What they don't tell you about being a game developer

http://www.altdevblogaday.com/2012/11/21/what-they-dont-tell-you-about-being-a-game-developer/

by rainmaker23 • 14 years ago

113 71 14 years ago

If you're doing 70+ hours a week, you're working for the wrong company. Move.

leak• 14 years ago

I just watched a documentary about Pixar and they mentioned John Lasseter used to spend 3 weeks straight in the office working. Just because you're working a lot, it doesn't necessarily mean it's the wrong company.

Here's a funny quote from him:

why do you have the best parking spot? John Lasseter "Because my car hasn't moved in 3 days"

But, I would move on too.

kayoone3• 14 years ago

I agree, however theres a big difference between sprints prior to launching and averaging 70+ hours of work throughout the whole project.

Whats the name of the documentary btw ?

rhizome• 14 years ago

If I was getting paid like Lasseter and basically running the show I could tolerate periodic 3wk crunches for creative spurts or whatever.

praptak• 14 years ago

> If you're doing 70+ hours a week, you're working for the wrong company. Move.

Or maybe you're working in the wrong industry. The cynic in me cannot help but label enthusiasm for creation of games as a severe economic handicap - one that many companies have no qualms taking advantage of. You love games? That's great, you'll also love unpaid overtime.

csense• 14 years ago

People say mean things to other people on the Internet?

Stop the presses!

kayoone3• 14 years ago

> Start Simple!

Cant stress this enough. Start with the simplest possible game project to test out the waters! You will be to naive and want to tackle big things but you will probably regret that. Theres alot to be learned by starting small and then create something bigger once you have some experience with the market.

eru• 14 years ago

If you just think in terms of finish a project, and not so much the market, Tetris is a good start. And shouldn't take too much of your time. (And if it does take lots of time for you, you are not ready for bigger things.)

Thomvis• 14 years ago

In my own experience, it is not only about starting simple, but also finishing it simple. I know you're not saying it isn't, but what I want to emphasize is that it is too easy to say that you're done with something simple and then move on to the next/bigger thing. For example, what eru suggested, if you build a Tetris-like game. You probably can have the gameplay finished in a few hours. And then, move on? Or spend another week on polishing, menu's, sound, graphics, copy, etc. I think the most valuable part of the lesson of starting simple is in finishing it. (And they don't tell you that.)

brador• 14 years ago

This is probably the best hidden advice on this page. Build complete projects. Make it a habit. If you just make gameplay prototypes, that will become your habit and you'll struggle to ship your big idea when the time comes. You'll be missing the final 90%. You won't know how to prep game art for example.

This applies to all creative "package" projects. Learn to ship.

danielhunt• 14 years ago

Off topic: I simply cannot read this post on android thanks to that grey nav bar on the left hand side.

It completely obscures the content when I zoom in to read the text.

Why do so many sites do have annoying behaviour?

etherealG• 14 years ago

Me too, and I'm genuinely interestedin reading the post.

Dejital• 14 years ago

Use this link:

http://www.instapaper.com/text?u=http://www.altdevblogaday.c...

patio11• 14 years ago

Being a game developer, as a business, has more in common to being the owner/operator of a taco truck than it has in common with playing videogames. If you like playing video games but would hate running a taco truck, you should probably not get into business as a game developer.

n.b. This is broadly true of all software businesses, not just video games. (Though I think running a software business is in many, many important respects easier than running a software business which makes video games.)

n.b. #2: This is also broadly true of many businesses which have, shall we say, anomalously high status. "I love cooking... I should open a restaurant! Then I'll have total artistic freedom to serve the food the way it should be made! And every day will be totally awesome!" <-- Not predictive of successful restaurateurs.

reitzensteinm4• 14 years ago

If we're talking indie game development here, I'd recommend getting into it in exactly the way as Patrick got into BCC. It should be approached as a hobby, until you're making enough money reliably enough that it becomes feasible to quit and do it full time.

That way you don't burn through your life savings, and you're very much aware of the day to day. Bonus points if you've had failures in between your successes. Patrick is dead on here - it's not all roses.

If you can't succeed doing it for 10-20 hours a week as a hobby, it's doubtful working even 80 hours will work. Game development is sort of like being a musician. If nobody likes your songs, you can't make up for it in volume.

