How You Got Into The Industry

I’ve heard so many horror stories from Climax...

Every games industry job above a tester will claim it needs industry experience, honestly if they’re not specific about what experience is required (ex: 4 years as a designer, MMO experience, shipped 2 titles), it’s often fluff and you may have success anyway – especially with tangible modification experience. And yeah, if all else fails go in at the bottom and work your way up. I’ve seen testers join towards the end of a project, and move up the ladder quite rapidly. Just realise that you won’t be bumped up automatically, and still need to promote yourself internally (where it’s much easier).

My parents have always been supportive of working in the industry, but if I’d wanted to tarmac drive-ways for a living they’d probably be behind me all the way.

Quote from Taylor

I’ve heard so many horror stories from Climax...

Please, continue.

Climax are a pleasure to work for ... infact have a guess what, so are EA!! unless your the kind of person who lets bad things happen to you and then blame somebody else for it

you worked for EA? nearly everybody I know who worked there said it was the worst time of their life

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It combines programming lessons, art lessons, marketing and design

Sorry to potentially dampen your expectations, but the diversity of the course's curriculum is setting off alarm bells. It takes a lot of time and dedication to get a solid grasp on any one of those listed disciplines, so I am rather sceptical as to whether the course will make you employable; it sounds fun, but I'd be worried.

I've programmed for about 6 years in total now (C/C++, C# and some scripting languages), and although I'm competent, I've got a long way to go. I've level designed for 8 and I still feel like I have a huge amount to learn; same deal goes for design & modelling. If your course touches on all of these disciplines, then you may not get much further than dipping your toe in the water and getting a flavour of what you might like to specialise in -- something you could potentially do at home in your own time.

I would look into the course's content and, crucially, the percentage of graduates who secure jobs in the games industry in a technical discipline (programming, art, design). If they cannot answer your questions or the results are not encouraging, I would look elsewhere. Sorry to sound so pessimistic, but there's a lot of crap games courses out there. A lot of them basically just take an existing course and jam computer games content in there to get bums on seats without actually making the graduates employable.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/i ... tream-news

http://www.edge-online.com/blogs/david- ... rites-edge

partially i agree with defrag: doing all this stuff in like 3-4 years won't make you a professional. but if this wasn't what you were looking for then it's fine! the first thing every so called programmer learns, is that actually typing code is only like 10% of your work. the rest is thinking of how to make a project come real. a lot of time can be spent in making UML diagrams.

anyway: i wish you fun with the course and that you can still find the time to advance in your spare time!

I'd actually say that design is overrated in many circles (by design I mean having a more or less ideal paper design and then trying to implement it). Jeff Atwood's blog has some nice bits and pieces, and this is something I wholly agree with. I generally write down a load of ideas/constraints and bash out a rough design, then get going. By the time I'm done, I've usually iteratively diverged from the original design in response to unforeseen problems anyway.

I'm very interested in design patterns or looking at how other people tackled similar problems, though Just not a huge fan of very formal design.

that's why i said a lot of time CAN be spent on UML i also prefer hacking some code and then think again and probably tidy it up.

one thing is I didn't had to do the military service or alternative service and so I'm a year younger than everyone else in the course I suppose so I can still quit next year and still be avg age to start with another study path (I don't think I'll do but it's an option I still got).

http://www.mas.h-da.de/Digital_Media_Study_Programme/9http://www.mas.h-da.de/Digital_Media_-_Fields_of_Practice

Good luck, for sure you're going to have allot of fun What I would do is join a few good mods teams once you are sure of the specific job you enjoy doing. The people who win in life do the most work or get very lucky

A good mod release and a degree would be the hard work done.

I worked on a couple of mods before but nothing too big (on my end - Move In! and Black Mesa are both pretty kick ass but my contribution was minor compared to the size of the mods). But yes I'm working on two smaller projects right now (only maps but with full custom-content hopefully) and might join into a big mod-team again...