So you want to be a video game programmer? - The Specs

http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/08/28/video-game-programmer-specs/

by agavin • 15 years ago

117 79 15 years ago

acgourley2• 15 years ago

It's worth reading this even if you're not interested in games or the industry that makes them. The game industry is one of the most mature industries in software and it offers a possible future for YOUR corner of the software world.

Besides being one of the longest running industries in software, it iterates teams and products rapidly.

Because of this it has performed a gradient decent more than any other software industry, and I would argue it is is sitting at a local minimum.

From that perspective it's very interesting to study.

angrycoder• 15 years ago

Unless your definition of mature is old, I'm not sure what you are talking about. At the large publishers stuff like unpaid overtime is built into the budget from day 1, game developers are typically paid quite a bit less than their counterparts in the business sector, and agile development practices are rare.

They build very expensive, monolithic pieces of software. It is pretty much the exact opposite of where software development has been going for the past 10 years.

acgourley2• 15 years ago

Earlier in the history of the industry games were ligher weight, more iterative and more exploratory. Over time that changed. Sure thats changing back again with indie games, but that's still a small part of the market.

I'm just wondering out loud, could your corner of the world be moving in that direction?

kabdib2• 15 years ago

Most games are trainwrecks inside. They are /just good enough to ship/ and often no better. They are fragile, fickle things that for the most part have a market lifetime much shorter than the time it took to develop the title. You get your money back -- if you do -- in the first few months of sales.

Games are pragmatic and hard, cheap bastards that chew up teams and spit them out.

It's fun. :-)

fferen• 15 years ago

This is what I've been suspecting after reading dozens of tutorials and examples on all manner of game-related APIs and libraries. It seems like game programmers as a whole care less about code organization, style, and all the other values that are exalted in other fields.

michaelchisari2• 15 years ago

I wonder if it's a different story with longer-running MMORPG's like WoW, FFXI, etc. Wouldn't the situation force the development process to be more stable and follow best practices?

lmkg• 15 years ago

> They are /just good enough to ship/ and often no better.

From one point of view, this is viciously optimized. I'm reminded of a quote along the lines of "the ideal racing car would cross the finish line intact and immediately disintegrate." The point being, find the minimum weight necessary to accomplish your goal, and spend as close to that minimum as possible. In games, the "weight" you're minimizing is the effort and focus spent on production quality, in order to be able to spend more on game design and performance, and ship faster.

ajg19772• 15 years ago

I'd love to know what you base this opinion on.

Every game I've shipped has been far more stable than the majority of applications I use on a daily basis today. Most of those codebases where then used in other titles, aside from the very game-specific parts.

Sony/Nintendo etc require that your game runs for 1-3 days without a crash, on a platform without virtual memory, before they'll put it on a disc that cannot be patched (well, until this-gen of consoles. Now it's just expensive to patch).

Quite a bit different from platforms such as iOS where developers get upset that Apple take five days to approve updates for for free (fail a Sony submission and you'll be paying $$$$$)

chaostheory• 15 years ago

I think what's sad when you compare the games industry to others like finance or telecommunications, (based on my experience) a typical (large) game company does way way more testing than say a big bank or telco.

amcintyre2• 15 years ago

Thumbs up for telling people they need to know some math. Even if you're not planning to work in the specialized areas that are mentioned in the article, it wouldn't hurt to be more comfortable with math than most developers are, because you may need to step in and help somebody in one of those areas, and (for me, at least), learning stuff like that on short notice is really hard.

kabdib2• 15 years ago

You don't really need to know 3D math unless you're working on graphics.

It helps. But you don't /need/ it.

agavin8• 15 years ago

Physics, collision, animation, and certain types of compression also use a lot of math. I also found that just plain gameplay programming in 3D games required a pretty decent command of matrix math and analytic trig.

amcintyre2• 15 years ago

Sure, and there are a lot of other things you don't /need/, but that will make you more valuable to employers, or to your customers if you're a business owner.

