from Hacker News

So You Want to Make Games

by szafranek on 5/4/17, 10:43 PM with 36 comments

  • by madshiva on 5/5/17, 11:34 AM

    Mobile industrie are not the same than game for PC, they are really focused more on money than the game itself, they are for dumb users (sorry I don't have other word for, and it's not even casual) making game like this is more commercial than a passion for gaming.

    There's plenty exemple of sucessful game that have only few developper and are better than AAA.

    I personnaly have started to make game because I like it to try other approach of programming and I want try to do things that other don't do more or don't focus. Like choice, cooperation, rewards on cooperation, etc.

    Just focus on doing things that YOU would play, that make fun and people will talk about it, pay for it (I'm not even close to this but finish something always give reward.)

  • by JabavuAdams on 5/5/17, 2:32 PM

    One thing I would strongly recommend against is going to a private game-development school. These tend to market very aggressively and be very expensive. The education provided is hit-or-miss, largely dependent on the specific high-turnover instructors you get.

    In my province, you can pay > $25k for an 18 month program. At the end of that program, only the top handful of programming students will actually know how to code vs. copying and pasting.

    If there's any way you can get into a college or university CS or engineering program, do that instead. Four years may seem like a long time, but if you include the time spent looking for a job after your 18 month program, it could easily be 4 years before you get your first reasonably paying game gig. Also, you can do a four-year engineering degree for about 8-10k a year in Ontario. Co-op can help defray those costs further and make you more attractive for that first full-time job.

    Universities all have game-development clubs. Also, these are the people you're competing with for that first job. I would much rather hire a CS grad from University of Toronto, or University of Waterloo than someone who barely knows C# from a game school.

    The flip-side is that there are exceptions. It's possible to find those diamonds-in-the-rough who weren't able or willing to go to university.

  • by animal531 on 5/5/17, 9:22 AM

    Focusing only on for example the Apple app store in deciding whether to go into making games or not is not a great idea, since it's by far the most congested (as the article also shows).

    But for the moment other markets also exist, such as desktop where one can still be very successful (as long as you can hit a certain level of word of mouth).

  • by drops on 5/5/17, 1:10 PM

    This video will always stay relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGar7KC6Wiw