Ask Me Anything

I was blessed to be working at a startup with really good management that shielded me from a lot of the awfulness that is the reality of corporate game dev. But even then, I feel like aside from the time that I spent with people I worked with, a lot of it was wasted yeah. Aside from some indie games that are genuine works of art, you’re mostly just working on a pretty soulless product as your final output yeah.

That was part of the realization that led me to want to leave. I was watching this guy trying to get the hanging strap to animate under the gun with rope physics, so you could swivel your little dude around and the rope would look right, and he was taking like a couple of weeks on this thing, all this talent and genuine effort on his part, all these expensive tools and army of support to help him get it done, and I just wanted to start shouting DUDE YOU ARE WASTING YOUR LIFE. Like you could be using this talent for anything and instead you’re here with the strap hanging down to make one micron worth of this game that doesn’t need to happen in the first place.

Whoa I just got this little flashback to my frustration with the ultimate futility of working there. But yes I think the nature of big-money game development is pretty soulless yes.

Like pretty much anything else, a ton of it is who you know. People knew me as the guy who was always doing the crazy Linux stuff, and so a little games startup hired me as a sysadmin initially because no one knew anything about how to make the servers run. But sysadmin is basically a part time job if you’re doing it right so I started taking on parts of our programming contracts and learned how to do a good job with it. Then once I had some “I know what I’m doing” evidence to point to and a bunch of people had worked with me it gets a lot easier to tell people you’re worth hiring.

I don’t actually think the “who you know” thing is some bad thing; it’s just people wanting to work with someone who’s proven or who they know knows their stuff. But for me it was a lot more that I was working on hobby projects a lot and tried hard to do a good job once I got hired than that I’m a real people person or anything.

Oh, and to answer the second question, which I neglected: On the whole no I wouldn't really recommend it as a job.

Working with creative people and on something that (in most cases) has some genuine fun associated with it, is a big plus. But, the minuses of overwork, underpay, steady undermining of the creative soul of the whole endeavor, are starting to be joined by the looming threat of getting kicked out of your career entirely in 5-10 years when AI starts being able to do it all itself.

The industry is clearly changing a lot with AI now and it’s not clear where it’s gonna end up. Applying for jobs at entry level is gonna be tough, tough, tough when you’re competing against all these laid-off game programmers who are victims of the seismic shift in the whole tech industry in general. Applying as just one more resume on the pile was always a disadvantage but now I think it’s a lot worse.

I can only really tell you what worked for me in the past; I actually don’t have a complete answer for you. Having someone on the inside of the company who’s your advocate is key. I got one great interview because a couple of people who worked for the company had seen a hobby project I worked on when we were all in school together and so they knew I knew my stuff, another job came from people who’d worked at a client of my company and so they’d worked with me directly. I almost always got the job through “back channel” talking with people at the place I was going to be working, and then they put me in the pipeline as opposed to knocking on the door with resume in hand.

This is just guessing, but one idea if it were me trying to break in now, I think I would find an open-source project that’s games adjacent or that people in the games industry depend on. Start making projects with it, get involved in the development, become known in that little community as someone who knows their stuff. Contribute good stuff that takes the whole project forward. Then if you see a job opening at a company related to someone you have contact with from that whole endeavor, reach out to that person directly talking about the job. If they know you and that you genuinely know your stuff and they’ve worked with you and you’ve helped them, you are instantly higher up in the resume pile even than even someone who has a way more “qualified” resume.

You can’t fake it though. You have to actually be producing stuff that people can see the quality of, otherwise they’ll take away a totally different view of you. But idk, mess around with Gaussian splatting or an open-source game AI library or something, try to make something good and you can become known as someone who produces good stuff.

I’ve actually been away from the engineering world for some time now; it’s purely a hobby for me now so that’s just pure guessing. But that’s my thoughts on it for what they’re worth. And you wouldn’t have to stop applying for jobs or anything while you’re doing that; it’s just a way to progressively add some strength to your pitch over time.

It's difficult to get an entry level position without years of experience. Computer science or software engineering degrees are usually preferred over game dev degrees. The gaming positions on my university's alumni job board are all unpaid internships, mostly from Epic.

Artful indie games? Yes. I got genuinely emotional when the stag in Hollow Knight was talking about how when this whole task is done he’s gonna leave Hallownest and see if he can find some of his family.

