Times have changed a lot since Garry broke through with the infamous Garry's Mod. That's where I got my first taste of programming - writing a PID controller for a tank turret so I could point the tank's gun using my mouse.
Today, it's easier than ever to get started making games (even I can do it! [0]) but standing out in a crowded marketplace is very difficult. The music industry saw a very similar trend about 10-15 years ago, with the release of consumer recording equipment. In both cases it lead to a 'de-professionalization' of the industry, where most participants are amateurs but most of the success still goes to established studios - barring one-in-a-million outliers such as Garry's Mod, or other indie darlings like Hollow Knight, Balatro, Stardew Valley.
> That's where I got my first taste of programming - writing a PID controller for a tank turret so I could point the tank's gun using my mouse.
Yeah, same here! I had done a couple of simple personal Flash games previously, but Garry's Mod is where I really felt like I cut my teeth on programming. Doing Wiremod/Expression 2 taught me PID controllers and some basic linear algebra, and after having helped some friends debug their code, taught me the importance of style and good practices.
I'm a dinosaur who's supposed to hate the music kids listen to these days, but the quality seems as good or better, and the quanity magnitudes higher, so maybe it was a professionalization of amateurs?
Well, the quality of the games that reach some level of commercial success has indeed gone up. On the other hand, ~50 brand new games release on Steam every day and a lot of them are gonna be first-time releases from amateurs for whom the level of quality & polish achievable with a small team & publisher support is just out of reach.
The best indie games are amazing these days, but they hide a long tail of disappointed developers.
> On the other hand, ~50 brand new games release on Steam every day and a lot of them are gonna be first-time releases from amateurs for whom the level of quality & polish achievable with a small team & publisher support is just out of reach.
I'd wager a lot of them are money grabs from someone who followed a tutorial on how to make a certain type of game in Unity, swapped a few assets, and put it out there hoping to make a few dollars?
Yes but it's difficult to distinguish your game from theirs in the search results. It's not like people play a demo of every game and then buy the best one
Quality is subjective, quantity definitely is more abundant however, there was a certain aspect to analog that can’t be reproduced digitally in one’s bedroom. The studio sound, while recorded digitally, is still very much an analog thing. That recording quality comes through. I can tell when something has been quantized and syncopated vs someone really good at the drums.
It will be game on when a bedroom artist can make their own master vinyl and print their own records without a $45k upfront cost.
the quality is definitely not better, not since the early 2000s when everything was fully digital and everything is single tracked, rhythm shifted to metronome grid, autotuned--the really big budget producers like max martin will put a little effort into the mixdown but by and large they're not even trying to make thing sound good, they're just pumping out minimal effort productions with default settings.
I am not sure if I buy the "de-professionalization" of the music industry. If that happened, it happened 70 years ago. beatles, beach boys, metallica. Many of the biggest bands of all time, with some of the best selling albums were literal teenagers.
They still needed expensive studios and technicians to produce a commercial-grade quality album. Nowadays you can try pulling it off at home by yourself.
Thomas interviews lots of successful indies about how to make games that provide a living. My takeaway is that while the AA/AAA environment may have never been more challenging, if you can ship small focused games, you the evolution of devtools (eg free and/or functionally free engines for teams earning under $1m) means that making a living shipping small games is doable. You just have to ship small games, not try to compete with studios spending $150m on the low end.
Just like in the music industry, people still believe they can be the outlier. Flappy Bird, more so than your examples built by skilled individuals, showed that "anyone could do it".
Having a hit game and being an industry programmer/artist might as well be two completely different skills.
Sticking with the music analogy, it is the difference between programming your own DAW vs being the audio engineer/writer/producer/singer of your own rap album.
The article highlights how to get into the modding industry. While that is part of the games industry, it is a small fraction of the larger game production business.