Game development is an irrational choice in terms of return on investment. Patrick is also dead on here. Even the successful developers would have made an order of magnitude more money if they had applied themselves equally and had the same luck in other industries.

You have to genuinely find the prospect of working on your craft full time more important than financial returns. And having the perseverance to hone your skills and produce successful games in your spare time, even if it takes years, is a good litmus test for that.

(I'm awkwardly referring to patio11 by his name even though I was replying to him to differentiate the you [him] from the you [in general]).

kranner2• 14 years ago

> If you can't succeed doing it for 10-20 hours a week as a hobby, it's doubtful working even 80 hours will work.

Not necessarily. Speaking for myself, sometimes it's all or nothing. I can't imagine having the same enthusiasm and persistence for a hobby than for a full-time effort, particularly if the latter involved burning a few bridges.

I'm not arguing it's rational, or that one should blow one's savings on it, but sometimes full-time is your only choice.

jiggy2011• 14 years ago

I can only think of 1 successful game that was built as a part time hobby (Cave Story).

Development of even a simple game takes so much time I don't know how practical it is on 10 hours a week. Game studios have armies of employed people on 60+ hours a week each.

daniel-cussen3• 14 years ago

"Game development is sort of like being a musician. If nobody likes your songs, you can't make up for it in volume."

Love it.

saurik• 14 years ago

(for those interested in this concept:) I swear there was a much better written article on this subject, but all I can find right now is one from Slate (that actually was posted to Hacker News a few years ago), which I don't think was the one I wanted to find.

"Bitter Brew: I opened a charming neighborhood coffee shop. Then it destroyed my life."

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/a_fine_whine/2005/12/bitt...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=461791

thenomad3• 14 years ago

It's also VERY important to note that the key part of this statement is not "Being a game developer" but "as a business".

I'm a professional filmmaker. I happen to also be the kind of person who hears the phrase "owner/operator of a taco truck" and immediately thinks "ooh, that sounds cool. I'd need to optimise the menu to minimise ingredient costs, obviously, and - ooh - I wonder if I could use extremely locally targeted Adwords stuff to market it and -"

(I've never even eaten a taco. )

Nonetheless, I also know a lot of other people who make films. Many of them don't have the particular bit of their brain that automatically starts writing a business plan when it hears any cool idea. However, they still make films - often really good films - and enjoy it. Sometimes they enjoy, or at least appear to enjoy, making their movies more than I do.

A very large number of those people also have an actual bill-paying job.

There's nothing wrong with creating just for the love of it. "Amateur" - one who engages in an activity for the love of it - is not a dirty word, and contrary to popular belief is not automatically inferior to "professional". You can achieve a pretty astonishingly large output if you're focused - I have a friend who was averaging >1 (published) novel a year whilst also running his startup. You can create great work. And you don't have to make the inevitable compromises that you do have to make if job #1 is "make enough money off this thing to live".

jackpirate• 14 years ago

I've never even eaten a taco.

You seriously need to fix this.

semicolondev• 14 years ago

"I like eating varieties of foods... I would open a restaurant!" I'm getting hit by this thought regularly. What'll be your take on this Patrick?

reitzensteinm4• 14 years ago

> You can read 1000 praising comments, but if just one of them is bad, it will ruin your whole day.

It's important to quickly get desensitized to this, because if you're even moderately successful, the volume of YouTube quality feedback directed at your very own pride and joy can quickly become overwhelming.

The really mean stuff never bothered me, nor the comments that seemed like they were Markov chain generated.

My biggest weakness was always idiocy - and trust me, I picked the wrong profession for that. Comments in the form of:

  Great game! (rating set to 1/5)
  Clone of [shitty clone of my game]
  How do you shoot??? (rating set to 1/5) (game has no weapons)
  [complaint about another game on the front page that day] (rating 1/5)
  Got [incredibly low score]!!! (game has global high score functionality)
  I bought this where do I download (game not for sale)

Unfortunately from memory, since I don't save any of it. But you get the idea.

michaelgrafl2• 14 years ago

Those are really funny.

There should be a website aggregating stuff like this. It would cheer me up.

And yes, if you're doing any kind of work that you pour your personality into, you need to develop a rock-steady sense of self-esteem, or it will destroy you.

MichaelJW• 14 years ago

You may enjoy this animation of a dramatic reading of a bad review: http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/558516

hugoc2• 14 years ago

Here: https://plus.google.com/106913700595933476859/posts

incision• 14 years ago

>My biggest weakness was always idiocy - and trust me, I picked the wrong profession for that.

