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The Three Questions

Do I have a portfolio?

This is probably one of the most important parts of getting a job in the game industry. If you don’t have a portfolio, the other guy will, and that’s a problem. Portfolio’s are meant to show off your previous work done. In this day and age, employers expect that you have already done your homework in whatever discipline you aspire to take on as a career.

Programming – Example Portfolio Site

Programmers need to make games that showcase what it is they want to do. For example, if you want to create AI systems in the industry, create something that showcases your knowledge on exactly that! Another example would be a graphics programmer making a game that showcased their knowledge of shaders. Your future employer does not want to be confused on your ambitions, so make it extremely clear what it is you want to do through your work, and your website.

Art – Example Portfolio Site

Same goes for artists as it does for programmers — specialization is key. Becoming a conceptual artist require different preparation than becoming a 3D animator or level designer. Whatever your niche may be, you still need many examples of your work.

Design – Example Portfolio Site — Game Career Guide Information

Becoming a game designer is not easy. Normally game design positions are really allocated to those with industry experience, but there are exceptions to anything. If you want to become a game designer you need full work games. A common misconception is that creating a game design document is what employers are looking for. This is very wrong, your peers want to see working games that they can play and analyze — such as a complete board game — although you will need to refer to the link posted above for more clarification.

Do I have connections?

Game Developers Conference – Survival Guide for GDC

Every year our officer team goes to GDC in San Francisco. If you are serious about entering this industry as a professional, this is a must go event. Contacts are everything in this game, and you can attain 40+ more actual game industry contacts just by showing up here and handing your resume / business card out like a mad-man.

IGDA Chapter meetings

Find your local IGDA chapter and go! Plenty of industry members and enthusiasts are bound to be found in or around it. Google is your friend for finding out this sort of information in specifics.

Do I have a degree?

You need to get a degree. Essentially a company has no reason to hire you if you don’t have a degree — unless you are a savant. But if you aren’t a savant, get your degree in whatever discipline you’re interested in. Here is a list of appropriate degrees for Cal Poly students.

Programming

B.S. in Computer Science
B.S. in Computer Engineering

Art and Design

B.F.A in Graphic Design

If…

and when you have answered all these questions with a big Yes, then it is time to start applying for jobs and internships. Below you will find a list of links in which to get started with the next part of your journey. Think of this whole process like a quest chain.

Game Jobs

Gamasutra Listings

EA Listings

Blizzard Listings

Game Internships

Gamasutra Guide

For all other Information (for the most part)

Tom Sloper has put together an amazing questionnaire that should be review by any aspiring game developer. It is probably the most truthful guide I have ever read, and will definitely put you in a good direction in case you don’t believe anything that I am saying. In any case, enjoy:

Game Engines

Irrlicht Engine — free

• One of the biggest benefits of Irrlicht is the amount of starter tutorials that have been documented
• It has language bindings with .Net, Java, C++, Python, Ruby, and Lua
• Supports a wealth of level and model formats
• 3D rendering support with OpenGL, DirectX 8/9, and a custom software rasterizer

Ogre 3D Engine — free

• A very robust 3D graphics engine written in and for C++
• Not a game engine like Irrlicht — is purely for rendering in OpenGL or DirectX 9
• Support handling for most 3D modeling export tools such as Maya, 3D Studio Max and Milkshape

GarageGames Torque Engine Series — ranging from $150 – 350 for students

• Fully capable game engines complete with Audio/Input/GUI/3D and 2D rendering components
• Some of the newer engines do not have full documentation and can be hard to use
• The more successful engines such as Torque3D and Torque2D are widely support and have a very large user base
• Come with many custom-made tools, and many books have been written on their engines

Game Libraries

OpenGL – graphics / input

• cross-platform API for 2D and 3D graphics
• hides the complexities of interfacing with different 3D accelerators
• highly documented, many tutorials, many, many books on how to use it

DirectX — graphics / sound / input

• a collection of many API’s for handling tasks related to game programming
• if you use pure DirectX for your projects, the dependencies are much easier to manage
• Has language bindings for C++ and C#
• has a lot of documentation which has been come in form of books / articles / tutorials

SDL – graphics / sound / input

• has the largest amount of available language bindings (refer to site for list)
• is an abstraction of OpenGL, making it a bit easier to read and code with
• highly documented in the form of books / tutorials / articles

Allegro– graphics / sound / input

• game programming library for C/C++ developers distributed freely
• Supports DOS, Unix (Linux, FreeBSD, Irix, Solaris, Darwin), Windows, QNX, BeOS and MacOS X
• Very old and stable with lots of projects and tutorials
• Simple API for graphics sound and input

Physics Libraries

PAL – Physics Abstraction Layer

• Uniform API which has Plug and Play for almost all the major physics engines
• Complete list here

Art, Modeling, and Sound

Blender — all purpose model creation tool for games

• Can be used for modeling, UV unwrapping, texturing, rigging, water simulations, skinning, animating, rendering, particle and other simulations, non-linear editing, compositing, and creating interactive 3D applications.

Gimp — graphics tool

• It’s like Photoshop, but free

Audacity — audio creation and editing tool

• cross-platform and is available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and BSD
• many features, including multi-track mixing, amplitude envelope editing, selective noise removal, etc.

Milkshape3D – low polygon modeling tool

• famous for its large repertoire of export capabilities (70 file formats)
• can also act as a skeletal animator and viewer

Software Engineering

Subversion — version control

• allows you to perform the most common version control operations directly from inside the Microsoft Visual Studio IDE
• requires a web server for installation

MSDN Academic Alliance for Cal Poly Pomona students

• Free Microsoft software for Cal Poly Pomona students
• requires your Cal Poly Pomona login information to access

Eclipse IDE – software development tool

• Allows you to build programs in Java, C++, C, COBOL, Python, Perl and PHP
• Supports many user-created plugins for the Eclipse Framework

Doxygen – automatic API generation for projects

• generates documentation for C++, C, Java, Objective-C, Python, IDL (Corba and Microsoft flavors), Fortran, VHDL, PHP, C#,