I've hired many game programmers and the key to getting into the industry is demonstrating a few critical skills:
1. Sufficient technical skill in whatever your field is.
2. Curiosity applied to problem solving. How can we make this work?
3. An ability to finish what you start. Get it done.
If you're a new programmer looking to start out on this journey, I recommend picking an engine and just start making stuff. Participate in as many Gamejams, Mods or minigame productions as possible. Ship things; Finish them. Then, when you're interviewing for a 'real' game job, you will have some experience to share and discuss.
For technical candidates, there's a minimum threshold that you must cross to be considered. For programmers, it's often C++. So learn the basics, get proficient, use the tools. Read the books on programming interviews and learn the types of things that are expected.
Absolutely necessary in a solo project, but in a team it is enough if a few members, or really only the leader, is good at that (as long as the leader is somewhat competent and has some cat-herding skills to keep everyone on track).
Keep things really small. Small projects you can pull off in a few days and then move on. The kind of scope you'd do for a uni trimester for example. I used a lot of my uni coursework to build small game(ish) projects around them
if I may offer some advice as game/engine programmer.
If you want to get hired at a company as a programmer, make really really small things, like tiny games. I am talking start with hangman, then sudoku in the console. Then move on to minesweeper and tetris. If confident do space invaders. At this point maybe get started with 3D? Maybe Unity and Unreal?
There's SO much stuff you'll learn making those games. Maybe you end up making a fancy menu, or adding sound effects. Maybe you come up with some basic particle effects. It doesn't really matter, what matters is you went through it and have something to show.
Don't get side tracked with big projects and trying to be a designer at the same time. Keep it small.
If I am interviewing you and see some solid and polished small games and we can talk about stuff you found cool you're already punching way above most entry level coders.
He quickly mentioned it, but good god, coding for a game is the hardest thing ever in the field. If you are a good software engineer, there is a good chance you are a bad game dev. It's so different, convoluted, mostly relying on tricks, clean code will slow you down, nothing works as you expected, and you have to learn so many things around coding (the engine itself, physics, texturing, modeling, lighting, etc.)
Game coding makes you have to think about thinks that a lot of web devs don't have to (or merely don't bother to) consider.
Optimization is paramount. To maintain 60 fps, you need to calculate your game state and render graphics in under 1/60th of a second. That's only 16.6[..] milliseconds. If you want to appeal to the high-end players with 240 hz monitors, you get less than 5 ms. When you're operating at that level of latency, every microsecond counts.
You start having to care about how your data is laid out in memory so that you can optimize cache usage. You start caring about branch mispredictions. Multithreading becomes an absolute must, but locks are landmines. If you're using a garbage collecting language, per-frame allocations are kryptonite and you re-use buffers to avoid unpredictable pauses.
Your profiler becomes your best friend. You're not just looking for good performance, but consistent performance. If there's a 3 ms spike in CPU time every 10 frames, your players will absolutely notice it and it will destroy the feel of your game. That 3 ms becomes a critical bug.
I think this is some mythical game programmer you have in mind because, having worked in a few AAA/AA games myself, i can clearly tell you that the overwhelming majority of programmers - including engine programmers - rarely think about any of that.
Sure, someone might occasionally pull out a profiler, but only if things start becoming visibly bad. But this is an exceptional situation, not the norm.
On the other hand, game engines are constantly engineered with features that go against performance: interpreted scripting languages, ad-hoc garbage collectors (for assets, not only for scripts), visual material editors[0], deep object oriented hierarchies with FAT objects (hello Unreal Engine), etc.
[0] Shader compilation stutter is something a lot of gamers notice and dislike and a common explanation for its existence is the number and complexity of shaders current games use. But one thing very few seem to notice is this is only the case in engines that allow designers/artists to create materials with visual editors that generate shaders without understanding the implications. In engines that do not allow that (such as current id Tech) and artist have to create their materials using a low number of predefined shaders you rarely hear about this issue.
A really good book I read recently was Game Programming Patterns by Robert Nystrom - I think it has helped me, as a more traditional software engineer, to dip my toes into game development in a way that doesn't feel like a spaghetti plate full of hacks and tricks. I recommend it.