Everybody has to choose things to learn and not learn, but my experience has been that putting math in the "not learn" category can make your life/career more difficult in some job markets. If most game devs decide they don't need to know math, that's just more opportunity for me, so I'm not too bent out of shape about it. :)

psykotic• 15 years ago

You don't need to know much mathematics, but a solid practical understanding of 3D geometry is a bread-and-butter skill in game programming, no matter your speciality.

gfodor9• 15 years ago

Video games are an interesting phenomenon. They manage to pack many of the most interesting problems of computer science into one of the most superficial, yet profitable, applications. They're kind of like the warping of space time, an anomaly of extremes that manages to relentlessly suck brilliant minds away due to its siren call.

And yes, I love video games, and considered working in the field. But, stepping back you realize there are more important things to work on, and more useful ways to spend your time. That doesn't mean the temptation on both fronts (playing and creating) ever goes away.

davidsiems2• 15 years ago

Get off your high horse.

You could say the exact same thing about books, TV, movies, paintings, etc.

Games are just like any other form media. Yes, many of them are superficial, but a lot of them tell incredible stories, teach life lessons, and evoke powerful emotions. To top it all off they can also be incredible teaching tools.

Just because you think something's a waste of time doesn't mean other people aren't deriving real meaning from it.

gfodor9• 15 years ago

This is the inevitable response that I get when I dare suggest that those of us with the gift of being able to program computers in such a interesting time choose wisely where we place our efforts.

I'm not saying it's immoral, unrewarding, or not plain fun to play and build video games. I'm saying that in life you get to choose how you spend your time, and in my view building the next killing simulator when you have the talent and means to do so much more is probably something worthy of self-reflection.

jbrennan• 15 years ago

I fully agree video games are an important form of expression and art. They tell stories and evoke emotion and deserve to be treated like art.

Having said that, typically those "sucked in programmers" are not the ones working on the "art" side of things, like the story, for example.

I think the "sucking in" of talent is referring more to those whose talents are in development, and not so much in expression of art.

blackhole• 15 years ago

While a lot of people inevitably dislike these kinds of high-and-mighty accusations of superficiality, as an aspiring video game programmer whose sole goal in life is to have the maximum positive impact on humanity possible, I have given this much thought. I have a rather interesting combination of analytic and artistic talents that can only be fully taken advantage of in the context of a game and its engine. I have looked at other industries, but in all of them they only utilize a subset of my abilities. In my attempt to optimize my impact to the absolute maximum, I have come to the conclusion that making games is what I am best at doing, and I must use this to push forward society in any way possible, even if it is only to give people a spark of hope when the world seems to be eating itself alive.

Sometimes, games are the most useful thing one could ever work on.

gfodor9• 15 years ago

This is an admirable post and I appreciate you making it! I think if more people thought through their actions as you do, the world would indeed be a better place (and we'd have better games to play as well :))

matusz13• 15 years ago

I'm a fan of this subject and I think that it's a relatively easy to associate the video game industry as something meaningless. (that doesn't mean that it's correct)

Anyone else a Jane McGonigal fan? http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_be...

mtogo• 15 years ago

More important things like making webapps that find restaurants in your area?

Get over yourself. Your web/mobile apps, as cool as they are, aren't more important or any better for anyone than video games unless you're feeding starving children or freeing people from tyrannical government.

rhygar• 15 years ago

People like this creep me out. Thank god we live in a society that has free choice of work.

gfodor9• 15 years ago

Oh, come on now. There's a bit of a difference here.

We can all agree that getting regular exercise and eating well is a good idea, and stuffing your face with junk food every day a bad one, without thinking either should be something enforced by society upon people.

CamperBob• 15 years ago

But, stepping back you realize there are more important things to work on, and more useful ways to spend your time

Such as lecturing people on Hacker News?

kiba• 15 years ago

One game. Dwarf Fortress.

It is a game totally worth consuming your life. It have too much depth and there's so much to learn. Designing your own defense system, figuring out how to satisfy and juggle the requirement of your fortress, and so on. It's mind expanding. Other than that, I like killing and skewing globins.

Someday, I'll be able to handle trapping globins and use them to automate my fortress.

5hoom• 15 years ago

Right on!