Most games, no. The industry is changing so it’s not even a reliable money-and-comfortable-life ticket like it used to be. Games specifically always tended to underpaid and overworked compared with the tech industry as a whole. And, with rare exceptions, the “product” you’re working on is gonna be just an engineered dopamine-and-microtransactions machine which is doing more harm than good once it’s let out into the world.

Ask me if I’m bitter 🥲. I got to work with some really great people at times and I’m still in touch with a few of them, but for the most part you have to get incredibly lucky to find a job in the games industry that’s a worthwhile thing to do with your time.

I'm a little unusual in that I didn't play a ton of games while I was working there. I had my games that I liked but I wasn't a "gamer," whereas most of the employees got into it because of some level of love for video games in general. There were actually games I worked on for significant lengths of time sometimes without even having played the game even once as a game. It was just a programming project, which that I had some love for and that was the side of it that I enjoyed.

To your actual question, I actually find it's the opposite. Like you can know all about anatomy and psychology and if you look at a sexy person of the appropriate gender, they're still gonna be sexy. The game is either fun or it isn't. If it's fun, it's kind of cool to be able to see little design elements that might not be obvious and see how they're working well to make it a good experience. It's another layer of experiencing the game but for me it doesn't take away from the enjoyment on the other level.

Fun story, we actually did a partnership with a local school one time and invited a bunch of the kids in to take a look at what we did all day, and for my part of the day's presentation I made a custom build of the game I happened to be working on which showed a lot of the behind-the-scenes trickery. Like it would pop up little wireframe cubes around all the objects so you could see how this integrated scene was actually made up out of cunningly pasted-together models, or I could fly up and look back down and see how the section of the world that was the path I'd been traveling down was the only part of the world that actually existed and everything outside was just empty. It would show path nodes so that you could see how NPCs running around were following these very defined and limited pathways. It worked perfectly. The kids were super into it and it was like I was a wizard, and kids are naturally attuned to probing the limits and lies of the presented worldview, so they were fascinated. It was super cool.

Probably Hollow Knight.

My experience predates any of the super-toxic elements like loot boxes, but I would guess that people mostly just shrug and do it if the client / boss says to do it. I mean, somewhere are engineers who are implementing all these features; you don't really hear of a company that wanted to make them but was having any level of trouble getting their people to make it happen. There might be a certain level of back-and-forth at the design level about what we want to do and what type of game we want to make, but it's pretty easy to demonstrate that the toxic features make a ton of money, which is usually the goal. I think it probably forms just one more nugget of the bullshit that periodically comes down the conveyor belt.

We only had one intense ethical argument that I remember; we were contracted for work by an organization that's widely known for doing bad real-world things and had a big debate in the office over whether it was worth taking the contract. Ultimately I and the other lefties who were against it were overruled, and we took the contract. We did stick to a firm policy of no porn, even in the early hungry days, but I think that was more for reputational reasons than any kind of ethical standard.

I think in general, being selfish in ways that make the whole thing unsustainable if too many people do it, is a bad way to be.

• Dodging paywalls so the journalists can't get paid, and have even a little bit harder of a time making it work business-wise at a time when they're already struggling and really badly needed, I think is a really bad thing. I pay my $4 per month or whatever to subscribe to a few different online newspapers for that reason.
• Shopping at Wal-Mart or Amazon even though they're clearly working hard to destroy the whole system that provided them a wealthy country to skim cash from in the first place, I think is pretty bad.
• Pirating books or reading them online is also pretty bad, as is pirating indie games. In all of those scenarios the actual people who made the thing will directly lose out by some significant number of dollars if you decide you'd rather get a burger or something than pay them for what they produced that you're now enjoying.
• Pirating music or movies or AAA games, I don't do personally, but pirating the media does so little to cheat the people who actually made it, and the people you're cheating are actually the exact people abusing the people who did make it, that I feel like it's probably the least of the evils I listed here. Personally I think it's still wrong and wouldn't do it, but something like dodging paywalls I actually think is much more impactful.
• Pirating textbooks is fine. Fuck 'em

That's my take on it with context.

I switched to business management years and years ago. I'm actually thinking of getting back into engineering now (at the perfect time apparently 🥲).