I do find years in enterprise made me uniquely prepared for organising my game code. I definitely see the spaghetti in there, but it's at least neatly contained in the bowls I've set out.
But it's definitely the hardest software domain I have ever tackled, and if only it were just software! Game dev is realy 6 other disciplines in a trenchcoat. Which disciplines they are depends on your game and whether or not you have help.
Hard disagree. In fact, learning how to apply clean code and architectural patterns in game dev has kept projects manageable and on track and done nothing but level up my general software ability.
Normal maps are a good example of tricks in games, why make a watery surface millions of triangles when you can just fake how light reflects off of it and trick people into thinking its got millions of triangles
One esoteric route would be to try and specialize in an area where talent is scarce. There's a lot of gameplay programmers, few engine programmers, fewer graphics programmers, and very few physics programmers (in my experience at least).
As such you could try to specialize in this area (collision detection, ray queries, rigid body simulation, constraints, solvers, softbody sim, fluid sim etc.). Of course this isn't for everyone as it requires skills and interest in: low level concurrent programming, maths/linear algebra and physical behavior intuition.
If you do find these topics fascinating and can demonstrate some ability in them, your skills will certainly be in demand.
I worked on the software dev side in the games industry for years. I have never seen a worse time to be attempting to make a living doing that, it's pure madness. The endgame being pushed, and looking increasingly technically viable over a decade or so, is the user, holodeck style, describes what they want and it is assembled in front of them. There is a lot of cope in the games industry about this ever happening because of how disruptive it would be.
In the mean time as others have mentioned I know people, industry pros, that make money on Roblox and UEFN. The valuable part is a talent for creating gameplay systems, which is not in any way related to low level programming or rendering algorithms, then you stand at least a small chance, but due to how crowded the market is the returns on this get smaller every day.
To anyone wanting to make a living from the games industry I would advise simply going outside and doing something else.
Edit to add: I have noticed than when I started in games over twenty years ago people knew hard work was involved. These days if you tell people you work in games you are met with a response that you basically play all the time and are not serious, and to some extent this reflects the changing nature of most of the work being done in that period.
> There is a lot of cope in the games industry about this ever happening because of how disruptive it would be.
I don't think it would be that disruptive, we already have a sea of sloppy half-baked games to swim in and it hasn't destroyed the industry.
I think what people will quickly find in their holodeck reality is that the average gamer can't think up good games, that the shared playerbase is half the fun, and that there would be a serious shallowness to the experience.
I think what will really happen is that game studios will start pumping out even more shitty mobile games with AI, and the type of people who binge 20 advertainment games per week will be sufficiently numbed.
Meanwhile everyone else will continue to desire the same more genuine and substantive games from studios, that is my prediction.
unironically I think this is the next frontier. If "other players" constitute part of the experience, how do you create/attract/curate a "quality" playerbase?
++. I find it kinda baffling that people assume that the ideal endgame is "AI makes whatever the user wants". What I want is to have interesting novel experiences crafted by talented people. I have no interest in playing a randomly-generated composite of a bunch of existing games. What would be the point?
> the user, holodeck style, describes what they want and it is assembled in front of them.
I think people have their head in the sand about how disruptive generative AI will have, not just to the game industry, but all entertainment industries.
It has started with music, 2D and 3D art, text to voice (voice actors no longer needed). Entire 3d environments, and then worlds, characters, story lines will be generated on the fly. The people holding IP will be the big winners (Disney, etc). If you don't hold any IP then you'll be shit out of luck.
I too started in the games industry 20+ years ago, and would not have recommended it even then. Crunch was brutal, the pay was low, and I left feeling like I hadn't learnt software best practices or really progressed in my skill set compared to people working in "boring" enterprise shops.
Because the value of IP is stored in cultural zeitgeist. People don't want to go to "A mouses fantasy location" they want to go to Disneyland.