A game like dwarf-fortress is a 6+ year labour of love from its creators (and its players!), and screw anyone who says dedication like that is wasting your life.

And more broadly, a game is as artistic & life-changing as the developer is able or willing to make it.

mahmud• 15 years ago

I have played less than 4 video games in the last decade, all of them either flash or shipped with my mobile phone. I'll give this one a try (helps that it has a Linux port :-)

johnyzee2• 15 years ago

As cool as Dwarf Fortress is, I really don't think we should go along with judging games by the metric that is suggested by the GP ("killing simulators"). It is like forcing kids to only play with Lego, because 'cops and robbers' is a 'crime simulation'.

pacomerh• 15 years ago

"stepping back you realize there are more important things to work on, and more useful ways to spend your time. "

Video games can be artistic, inspirational, stress relievers (In my opinion one of the greatest invention for men ever), they stimulate imagination, and have been proven to help real professionals like surgeons be more precise at work.

How is your e-commerce vocation more useful for humanity exactly?, its still consumerism no?

SoftwareMaven3• 15 years ago

I've worked for a couple of game studios over the years. Unfortunately, conditions were atrocious at both, something that seems to be fairly common in the industry. My hypothesis is so many coders spent their teen years playing video games, wanting to write them, that they are willing to work in sub-par conditions.

I won't work at another one, unless it's my own. Sadly, I'm not skilled enough to start my own.

agavin8• 15 years ago

All the studios that consistently turn out brilliant games: Naughty Dog, Valve, Epic, Blizzard and many many others are really well run. Working there might often be brutal because of how hard the job is and pressure, but they know the process of making great games and the quality of employees is very very high.

It's less so at the big corporate studios where marketing and big company policy has heavily infiltrated the system.

_delirium• 15 years ago

It could be the personalities of the people I make contacts with (I'm a researcher who works with research-interested game-industry people), but the burnout rate seems really high, even at the well-run places. More than half the people I've met in the last 5 years have quit their jobs within that timeframe! And a lot cited the working conditions: more or less that the pressure-cooker environment was cool in their 20s, but not a long-term career path. Some have gone the indie route, some to consulting, some back to grad school, others just left the game industry entirely for a job somewhere like Lockheed.

stonemetal• 15 years ago

Is that true though? Rockstar has a reputation for turning out great games and being one of the worst places to work.

mostlycarbon• 15 years ago

There are two quotes that I remember from my CS profs that have stuck with me over the years.

AI prof addressing statistical vs. rule-based learning: "All models are wrong. Some models are useful."

Systems level programming prof: "Now that you have a thorough understanding of programming all up and down the stack, if you want to minimize the amount of money you make and maximize the hours you work, then take a job as a video game programmer."

I know several coders who have worked in the gaming industry for 5+ years and they're all completely jaded at this point.

joelburget2• 15 years ago

I wish people would stop glorifying how many hours they work and how little sleep they get, "You need to live without sleep (4 hours a night every day for years baby!)." Sounds juvenile to me.

sukuriant2• 15 years ago

It's the lead position. My lead at work (MS) works more hours than me, too; and, so far as I know, knows what all of us are working on at a pretty considerable level. He does testing for some of the things that we can't, or that need to be done immediately if we're doing higher priority things, and so on.

I'd like to think he still gets at least 6 hours of sleep a night, but I wouldn't know. The synopsis of the lead, I read, was reasonable, especially remembering what sort of lives the people that worked for EA had.

In short, I don't think this was trying to glorify the hours worked, and instead alerting would-be leads to understand what they're committing to.

davidsiems2• 15 years ago

Agreed, a good lead would be doing everything within their power to _prevent_ this from happening to themselves and the rest of the team.

sukuriant2• 15 years ago

But if things start to go bad, they will probably be the first ones to start staying late.

alanfalcon2• 15 years ago

I think foregoing producers definitely makes this very difficult. We had some wonderful producers at Blizzard (web team) that came on and turned the team around from hours of OT every night to projects being done on time without OT except in rare cases. Leads don't have (quite) as much on their plate, devs don't get burnt out, and things just run so much better.

waitwhat2• 15 years ago

Have people already forgotten about the EA Spouse?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EA_Spouse

http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html

ajg19772• 15 years ago

Read the last sentence before taking quotes out of context - "being a lead is all about responsibility".

