Games development

caff

caff

caff

Soldato
Joined
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Anyone here into game development in any way? Either as an indie, professional, coder, artist, musician etc.?

I've been a plain old apps developer for years, but I've always loved games, and was wondering if others here have dabbled in games programming like myself.

Never yet released a game because it's hard to find a decent original niche in the market that could sell, and that I would enjoy working on, for me to warrant putting the effort in.
 
I have produced about 2-3 little games in my time, though when I have implemented the bit that I was interested in, I get bored and forget the project.

1) A "large" tile based rpg with full graphics engine, when I was about 15 (called the Four Marx)
2) A silly "shoot the squirrel" game around the same time.
3) An asteroids clone called "star trek the previous generation" using the behaviours of "boids" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boids

At the moment I am coding cores for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opensg which would be quite cool to put into a game, though I don't for a games company. Might be applying soon though.

If you want to work as a coder, my advice would be to make some nice demos ^^.
 
Shoseki said:
If you want to work as a coder, my advice would be to make some nice demos ^^.
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Great advice!!

I was into the games industry about 20 years ago and did roughly what Shoseki suggested.

For me, I had a friend who wrote a game and gave it to a publishers. But it was me that did some heavy duty (well it was then!! :p) 'magic' on it to get HUGE play areas into a few lines of code.

While my mates game didn't go down too well, they were interested in how the play area (which was massive) had managed to be squeezed into such a short amount of kb, and when I showed them what I'd done, I was offered a job in doing similar routines for their other games to compress the graphics and mostly levels so they'd fit onto C30 tape.

But if you can create a demo of what you can do, I'm sure most will look at your work. But PLEASE don't take this the wrong way, there are some VERY VERY talented guys (and gals) out there that are absolutely incredible in what they can do these days so the competition is ridiculously strong. I was VERY fortunate in that I didn't study at school, sat on my backside all day playing games or programming, so the industry was still new. I wouldn't have a chance today as my skills aren't as good and I've been doing it over 20 years!

Good area to get into though at the moment is perhaps the Mobile Phone industry. There's good money to be made in writing games for mobile phones.
 
Yes I can see mobile phone / PDA-type device games taking off in a big way, but I don't own a flashy phone or PDA to try it out with. The market seems so varied in terms of technology and I wouldn't know where to start.

Writing stuff for Windows Mobile devices could interest me but I suspect I'd need to learn Java, C or something fairly low level. I'm definitely not a hardcore coder, I'm more interested in the design and fun side of games.

At present I'm using a fairly basic (but pretty powerful) games dev language called Blitz3D to write stuff for 98/2000/XP/Vista (it's DirectX 7) which is great fun.
 
You don't need a flashy phone! If you code in VB/C# then you can run an emulator (which is pretty accurate), and free from the WM5/6 SDK.

If you're a Java Developer, download the J2ME and again that comes with an emulator to test the software.

Don't know if they still do this, but if you register on the Samsung developers website, AND providing you can prove you have a good idea that is running in an emulated environment, they will send you a phone to test the software on, free of charge.

If you've done Blitz3d (which is pretty good software), then jumping over to another language shouldn't be an issue.
 
I work as a Games Programmer - freelancing, in fact.

If you have C++ programming experience and want to get into the Games Industry, what's stopping you? Start applying for jobs.
 
I am very interested in all this and there have been a few threads covering the industry and getting in to it. Have a search around.

If you have an Xbox 360 give XNA a try, it uses C# and support for it is continually growing with even engines such as Torque being implemented.
 
Zefan said:
I am very interested in all this and there have been a few threads covering the industry and getting in to it. Have a search around.

If you have an Xbox 360 give XNA a try, it uses C# and support for it is continually growing with even engines such as Torque being implemented.
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Main problem getting into console development, is that console companies sell their SDK's for retarded amounts of money.

If they opened them up, everyone and their granny would have a pop at developing a game. Silly really.
 