Convincing people to give a shit about your IP is a totally different issue to producing it, in my opinion. There are already countless talented artists a big producer could hire to make them new IPs but it is still incredibly rare for a new IP to take off.
Art keeps getting cheaper and easier to make yet as a society we are addicted to remakes and expanded universes, new seasons of shows that ended a decade ago etc.
> the user, holodeck style, describes what they want and it is assembled in front of them.
I really don't think this is what most gamers want - and I think they'd like it even less if they tried it, for the reason you highlight 2 sentences later...
> The valuable part is a talent for creating gameplay systems
Beyond that, gamers like a sense of "community" - being able to talk to people who play the same game, have a shared framework for achievements and the like, etc.
I do believe generative gameplay will be the next big thing, but not to spit out an entire game by any means.
> The endgame being pushed, and looking increasingly technically viable over a decade or so, is the user, holodeck style, describes what they want and it is assembled in front of them.
Maybe this is just more cope but I think its important to remember that anyone who can write will still read books written by others. AI will be disruptive but art is ultimately about sharing and receiving what someone else is trying to share.
Anyway....it looks pretty neat. I feel like the industry as gone from a time of mods, through an era of AAA unmoddable games, and now we're landing on "all games will be mods.". I guess we're chasing Minecraft and Roblox and Fortnite models now.
He has an interest in getting good devs hyped on S&box, but he's being pretty open ended and honest here. Want to be a game dev? Make a game and ship it... all of the resources for the in between steps are out there and it's only getting easier, but for everyone else just as much as you. I grew up in the gmod mini-modding scene and it's still one of the most impactful parts of my life. First there's editing existing scripts, then there's recognizing what people (or yourself) would like that doesn't already exist, then there's the grunt work of turning it from idea into reality, then there's releasing it with your name attached. It's very rewarding. Still working on releasing something with a price tag attached but this post a good reminder and motivation.
And yeah, the steam workshop was way ahead of its time, and feels like a new, higher tier of sandbox game. I don't think there's any other game that came out around the same time as gmod (2006) that has had comparable momentum and staying power.
He mentions s&dbox, his new engine/gmod spiritual successor. They maintain an interesting devblog over at https://sbox.game/news if you are interested in how the sausage is made.
It feels like his new goal is directly challenging the niche that Roblox sits in. They have their work cut out for them if they hope to pull people away from that ecosystem.
roblox is a good suggestion. i know it's often criticised, especially for its profit margins, but developers get a massive potential audience, free unlimited multiplayer hosting, and many monetisation streams with little setup.
the company could definitely do with better PR, and their child safety features are good but not perfect by any means. i'd still say it's a good choice if you're trying to make a game easily and quickly
disclaimer: i've made money from Roblox's DevEx program
Grinding leetcode and learning art seem at odds here. If you're a dev grinding leetcode, you'd likely be working in AAA where your time would be wasted making assets.
In British English, 'college' does not refer to University / higher education, it's closer to high-school. Garry's british and probably went to a UK college at the normal age for someone in his cohort.
> Our college is free and normally vocation targetted. People who leave school usually either get a job, stay on at school for 2 more years, or go to college.
To be more precise they are called "6th Form College", and take 2 years to complete. At the end you take A-Level exams* which determines which type of university you can apply for.
Where I grew up, there were kids in high school that left high school as soon as they were able to get jobs because their family needed them to help put food on the table.
As an aside, ARC Prize Foundation (behind ARC-AGI) is on a 6 month sprint to build 100s of mini games as a part of ARC-AGI-3 [1]. Rationale here [2].
We’ve stood up a mini game studio to make it happen. If anyone is interested, happy to share what we’ve learned. We also have open slots for more indie game devs.
Times have changed a lot since Garry broke through with the infamous Garry's Mod. That's where I got my first taste of programming - writing a PID controller for a tank turret so I could point the tank's gun using my mouse.