If you're the lead and things start going south on your project then you'd better be prepared to start leading and taking on whatever is needed to get your game shipped.

I know it's cool to preach about working smarter instead of harder, but getting a game out of the door and into a box usually requires large doses of both.

joelburget2• 15 years ago

I agree somewhat. Yes, a lead has more responsibility, and will work as hard as the other team members. Sometimes they may have to push to get the product shipped.

That is a completely different thing than four hours of sleep a night for years.

potatolicious• 15 years ago

The game industry puts this type of workload on more than just leads and managers - the rank and file toil for long hours with miserable pay (compared to the rest of the industry). There are a few exceptions to the rule - studios where life resembles something like normal, and crunch time is an anomaly, not year-round.

They are few and far between though. I grew up in Vancouver where EA has its largest studio presence, and the number of burned out game devs I've met is a little scary.

Video games is like Hollywood - it's glamorous, and has the tendency to suck in some great talent, chew them up, and spit them by the curb 2-4 years down the road. And this will not change so long as there's a lineup of talented artists and developers out the door and around the block waiting for their crack at what may just be the worst working environment known to software-dom in this country.

kd1220• 15 years ago

It's likely bravado from college days. I remember overhearing many conversations at school where students would brag about pulling their second all-nighter in a particular week. I could only think that they were doing something wrong. If your work load is requiring you to stay up for more than 16-18 hours a day, then you're either doing too much or you're really inefficient.

A metric of success, to me, is being able to make money while you're asleep. You'll never escape the chains of the cubicle if you don't work smart.

richcollins2• 15 years ago

Should be re-titled to "so you want to be a video game programmer at a large studio".

agavin8• 15 years ago

Why? I'm very NOT large studio oriented. I don't think anything stated in my post (which is just part of a larger series I'm writing) is even about studio size. In this particular post I'm just broadly breaking down some of the sub-specialities inherent in the process of programming video games. In a web app you need more network and database programmers, in a video game you need graphics and sound programmers. It's just practical sense. The same guys might do these tasks, but if you like advanced 3D graphics and get a kick out of it -- get a programming job that involves graphics!

richcollins2• 15 years ago

Those technical specialties are specific to certain genres of games. You don't have to learn all of them to get started and make good games. You probably do have to shoehorn yourself into one (or a few) of them if you want to work on big budget games.

punyhuman• 15 years ago

Seems like many people here enjoy playing video games but they do not like that some very smart people chose to program them instead of "making the world a better place". Hmm.. makes me think why do you consider it like that. Its one thing to say that the gaming industry is bad because of bad working environment (a new info to me) and quite other to say that its bad to work for since it does not make the world a better place. A game is made because someone wants to play it. Why do they want to play it? Because life is a bitch and we get frustrated.(And I am fairly sure that people who are "making the world a better place" also experience that). So they try to escape the daily motions of life by shooting zombie faces or kicking someone's ass by making a avatar of them in a wrestling game. That brings us a sense of relief and allows us to fight another day or week or month (depending upon your gaming habits). So why not? My puny human brain cannot understand all this bad rap given to these poor game programmers who are maybe working in the worst environment possible (according to some comments here).

edit: Reading this again I realize that some people will argue that they are not against the therapeutic values of games but they get angry when people waste time on it. Hmm... interesting counter argument. Lets see, I can cut my hands with a kitchen knife so maybe I should throw it out right now. Dammit punyhuman you may fry your brains with this mobile crush it, right now. Punyhuman is surrounded by such things, they are all after me. Help HN people.

agavin8• 15 years ago

I posted a part 2 -- except I actually made it a prequel -- but it's new nonetheless.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2937426

agavin8• 15 years ago

and a part 3: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2941688

and a part 4: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2950413

agavin8• 15 years ago

And a part 5:

http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/09/11/video-game-progr...

So you want to be a video game programmer? - The Specs

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