Do you enjoy your job in the games industry?


    Feel good story of the year


    plz make this into a movie

    Quote from Castle

    I have been in the industry for so long now I dont even remember everything I worked on. I am happy to be doing what I love to do and in all honesty lately I have been more afraid that I'll end up unemployed for a long time again which was more soul crushing than working on a bad game. And I have worked on some bad games before let me tell you lol... None of it compared to having to push shopping carts at walmart while looking for work. During the interview they showed some of the games that they sold in the electronics department and one of them was Call Of Duty Black Ops and for some reason I pointed and said I worked on the first one. I am not sure why I bothered to mention it but nobody believed me anyway. None of those people were able to understand that there is a world outside of that place.


    I had a guy talking during break with someone else talking about how he wanted to learn Unity but he messed around with Fallout modding. I mentioned that I worked on a couple really big mods for New Vegas. He said "Don't you push shopping carts?" I told him I had been working on games for a living for more than 10 years and he gave a sarcastic smile to his buddy like I was full of shit then continued talking about this one time he loaded up Unity.


    *sigh* I'm more worried about experiencing shit like that again.

    Holy shit that's a sick story, never heard anyone else had that experience before. Why the heck would you lie about working on a video game?! Gotta work harder so I don't need to push dem' carts.


    Quote from Em

    Let's all go indie and make our mapcorean game.


    Joke aside, I would really like to start a personnal project with other people.

    That's an interesting thought though, I wonder what'd happen if the full strength of mapcore went together and did something, probably some kind of universe collapse of awesomeness.

    I have read all the posts; this thread is heavy on info.


    As someone who is on the outside and was never part of the gaming industry, I was under the "rosy" impression that the inside, at least most of it, was all fun and games, with "rainbows and butterflies". Reading many of the comments was interesting and revealing.


    If it's any consolation, what everyone stated and experienced at some times is actually shared across all industries: burn-out after prolonged work cycles at the same place, crunching and stressing at important work milestones, motivation dwindeling over time, creativity curbed by strict working rules, having an a$$hole boss who does not understand your work or makes you feel under-appreciated, $hitty co-workers/work attitude, toxic workplace/management, etc...


    In case you're wondering, yes I have gone through all these in different places that I worked at during the past 12 years, whether it be a large multinational manufacturing facility or a small family business.


    Most of the replies I read imply that everyone likes what they do (the concept of designing games and related disciplines) and would not trade it for another job; the problem lies with where you perform the work (the company).


    If you're genuinely not happy at one place, it's high time to take a break and go for another place; change is always necessary to shake things up, break the status quo, open up new horizons and allow you to grow as a human being. There is absolutely no sense in remaining in a place you loathe for the sake of "alleged" social security: the mental and moral "damage" you will incur from staying at that place far outweighs the financial benefits if they are present. It is a bit more difficult to do so when you have a family to support but it is still doable.


    Good luck to everyone searching for greener pasture


    Haha!

    Curiously, I wonder whats up with this "You will never amount to anything" stuff. Like is there some kind of glass ceiling I am not aware of? A lot of people get into this idea that if you are working minimum wage or in the service industry its indicative of your actual value in society. In reality, there are way too many factors to determine what someone is actually capable of.

    Right now just about anyone can take up insane things like robotics and 3D printing for example and receive almost zero relevant help from school because the classes either suck or just dont exist yet and potentially become a made-up-number-air. Its the exact same thing I experienced a long time ago when getting into the game industry. I was actually told that I will grow out of wanting to play with computers. There were zero classes to teach game design in the college I was at. When asking about them starting classes for game design I was pretty much laughed at.


    This was Rockland Community College in new york in the late 90s. Now that I am back in the same area it might be amusing to see how much things have changed on this front and if I can be lucky enough to find the same staff who I talked with back in the day. That would actually be insanely amusing to me now that I think about it. LOL

    Quote from Sjonsson

    Holy shit that's a sick story, never heard anyone else had that experience before. Why the heck would you lie about working on a video game?! Gotta work harder so I don't need to push dem' carts.


    This a misnomer. I wasn't necessarily in that situation due to laziness. This was a hard lesson in what can happen if you are not very good at two very important things.


    1. Selling yourself

    2. Networking


    I am in a situation where I spent ALL of my time working and zero of my time putting myself out there. I didn't go to the parties and meet people in my relevant industry. I didn't keep my portfolio out there and I didn't make sure to have a presence. I still suck at job interviews on top of that. So I mean, while the post I put up may incite pity to some extent, I look back on it as both a hard lesson and just how quickly you can fall out if all you spend your time on his honing your art. There is actually a time when going out to have a beer with industry people for a fun night is better than learning how to get better at what you do. I am paraphrasing but its actually true.


    Thanks for sharing that, I always think about skill level in a prestigeful way and it feels like other juniors like me tend to do the same. Definitely gonna keep that in mind.

    Currently I'm a Junior at Jagex. Do I enjoy my job? Eh. It's had lots of ups and downs...


    It started out pretty well as it was my first time in the industry and my first time living away from home. Everything was all new and shiny. For the first 9 months or so, I enjoyed what I was doing as I was just working on maps with a bunch of direction from my lead and other peeps. It was genuinely awesome.


    But then things went shitty. First off, our lead left without a replacement. Then I was thrown onto a part of the project that was horribly mismanaged as higher ups didn't know what the fuck they wanted resulting in a constant cycle of redoing work over and over and over again, whilst doing overtime, of course. To top it all off, there was the 3 month period where I had literally nothing to do, which was hugely demotivating...but I at least managed to spend that time learning to write random random things in C# / Unity such as tools and a visual scripting system.


    Currently, I see my job as something I just have to get over and done with. Don't get me wrong - I still think it's awesome that I get to make the vidya games, but for a long time I've felt undervalued, unchallenged, and - well - simply bored.


    I guess the saddest thing from all this is that I no longer have the motivation to work on levels in my spare time and I often question whether there is much of a future for me in the industry.


    *shrug*

    Quote from Psy

    I guess the saddest thing from all this is that I no longer have the motivation to work on levels in my spare time and I often question whether there is much of a future for me in the industry.


    *shrug*


    that sounds like you're burning out, you should take a break and relax dude.


    I just played overgrown and it's fucking awesome, you should keep doing what you do, there definitely is a future for you in the industry.

    I think not properly being managed when entering this industry is extremely toxic. It sounds like you were off to a great start... then the lead left.

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