All entries for Monday 16 January 2006

Getting into the games industry

There are a number of ways to get into games design. The best way is to build up a portfolio of work and submit it to a number of games companies, who may take you on for an interview. A lot of companies want experience, but some companies will take on good applicants wo have a good portfolio.

The qualifications you'll need depend on which area you're interested in – obviously the qualifications needed to become an artist are different to those required to be a programmer. This is written on the assumption that you want to become a programmer – if you want to be an artist, a script writer, or an audio engineer, then the links at the bottom of this post may be of more help.

Programming-wise, you might not like to hear it but you're probably gonna need maths in there. Most of the members of the Video Game Design Society are doing a degree in computer science, which gives some experience of programming, and (in our course at least) some experience of working in a team on a large-ish project. It also involves yet more maths…

One thing that the Warwick Computer Science degree doesn't have is anything to do with C++, which is the language most games are written in. You'll almost certainly need to learn that, and then create a nice shiny demo cd to give to potential employers along with a CV.

Our sponsors, Blitz Games gave us a number of info sheets on working for Blitz, and here they are:

Warning, each of these files is a 2mb PDF file. It is strongly suggested that you right click them and "Save target as..." or "Save link as..." and read them locally

• General information about Blitz
• What's it like at Blitz?
• Work placements
• Artist careers
• Audio careers
• Programmer careers
• QA Tech and Script writers careers

Many thanks to Phillip Oliver and Simon Smith who came down to give a talk to us and gave us the leaflets. Hopefully we will also be able to distribute the presentation that they gave.

Resources

• Warwick Video Game Design Society
• Blitz Games
• Game On!

Some content abridged from Nick Forrington

Mathew Mannion : 16 Jan 2006 17:38 |  Tags: Articles VGDSoc |  Comments (11) |  Close comments |  Report a problem