Today, it's easier than ever to get started making games (even I can do it! [0]) but standing out in a crowded marketplace is very difficult. The music industry saw a very similar trend about 10-15 years ago, with the release of consumer recording equipment. In both cases it lead to a 'de-professionalization' of the industry, where most participants are amateurs but most of the success still goes to established studios - barring one-in-a-million outliers such as Garry's Mod, or other indie darlings like Hollow Knight, Balatro, Stardew Valley.
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/3627290/Botnet_of_Ares/
> That's where I got my first taste of programming - writing a PID controller for a tank turret so I could point the tank's gun using my mouse.
Yeah, same here! I had done a couple of simple personal Flash games previously, but Garry's Mod is where I really felt like I cut my teeth on programming. Doing Wiremod/Expression 2 taught me PID controllers and some basic linear algebra, and after having helped some friends debug their code, taught me the importance of style and good practices.
>> 'de-professionalization'
I'm a dinosaur who's supposed to hate the music kids listen to these days, but the quality seems as good or better, and the quanity magnitudes higher, so maybe it was a professionalization of amateurs?
Well, the quality of the games that reach some level of commercial success has indeed gone up. On the other hand, ~50 brand new games release on Steam every day and a lot of them are gonna be first-time releases from amateurs for whom the level of quality & polish achievable with a small team & publisher support is just out of reach.
The best indie games are amazing these days, but they hide a long tail of disappointed developers.
> On the other hand, ~50 brand new games release on Steam every day and a lot of them are gonna be first-time releases from amateurs for whom the level of quality & polish achievable with a small team & publisher support is just out of reach.
I'd wager a lot of them are money grabs from someone who followed a tutorial on how to make a certain type of game in Unity, swapped a few assets, and put it out there hoping to make a few dollars?
Yes but it's difficult to distinguish your game from theirs in the search results. It's not like people play a demo of every game and then buy the best one
Quality is subjective, quantity definitely is more abundant however, there was a certain aspect to analog that can’t be reproduced digitally in one’s bedroom. The studio sound, while recorded digitally, is still very much an analog thing. That recording quality comes through. I can tell when something has been quantized and syncopated vs someone really good at the drums.
It will be game on when a bedroom artist can make their own master vinyl and print their own records without a $45k upfront cost.
the quality is definitely not better, not since the early 2000s when everything was fully digital and everything is single tracked, rhythm shifted to metronome grid, autotuned--the really big budget producers like max martin will put a little effort into the mixdown but by and large they're not even trying to make thing sound good, they're just pumping out minimal effort productions with default settings.
Tools are much better compared to old school cassettes and such
Rick Beato would disagree.
I am not sure if I buy the "de-professionalization" of the music industry. If that happened, it happened 70 years ago. beatles, beach boys, metallica. Many of the biggest bands of all time, with some of the best selling albums were literal teenagers.
They still needed expensive studios and technicians to produce a commercial-grade quality album. Nowadays you can try pulling it off at home by yourself.
You may find this channel interesting: https://www.youtube.com/@thomasbrush/videos
Thomas interviews lots of successful indies about how to make games that provide a living. My takeaway is that while the AA/AAA environment may have never been more challenging, if you can ship small focused games, you the evolution of devtools (eg free and/or functionally free engines for teams earning under $1m) means that making a living shipping small games is doable. You just have to ship small games, not try to compete with studios spending $150m on the low end.
Thanks, that seems very interesting!
Just like in the music industry, people still believe they can be the outlier. Flappy Bird, more so than your examples built by skilled individuals, showed that "anyone could do it".
Having a hit game and being an industry programmer/artist might as well be two completely different skills.
Sticking with the music analogy, it is the difference between programming your own DAW vs being the audio engineer/writer/producer/singer of your own rap album.
The article highlights how to get into the modding industry. While that is part of the games industry, it is a small fraction of the larger game production business.