Shoseki said:
Main problem getting into console development, is that console companies sell their SDK's for retarded amounts of money.

If they opened them up, everyone and their granny would have a pop at developing a game. Silly really.
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My uni is getting some 360 SDK's for my course, aren't I lucky :D
 
Zefan said:
My uni is getting some 360 SDK's for my course, aren't I lucky :D
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nice :D

One of my colleagues here at the University of Brighton is about to start teaching a Computer Games course, he has acquired some PS3 SDKs. Thing that I'm annoyed about, is that I'm the games nut, he is only teaching games as a way of teaching operating systems/software engineering...
 
Shoseki said:
Main problem getting into console development, is that console companies sell their SDK's for retarded amounts of money.

If they opened them up, everyone and their granny would have a pop at developing a game. Silly really.
Click to expand...

PS2 Linux Kits aren't that expensive, around £140 at retail (well, they used to be). They're even cheaper if you're a student. They're not for the faint of heart though, really need to know what you're doing as a programmer to be able to start working with it.

I had one; sold it to a chap in the MM I believe. We used them on our CGT course at Uni, alongside the Net Yaroze systems (which were far easier to get to grips with).
 
If you want to get in to the games industry then join a mod team, you will have your pick who you work for as coders are like gold dust. If you pick a good mod and implement some good stuff you can show that to any dev house and they will take you seriously.
 
Mint_Sauce said:
If you want to get in to the games industry then join a mod team, you will have your pick who you work for as coders are like gold dust. If you pick a good mod and implement some good stuff you can show that to any dev house and they will take you seriously.
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Correction - Good coders are like gold dust. Anyone who has ever played a game has made a stab at creating one. But not all programmers are good.
 
I have a degree in relation to it.

BA Games Design.

I'm a 3D Environmental and Texture artist, though I am currently not working in the industy. But I'm art side.
 
Shoseki said:
Correction - Good coders are like gold dust. Anyone who has ever played a game has made a stab at creating one. But not all programmers are good.
Click to expand...

Very true. Last year we were placed into group projects where programmers, 3D artists, concept artists etc.. all had to combine to get a full working game made. Now, every week there were presentations to be made, team after team after team would present Unreal 2 engined games, Source mods, or open sourced 3D engines for general purpose. Now whilst these do require extra programming on top and can give some spectacular results a few people created their own.
These stood above as they were cleverly coded to give nice results.

Then one group in particular stepped forward with probably the most multi-cultural group you would ever expect, some of which barely spoke a lick of English, one of which was the programmer (the group only had one). What the lad had created was nothing short of amazing. He'd coded everything from a fully self loading launch installer, through physics, AI, animation stages etc.. One guy basically carried a full group project and all without speaking in a fluent dialect (he was Vietnamese I believe). It's scary how good some people are.

Now I'm not expert (as I don't have a clue about programming), so I don't know the difficulty of what it was that he coded, but I do know that everything was written from scratch by him and it still stood out over games using Unreal/Source Engines and tried and tested Open Source engines. So you really have to be VERY good to stand out.
 
Wow - sounds like a talented kid! I prefer open source - exchangeable modules myself, especially one project (OpenSG) which can do some amazing real time distributed graphics work. As for physics engines and the like, well I'm not physicist, but I do believe in one thing - to be truly amazing at something, you have to limit your scope. So what I would do is produce a game demo that shows off one *particular* thing - whether its a particle effect, AI / flocking, physics (though you'd have thought that had been done to death by now, certainly rigid body motion), lighting / graphics, whatever.

A jack of all trades is a master of none.
 
Yes, I believe it was OpenSG that was used on one of the more (ridiclously) ambitious projects. It was very promising (a creation of 3 fully explorable castles with puzzles all navigateable in full 3D animated glory - without the use of any bosses or fighting). Unfotunately I don't know whether they did or didn't (I'd predict they never) get it completed.
 
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