Moving from Enterprise to Game development advice

Question

Im an enterprise developer mainly focused on Java and .NET at the moment, I have been for around 5 years now, and Ive got a good grasp on the way things work.

I'm employed by a consulting firm, and the work I do is quite interesting, however, over the last year/year and a half, I have been thinking about getting into games programming.

Being a gamer for all my life, I love games, but never really thought of getting into games development for some reason. I have been reading a lot about it, even going to a short course on an intro to games development, and Ive got to say, I do like it!

But after a lot of investigation there is one thing holding me back, the money. I earn a decent living out of consulting and would definitely expect to loose a chunk of my weekly earnings if I was to move into gaming.

I live in Australia, so Im not too sure whats available, but it looks like there is a bit around.

I would love some advice on this, what should I do next? Should I get involved in some Indie games that I could do part time?

Thanks a lot for any ideas, advice etc... - Mark

Answer 1

If you want to do games, make sure to know memory management in C and C++. Performance matters in game programming.

Answer 2

I say start off coding games as personal projects when off work in order to gain experience working with them. Using free tools like XNA would help with that.

Basically, code games if you want to, but don't quit your current job to run off looking for work in game development.

Answer 3

I think that unfortunately for you to go from a five-year experienced enterprise developer to the bottom of game development would require a significant pay cut and I doubt you could get around that. Some would argue that game development is harder than enterprise development, and even if you don't agree with that, it still involves a very different skill set and you are unlikely to be able to walk into any sort of senior position due to the lack of such skills.

If "making games" is more important to you than "working in games" then there are many decent routes you can take in your own time to get you making small and interesting games far more quickly and with more creative input than you would get working for a games company. Examples include Adobe Flash (maybe via HaXe), Java, C#/XNA, Python with PyGame or Pyglet, GameMaker, RPG Maker, etc.

On the other hand, if you want to pick a middle route of working on your own games but developing skills for possible use in the games industry later, you can develop in C++ as the professionals do, with many options there too. These range from frameworks like PopCap to 2D libraries like SDL or SFML and 3D libraries such as OGRE or Irrlicht or any number of other helper libraries (of which I collect a list here).

Another route is to work on mods to existing games - browse through the projects on ModDB for examples of how people are working on released games to customise the gameplay while enjoying the advantage of working with a finished game engine and production-quality art and sound assets. Typically this involves getting the game that is being modified and possibly downloading a couple of tools or an SDK, then you can produce plugins or new data for the game to change its behaviour.

Sorry for the link dump but I hope that illustrates the range of options open to you, and that you have a lot of choice in how you pursue this interest.

Answer 4

I've been thinking the same thing but looked at the game platforms and jobs and didnt' find any using enterprise databases or paying enterprise rates. I think that so much web and client application software is going to be open source that the best thing to do is keep working on enterprise development and work on developing brands for game projects in the virtual world platforms. In time it may be that the virtual worlds develop into more common web applications like 3d corporate web sites so I hope a enterprise platforms will be developed. Also it was easy to develop an entire sim with a city, trains, trolleys, marina, planes, helicopters, space stations, space ships, damage and weapons with open source scripts on the open source simulators.