Thursday, April 20, 2006
50% game developer theory
Here is my theory. I think that 50% of all CS majors would like to make games. Very few will professionally I believe but for the most part, I think its a pretty good guess. Today was career day at Palomar and they had some speakers coming in and talking in some sessions. At the business applications and web development talks, the rooms had about 10 people in them each.
Then there was the talk for video game programming. All 40 seats were full and there were people standing at the back of the room to hear the two programmers from Rockstar talk. What I found amazing was that it was made pretty clear that being a programmer in the games industry doesn't get you squat when it comes to pay compared to what the other speakers today had said they were making and what we should be making. The other speakers also were working 40 hour weeks on average with the occasional crunch period every few months that lasted a couple weeks at most. The game programmers said 80 hour weeks were pretty common.
And then they said that if you wanted to work on a specific game really bad or for a certain studio, sometimes you'd have to take a paycut to get onto the team to do it.
The two guys that came from Rockstar games, Alex Erath and Wolfgang Engle, had some interesting things to say about the development and it sounded like interesting projects they were working on. I was really amazed though at how many students showed up for their talk. They did give out some free Rockstar stuff and talked about a table tennis game they've been working on but more from a programming standpoint than from a gameplay aspect. I really think some of the people were there thinking it was for designing games instead of programming because when they asked who was interested in game programming, myself and four other people in the room raised their hands.
Okay, back to my C++ homework project.... ¶ 7:16 PM
Here is my theory. I think that 50% of all CS majors would like to make games. Very few will professionally I believe but for the most part, I think its a pretty good guess. Today was career day at Palomar and they had some speakers coming in and talking in some sessions. At the business applications and web development talks, the rooms had about 10 people in them each.
Then there was the talk for video game programming. All 40 seats were full and there were people standing at the back of the room to hear the two programmers from Rockstar talk. What I found amazing was that it was made pretty clear that being a programmer in the games industry doesn't get you squat when it comes to pay compared to what the other speakers today had said they were making and what we should be making. The other speakers also were working 40 hour weeks on average with the occasional crunch period every few months that lasted a couple weeks at most. The game programmers said 80 hour weeks were pretty common.
And then they said that if you wanted to work on a specific game really bad or for a certain studio, sometimes you'd have to take a paycut to get onto the team to do it.
The two guys that came from Rockstar games, Alex Erath and Wolfgang Engle, had some interesting things to say about the development and it sounded like interesting projects they were working on. I was really amazed though at how many students showed up for their talk. They did give out some free Rockstar stuff and talked about a table tennis game they've been working on but more from a programming standpoint than from a gameplay aspect. I really think some of the people were there thinking it was for designing games instead of programming because when they asked who was interested in game programming, myself and four other people in the room raised their hands.
Okay, back to my C++ homework project.... ¶ 7:16 PM
