I started my career because my friends were like “I can Java” and I was like “bullshit I’ll do it better.”
That’s seriously it.
I started learning Java back in maybe 2010 when I discovered Minecraft and realized I could make my own mods. It seems like many people started this way, but I don’t think many actually turn out to be good programmers! A couple years later, I’m still working at trying to make my own voxel engine. That’s my goal. To this day, I’m still fascinated by the fact that I can turn a bunch of letters and numbers into actual working programs. I love the fact that there is almost an infinite different programs that you can write. It seems like anything that I can think of, I can turn into a program. So damn cool!
Just noticed this. Thanks sproingie, made me feel better 
I am looking especially into Graphics/Gameplay programmer (maybe also Networking) in general, as I qualify for everything except C++ (I almost finished learning the basics and just bought a nice book!).
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The first program I ever wrote, back in primary school, was a game. The gameplay was rubbish, but hey. I had a few games under my belt by the time I went to university.
In my last year at uni I received an invitation to apply to a local games company - they went down to the Senate house, made a list of everyone who got a first or a 2:1, and sent them a letter. That wound up being my first real job.
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It doesn’t hurt to try to get into a university in a city which has a few games companies. Write games in your spare time. Go to industry conferences with your portfolio on your laptop and show it around.
Also play games, but do it with a critical eye: what does this game do well? What would I change?
I don’t see me becoming pals with C++ ever. And also starting it now seems so ridiculous. It’s like starting to build VCRs in 2013.
I have been inspired by Cas and will try to do something similar for now. There are virtually no game devs using java, especially locally, so gotta get a job, making games on the side and hope that one day one gets a little bigger.
Sorry for not being active these days, I’ve been at the vacation. Now I’m back at my home and I want to learn OpenGL with Java and C# in the remaining holidays (almost 2 months) for me. I’m going to buy a graphics card tomorrow (ASUS NVIDIA GeForce EN 210 1 GB DDR3) for ₹2080 at a local dealer. I’ve got admission into an ‘A’ graded college (I thought I’d get in a ‘B’ graded one but) and the classes start on August 20th
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That’s the best kind of surprise! Congratulations.
I’m going to build up my confidence a bit more and apply to these guys (as they look like an awesome UK java game company and they’re usually hiring):
I think that Computer Science gives you the basics, but that’s not really enough to qualify you for games in particular… I’ve heard that Physics is a good course to take, or something with a maths component. There are courses with industry experience built in, and there are those which are focused more on the games design or creative roles.
I think that a portfolio of personal work shows dedication, progress and commitment… The idea isn’t to produce AAA, but to have the potential of what you could do given the appropriate resources or as part of a team.
Don’t get hung up about the coding language or API… There’s a lot of transferrable knowledge with vector maths, algorithms, game loops, and render pipelines that are going to be useful whatever you’re doing… And in another 6 months you will likely be working on different platform, different apis, codebase, etc.
Whatever you know, or think you know, you are going to learn a lot more as soon as you actually start doing the job anyway.
Jagex…Runescape…
Didn’t pjt33 use to work there?
Yes, that was the second games company I worked for. (Hence “a few” in my previous post…)
It’s almost 6 years since I left and I think some things have changed, but it’s probably still the case that most people at Jagex aren’t developing games. The majority of the employees did customer support. When I joined, Andrew Gower was the only person who did core engine work on RuneScape; by the time I left, one other developer had joined him on that team. There were about 20 quest developers (writing in a DSL), and the FunOrb team grew from 2 (I was the second person employed full-time to work on minigames, although the legendary Thomas had done a couple of summers as an intern and joined full-time soon after me) to 8 (including one manager). So in total, you could count the people doing game development in Java on your fingers.
tl;dr: there are game development jobs at Jagex, but not as many as you might have thought. Doos, apply by all means, but understand what you’re applying for.
I missed this reply earlier, but thanks for the info… I must have thought there were lots of positions as I kept seeing them posted.
Back In July I polished my cv and portfolio and sent a speculative application after the tools developer team leader role I was interested in vanished the week before… Didn’t hear anything back though.
I went to Jagex once, and had a most unpleasant experience which nearly ended up with me giving the CEO a fat lip. Seriously.
Cas
Im a bit to late to party but
I know a lot of people who online refer to C++ as cpp, because in earlier days of search engines, the + was actually a command, it still is, but its improved, e.g. “washington +george” does something special.
So in the early days, searching for “C++” actually made you search for “C” and it dropped the ++, because it thought it was an unused command or argument. However, this is since fixed, but thats why some people I think still call it cpp. The argument doesn’t hold true for calling .jar/.class or whatever to Java
ra4king. I think you underestimate yourself. You are a fine programmer and learning or adapting to a new language is minimal, at least in my experience. Once youve put enough time into a particular language, going to other ‘similiar’ languages are quite easy. Java and C++ while are not traditionally called ‘similiar’ they are infact very similiar when you compare it to some of the other styles of languages like Haskall or Lisp(functional) or prolog(logic programming) or even the handful of other object oriented ones. Aside from a little syntax here and there, you will be right as rain.
Also having made any game at all, already puts you in front of a lot of competition(albiet, still plenty of comp). Plenty of qualified programmers, individuals, with various levels of education and experience apply to game programming jobs with having never made a single game. Additionally, game programming is hard, and I hear of stories from time to time of people who quit it quite fast. So by proving you’ve made games and stuck with it, you understand a lot more of the ‘massive amounts of time for trivial output’ then many others.
Lastly, where are you guys getting the ‘A’ vs ‘B’ graded college? Is there a master list I can look up, to find out which one I went too?
:o : :persecutioncomplex: ??? ??? ??? ???
It’s the ranking in India. Central Government has made committies called NAAC and NBA which gives ranking to the ENGINEERING colleges in the country. Those are the grades.
Does the list only contain India based colleges? Or do they have rankings for other countries colleges as well?
It’s only limited to India.
I’m pretty sure India was just busted for tampering the grades of essentially ALL students, no?
Also, what game dev career? :V
I didn’t understand your post clearly. Can you elaborate it?
Like I said in my previous posts, the game-dev collages are not officially recognized by the government. There are several collages which are giving course but no valid certificate here. I’ve joined in Software Engineering with CSE - Computer Science and Engineering. I will be applying to game studios on my own with a resume after some work as a software engineer.
Also my comment on game dev careers was a remark on my own game dev career - or lack thereof. 