Alright.

Lets talk shop. You’re here because you are interested in getting a job in games or are interested in the games industry. In my opinion, it’s best to start from the beginning.

There are three major ways to get a job in the industry. To be clear, these are not the only ways in, just by far the most common. These groupings are generalizations, most people will fall somewhere in between.

The first and most well known is the “College Route” People using this route find something they’re interested in, do

some preliminary work in it, then go to college, get a degree, and through college get contacts that get them an entry level position. From there they climb the corporate ladder the good old fashioned way. Truthfully, this is the same no matter what industry you are going into, except for a select few. Conventional wisdom leads to this route, and the older a game developer (not publisher or media person or manager but developer) is (excluding the very first industry pioneers) the more likely they did this.

The second and probably least understood is the “Skills Route” People doing this find something they’re interested in, and then do it continuously and obsessively until they have enough experience and credentials to get a job.

This route doesn’t necessarily exclude college, but someone following this route is going to college to get a job in this specific niche, not going to college for “computer science” and planning on working “in the games industry.” Anyone saying those sorts of things is on the college route. Alternatively, someone majoring in “Public Relations and Digital Media Communication” (the closest thing I have found to a major in community management) and planning on becoming “a community developer with a focus on public relations and outreach” is on the skills route, probably. Why is this route among the three major routes? I’m doing it, and this list is arbitrary and based on my personal opinion. Also, it really matters how

The third and unarguably and undoubtedly worst is the “Indie Route” This is the guy who has spent three years coding his own engine only to accidentally make a game that is basically a more advanced form of minecraft. Accidentally because he spent so much time making his game he was actually unaware of minecraft and the similarities between his game and it (for more information and a free game, visit www.brutalnature.com).

That said, these people are the Vincent Van Gogh’s, the Enrich Von Manstein’s, the Nikola Tesla’s, the Thomas Bergersen’s. The people who go totally unnoticed throughout they’re lives and die penniless, but pioneer the great advances in their fields, or end up on the losing side of a great battle and develop something grand and amazing, or create incredible works of art but don’t have a large enough audience to keep them solvent. Indie is where the innovations that change the face of the games industry happen. Those innovations promptly get ripped off by a AAA studio and sold back at a 200% markup. This is a fact of the world. If you are brave enough to enter these waters, I applaud you. I don’t want to be you, but I’ll stand back and give you a hand.

The final way, which doesn’t really count but I have to mention anyway, is knowing the right people. For instance, the lead developer on the Zozball project is 16 (classmate of mine), wants to be a robotics engineer, and is making a game in unity because I showed him the old tech demo and he said “I could make a better one in an hour.” He was hired the same day, and has now developed a full on game, and has two people working under him.

Thanks for reading, now that you’ve finished the article feel free to share this (it really helps my career to have more people aware of this), leave a comment telling me my formatting is retarded, or any number of other things.

The game for this article is pretty basic; figure out which one of the three routes I’m taking.