If you're an Android developer:

  1/5: Unstable garbage. Constantly force closes on my 
  overclocked phone running nightly builds - patched over 
  with a custom kernel.

Review systems are a pretty interesting problem that can't seem to evolve beyond "1-5 stars, maybe a blurb". I'm sure it's quite a delicate game to juggle engagement, filtering, averaging and all.

hugoc2• 14 years ago

And the app had to be sideloaded because Play said it was incompatible with my device.

Sigh, but we can laugh about it: https://plus.google.com/106913700595933476859/posts

kranner2• 14 years ago

Frankly a title like 'Malevolence: the Sword of Ahkranox' doesn't sound like it's going to appeal to a broad demographic.

Even if one is indie it would seem sensible to treat it like a business, and make the ponies-and-handbags games until there's enough cash to make whatever one wants and damn the commercial viability.

socialist_coder• 14 years ago

Not everyone wants to take that approach (although it is a good one). It's harder to be financially successful making games that don't have mass appeal but it's definitely doable.

sukuriant2• 14 years ago

Their off-time work is contractually owned by the company? Is this true for most game development companies? I have never heard of that happening before. Is that even legal? In the two positions/companies that I've worked with/for, I've been able to moonlight, as long as it didn't compete directly with the company (in laymens, non-lawyer terms).

Is this a common detail with game devs? With most jobs? It sounds awful.

thisone2• 14 years ago

I've seen this mentioned off hand, occasionally, by developers, not necessarily game developers. My contract where I work prohibits moonlighting, because they want your soul (really, they even try to specify how excited I should be every day).

They even got their knickers in a twist when they learned I work on my own projects and help out friends and OSS, in my own time, on my own equipment, but there's not thing one they can do about it.

I've also had a friend be told that he would need to give up his personal, part time, income generating website in order to take a particular job (not here). The website business was not in competition with or even the same general industry as the job.

philbarr• 14 years ago

Yes, I've had this in my contract with every job I've had except my current one. My current place was set up by developers though and I think the contract reflects that. It actually specifically states that I can do stuff in my own time as long as it doesn't affect my normal work.

flyinRyan4• 14 years ago

>My contract where I work prohibits moonlighting, because they want your soul (really, they even try to specify how excited I should be every day).

Personally, I would just ignore clauses like this. I know of no examples of stuff like this ever being held up in court. At least not at our level. You might have to worry if you were an executive or something.

flyinRyan4• 14 years ago

Companies will put all kinds of things in their contracts. Even things that aren't binding. If you get just 10% of your workers to believe it's enforceable, you win.

bsenftner• 14 years ago

At one studio job, where I was in my last and final interview to be a director - "really, a formality" they said, "you're good as hired"... and at that interview they informed me they knew about a patent I own, and said all I had to do was sign the patent over to them and I'd be hired. WTF?! I told them "no", they said "no job" and I said "good by!" And who was that studio? Vivendi Universal.

codeonfire• 14 years ago

Why didn't you just name a price in the multiple millions of dollars? Even dumb directors understand money.

cmccabe• 14 years ago

Their off-time work is contractually owned by the company? Is this true for most game development companies?

It depends. If you live in California, you are protected by the California Code, section 2870.

http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=lab...

It's a bit difficult to summarize, but basically something you do on your own time, without using any equipment supplied by your employer, that is not related to something your employer is planning on doing, and doesn't use any trade secrets, can be yours even if you are a salaried employee. The "trade secrets" clause is probably the hardest to meet, since it's easy to claim that something was a trade secret in retrospect. If you work for a megacorp, the "planning on doing" bit may be problematic as well.

You almost certainly cannot use these protections to work on games in your spare time if you are a game developer. But it can be helpful for working on unrelated projects, including open source ones. If you really want to do your own thing, contracting provides strong protections.

If you live in another state, you probably are bound by whatever pound-me-in-the-ass contract your employer drew up, which almost certainly assigns copyright and patent of everything you do to them.

teamonkey• 14 years ago

I've worked for two of the big games publishers and yes, they both included this clause as part of the contract to say that they own anything you create out of hours.

