Want to work in the game industry?

I've had a few people telling me that they want to get into the game industry. Since I don't have a lot to say about DD2 right now (I was on vacation last week, studied alternative methods of storing game data the week before, and have mostly been looking for a new job this week) I thought I would go over the different positions in a game company.

Producer - These are the people that talk with the publishers and are basically the boss of a team. They make sure that everyone is working on the right thing and that everything will finish on time. Producers need good management skills and good writing and speaking skills.

Designer - Designers are the people that not only come up with ideas about games, but also the people that end up doing a lot of the grunt work on a game. For example, while making My Japanese Coach we would get a large sound file from a two hour recording session. A designer would then use a tool to cut the sound files, name them, and get me a list of sounds that had pops or clicks in the recording that needed to be redone.

Programmer - Programmers are the people that write the code that makes everything happen. For major games we usually use C/C++. Smaller games may be written in C# (such as Xbox live arcade games), Java, Flash Actionscript, and even PHP.

Artist - Artists are the guys that make all the action worth looking at. I'll let Peter go into more detail about the types of artists that work on games since he knows a lot more about it.

Tester - Yay! Play games all day long and get paid for it! Hehe, sorry. It sounds a heck of a lot better than it is. First off, the games that you are testing are not finished games up until the very end, so you'll be playing a broken game. Over and over and over again. Also, you don't get to just choose which games you'll be testing. After a few months of testing on Barbies Fabulous Pony Ride you might not be so excited ever the idea of being a game tester anymore.

Of course there are also the other jobs that will be in most companies, such as human resources and IT.

Is there a job you want to about in more detail? Any question? Leave a comment!

IGDA Night

I think I've mentioned that I'm a member of the local IGDA (Independent Game Designers Association). Every three months they have a big get-together where we can display the games that we're working on. Two bloggers mention what games where there, and of course they both mentioned us! Check out Rampant Games and Monkey-Time for more information. And as Jay at Rampant Games mentions, the game did crash a few times during the night. That'll teach me to try adding new features as I'm walking out the door to demo it. >_< I did get all the bugs fixed the day after.

Also, what most people got excited about was the game maker. So I took another look at it and ... didn't like what I saw. Sure, it's nice and easy to use in many instances, but it still has a few things in it that I think will be an inconvenience later on. So... I'm re-writing it. Not really from scratch, but I won't be finished this week. I'm also looking at saving the data differently, since the current method requires me to have all the game data loaded at the same time.

Lastly, when Peter and I were chatting we came up with a new game idea. By this time the response from us was just to write it down to look at it later. By the time we finish Darkened Dreams we will easily have more than 100 game ideas.

-Califer

P.S. Good to know we at least have one reader left.