're thinking about getting into game development you've been thinking like hey maybe that would be fun maybe one day I'll be a game developer I'll just keep working this job or you know I don't have the time to do it right now everybody's got the time right now pretty much just think about it and spend some time and maybe just cut out an hour two hours a day and just dive in get started with it try it out and you might find out that hey you love it it changes your life and suddenly going to work is not a terrible boring thing at all it's a fun exciting thing that you can't wait to do and you love your job and you're having a blast at it so that's why you should be a game developer and that's I mean that's why I'm a game developer I love it I can't imagine doing anything else and I I can't think of anything else I would recommend people do Oh get on it

Channel: Jason Weimann

Views: 61,965

Keywords: gamedev, unity, unity3d, unreal, game developer, game programmer, game design, game designer, game development, indie gamedev, programming, how to make games, game dev, indie game devlog, making games, game programming, unity 3d, development, brackeys, games, video games, unity tutorial, devlog, how to make a game, video game, blackthornprod, game, 2020, nintendo switch, fun, unity game dev, game industry, games industry, quill18, unity3d college, sykoo

Id: oQbjDq9SBRc

Length: 11min 40sec (700 seconds)

Published: Mon May 11 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/already_seen]

Short answer: no. Long answer: yes.

[u/AutoModerator]

This post appears to be a direct link to a video.

As a reminder, please note that posting footage of a game in a standalone thread to request feedback or show off your work is against the rules of /r/gamedev. That content would be more appropriate as a comment in the next Screenshot Saturday (or a more fitting weekly thread), where you'll have the opportunity to share 2-way feedback with others.

/r/gamedev puts an emphasis on knowledge sharing. If you want to make a standalone post about your game, make sure it's informative and geared specifically towards other developers.

Please check out the following resources for more information:

Weekly Threads 101: Making Good Use of /r/gamedev

Posting about your projects on /r/gamedev (Guide)

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/LINKseeksZelda]

I dont like how he makes it seem like you can just call up the nearest game studio and get a job.

[u/Robcard]

game dev youtubeer or terrible influencer.

just like all the poor people want to try and play basketball or running as a job.

they all fail, except for like 10 people.

dont expect to survive doing those kind of jobs. but if you enjoy them as a full time life consuming hobby, well, at least you can say you enjoyed it.