Mike Wood
Posts: 2095
Joined: 3/29/2000
From: Oakland, California
Status: offline
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Hello...
Computer game programming is a rather interesting job. You sit in a small room all day and night, thinking hard thoughts and typing arcane symbols and long, complex equations into a computer for many months before the product is released and others on the development team receive the accolades and magazine interviews.
A computer science degree might be useful. My degree is in psychology.
I would recommend time on task. Write as many computer programs, of all types, as you can. Learn all you can about low level graphics, sound routines, internet programming and artificial intelligence programming. Learn 3D algorithms and computer gaming physics. Much of this (especially computer war game AI) is not taught in college, because the teachers do not know how to do it. You will need to figure it out yourself, through trial and error.
quote:
Originally posted by Totenkopf:
This may seem a little off topic, but I plan to make PC games for my future career, specifically in programming and design. What does it take to be successful? I'm already going for a major in computer science but the thing that worries me is that I live in Canada and there's not a lot of game companies here so I might have to move to the US. Any pointers or advice greatly appreciated.
You must be willing to live "Hand to mouth" for the rest of your life and dedicate yourself to coding. No dating, no picnics in the park in summer, no trips to the beach, nothing but coding. I know a half dozen of the successful war game programmers and they usually work 12 to 16 hours a day, seven days a week. More, as they approach project completion. I have worked many 36 to 48 hour days on Steel Panthers: World at War. You must be a self a starter who can work with no supervision and you must be driven to the point of making Batman look like a slacker. You must program because you cannot live without doing so. You must program for the shear love of it.
When I decided I was going to make a living by designing and programming computer games, I taught myself Basic, Prolog, SYS, SPS, Pascal, C/C++, assembler, Fortran, Easycoder, RPG, BAL, Cobol and Snobol. I wrote hundreds of thousands of lines of code. I wrote a point of view step engine and with it, a role-playing game. I then wrote a flight engine and with it, a space flight simulator. I then wrote a grand scale galactic conquest guns and butter game using neural net artificial intelligence. I then wrote two tactical level war games. This took me six years, as I had to figure out how each of these worked and write hundreds of routines for each.
I then went looking for work. None to be found. I had never had a game published, so I was an unknown quantity and an internship in clinical psychology does not get you a job as a programmer, at Microsoft. I did make a deal with QQP to publish "Fleets of Honor", but they went out of business before it was finished. I continued to write programs. Two years later, I stumbled across Novastar. This was a small, startup company, with no programmer. I convinced the owner that paying me would pay him in the long run and game him a list of projects which he could sell. I started writing programs for Novastar. We also made arrangements with SSI and Atomic Games for projects that fell through. As frequently happens in the computer gaming niche market, the fans we had were dedicated, but there were not enough of them to keep the company in business.
After Novastar went under, I found that the projects I had done with them were known to war gaming companies. I had several offers from established companies, who offered salaries ten to twenty times the penance I had received at Novastar. I talked with many of the heads of these companies and became friends with some of them. I ended up talking with the fellow who ran The Gamers Net, a web site dedicated to war gaming, who had been considering publishing war games in some form. Rather to be a big fish in a small pond, always optimistic and liking the idea of getting in on the ground floor, I negotiated an arrangement with David Heath, absolutely the best business man I have ever met. After TGN was purchased by and run out of business by iENT, we decided to form Matrix Games.
My advice is, first of all, be a genius. Every successful computer war game programmer I know, is. If you are not, try eating as lot of fish (brain food). Keep writing computer programs and make friends with as many people in the field, as possible. Be willing to work for free or next to and work harder than anyone else on earth. It is a hard job and there are only a dozen or so people on the planet who have what is required to do the job. You might be one of them.
Hope this helps...
Michael Wood
Lead Programmer,
Matrix Games
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