In the ?Getting into Oz/NZ gaming? thread, this term, ?real Jobs,? came up. I?m curious as to what everyone?s real job is? I know most of the people on this forum are students attending various schools/Unis/self teaching. For those that are currently working full time as well as trying to break in, what is your Real Job?
I ask this as I?m in an interesting situation. For the past few years I?ve been working for various gaming companies in the US (EA, Westwood, Timegate?) and I?ve decided it?s time to get out of the development side of the gaming industry. Now, one would think that this would be easy to do as ?everyone? knows that being a programmer in games, you?re constantly working on the newest/best technologies and when working on titles like C&C Generals, the quality of the code has to be High. So, it should be pretty easy to get a gig in an industry out side of games right?
Well, here?s where it gets interesting. I?m currently living in the US and will be relocating to Perth, WA in July (so hey, anyone want to talk about the industry in the US :) Shoot me an email). Although I?m a Citizen of Oz, I have never worked there so I have no local ?Programming? contacts. As such, I?m entering the job market without knowing anything about the market I?m entering. Any insight as to what?s available/what you guys are doing would be helpful for me to start building a picture of the market as well as forming some contacts. Specifically, do ?Real Job? professionals have a respect for game programming as a legitimate Software development field or are they like some companies here that feel gaming is a ?Relaxed, no pressure, you don?t do real programming job? and thus have little respect for putting game programming as experience (I?ve actually resorted to rephrasing game programming with ?Real Time Simulation Software Development? on my resume because of this.)
Any insight would be helpful, so thanks in advanced.
Chris
You can make money off shareware but will you? It can take alot of work and it might take you a few games to find a succesful formula. This site has a bit of info for interested developers:
http://www.dexterity.com/articles/
Personally I would be far happier seeing a finished game than a fancy spinning cube and I'm sure most developers agree. Make a simple game and make sure to really finish it including menus, sound effects, high score screens etc. That will show people that you can stick to a project and complete it rather than just copy pasting a bunch of OpenGL tutorials onto your cube.
Hope this helps!
:)