Which is ironic, given the amount of work I've done for them out of hours.

ivanstojic• 14 years ago

It's kinda sad that, in order to protect himself, he has to put a disclaimer on his blog about four paragraphs down from the start.

jamesjguthrie• 14 years ago

"A large, loud portion of the public will openly hate you regardless of what you do. Learn to live with it. No-one will ever take your project as seriously as you, or fully realise what you’re going through. Everyone will think they know better than you about your own project. Getting noticed at all is incredibly difficult . The odds of you making money out of it are slim. If you want to succeed, you’ll likely have to sell out. Just how MUCH you sell out is up to you. You have to develop a VERY thick skin. Being open with the public isn’t neccesarily smiled upon 100% of the time. You will meet many “game developers” but very few people who are actually developing games. You need to have the ability to listen to all advice given to you. Remember that listening to advice doesn’t mean you have to take it. But listening can’t hurt and you never know what you might learn."

Lots of this is applicable to founding a startup too. Good advice tbh.

mcherm• 14 years ago

Your game sounded interesting. But the site does not have a prominent "Click Here To Be Notified When The Game Is Available To Buy" button.

It should. "Marketing" details like that will make as much or more difference in the game's success as the quality of the game itself. Go add this NOW, before the Hacker News effect tails off.

danso• 14 years ago

> as a developer friend of mine once said “Those people hating on your game will always complain loudly. That’s just what they do. The fact is, though, that they’ll probably still buy your game.” and that’s what you need to focus on. It doesn’t matter if other people like your game. What matters is whether YOU like your game. If you love it, other people are bound to as well.

Optimism is good but I think this is the wrong kind of optimism. Especially the part about people who rip on the game will buy it any way. Besides the whole piracy thing, what's more likely is that people just won't care. In this world of increasing choices, it's more likely you'll be ignored rather than either hated or loved

MrFoof• 14 years ago

When I was 6 years old, my goal in life was to move to Japan and work for Nintendo. Possibly the idea of marrying Princess Toadstool was somewhere in there, but that was the idea.

When I was 20, I actually had a chance to work on MechWarrior 3. After the interview process, I decided to run very, very far away and to never consider it.

I'm 30 now, and actually have been working on a game for the better part of 8 months. My mindset is that it's a hobby that has a small chance of making enough money to live on, but I've set things up to ensure I can actually dedicate real amounts of time to it periodically. Rather that quit my day job, I moved into the consulting business (thanks to folks like patio11) to provide a financial runway for what I would prefer doing (making video games). Right now the balance is 7 months full-time consulting, 5 months making video games. However, (again, thanks to patio) I know I'm undercharging and as I'm able to raise my rate that will shift more to 5/7 or 4/8 over the next 18 months. I already have customers waiting in the pipeline that are willing to pay the new rate as soon as I'm available.

Oddly enough, my current customer is a AAA video game studio, and I've a few friends in the industry as well (also mostly at AAA studios). Personally I couldn't deal with the idea of surrendering so much creative input. There's also the fact that they literally can't pay me enough to work there. I will say that by and large the industry is filled with a tremendously nice group of passionate folks, but I "wouldn't want to live there".

It's a fickle market though, which is why I decided to mitigate the financial risk of financially unsuccessful projects by funding it with a consulting day job. The consulting affords the video game making. For me, the financial risk would've been real. I'm developing on a platform that's not taken seriously, with an art style that might put off hardcores, but with hardcore gameplay and a simple monetization strategy (you buy the app. There'll be some expansion packs, but that's it) and no IAP currency nonsense. Things a normal studio would never dare try.

RyanZAG• 14 years ago

Awesome stuff. I'm actually in exactly the same position on you - been making a game part time and funding it with contracting work.

Agreed on the fickle idea, as well as trying gameplay that a normal studio would never touch as it's not been proven. All I can say is keep up the effort - if its enjoyable and interesting then it will succeed. Looking forward to seeing the completed product, and I wish me, you and everyone else pushing out interesting Indi games massive luck!

sergiotapia• 14 years ago

70 hour work weeks; fucking atrocious. Where do people find time for family and friends and hobbies? I can't imagine working long stints like that regularly, I would probably burn out and product shoddy work.

bconway• 14 years ago

Anyone else feel this read like a paraphrasing of The Oatmeal's most recent comic?

sprobertson• 14 years ago

Yes actually, the quote about comments could be lifted straight from here: http://s3.amazonaws.com/theoatmeal-img/comics/making_things/...

What they don't tell you about being a game developer

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