I've hired many game programmers and the key to getting into the industry is demonstrating a few critical skills:
1. Sufficient technical skill in whatever your field is.
2. Curiosity applied to problem solving. How can we make this work?
3. An ability to finish what you start. Get it done.
If you're a new programmer looking to start out on this journey, I recommend picking an engine and just start making stuff. Participate in as many Gamejams, Mods or minigame productions as possible. Ship things; Finish them. Then, when you're interviewing for a 'real' game job, you will have some experience to share and discuss.
For technical candidates, there's a minimum threshold that you must cross to be considered. For programmers, it's often C++. So learn the basics, get proficient, use the tools. Read the books on programming interviews and learn the types of things that are expected.
3) there is my biggest challenge personally
Absolutely necessary in a solo project, but in a team it is enough if a few members, or really only the leader, is good at that (as long as the leader is somewhat competent and has some cat-herding skills to keep everyone on track).
Keep things really small. Small projects you can pull off in a few days and then move on. The kind of scope you'd do for a uni trimester for example. I used a lot of my uni coursework to build small game(ish) projects around them
if I may offer some advice as game/engine programmer.
If you want to get hired at a company as a programmer, make really really small things, like tiny games. I am talking start with hangman, then sudoku in the console. Then move on to minesweeper and tetris. If confident do space invaders. At this point maybe get started with 3D? Maybe Unity and Unreal?
There's SO much stuff you'll learn making those games. Maybe you end up making a fancy menu, or adding sound effects. Maybe you come up with some basic particle effects. It doesn't really matter, what matters is you went through it and have something to show.
Don't get side tracked with big projects and trying to be a designer at the same time. Keep it small.
If I am interviewing you and see some solid and polished small games and we can talk about stuff you found cool you're already punching way above most entry level coders.
He quickly mentioned it, but good god, coding for a game is the hardest thing ever in the field. If you are a good software engineer, there is a good chance you are a bad game dev. It's so different, convoluted, mostly relying on tricks, clean code will slow you down, nothing works as you expected, and you have to learn so many things around coding (the engine itself, physics, texturing, modeling, lighting, etc.)
Game coding makes you have to think about thinks that a lot of web devs don't have to (or merely don't bother to) consider.
Optimization is paramount. To maintain 60 fps, you need to calculate your game state and render graphics in under 1/60th of a second. That's only 16.6[..] milliseconds. If you want to appeal to the high-end players with 240 hz monitors, you get less than 5 ms. When you're operating at that level of latency, every microsecond counts.
You start having to care about how your data is laid out in memory so that you can optimize cache usage. You start caring about branch mispredictions. Multithreading becomes an absolute must, but locks are landmines. If you're using a garbage collecting language, per-frame allocations are kryptonite and you re-use buffers to avoid unpredictable pauses.
Your profiler becomes your best friend. You're not just looking for good performance, but consistent performance. If there's a 3 ms spike in CPU time every 10 frames, your players will absolutely notice it and it will destroy the feel of your game. That 3 ms becomes a critical bug.
I think this is some mythical game programmer you have in mind because, having worked in a few AAA/AA games myself, i can clearly tell you that the overwhelming majority of programmers - including engine programmers - rarely think about any of that.
Sure, someone might occasionally pull out a profiler, but only if things start becoming visibly bad. But this is an exceptional situation, not the norm.
On the other hand, game engines are constantly engineered with features that go against performance: interpreted scripting languages, ad-hoc garbage collectors (for assets, not only for scripts), visual material editors[0], deep object oriented hierarchies with FAT objects (hello Unreal Engine), etc.
[0] Shader compilation stutter is something a lot of gamers notice and dislike and a common explanation for its existence is the number and complexity of shaders current games use. But one thing very few seem to notice is this is only the case in engines that allow designers/artists to create materials with visual editors that generate shaders without understanding the implications. In engines that do not allow that (such as current id Tech) and artist have to create their materials using a low number of predefined shaders you rarely hear about this issue.
A really good book I read recently was Game Programming Patterns by Robert Nystrom - I think it has helped me, as a more traditional software engineer, to dip my toes into game development in a way that doesn't feel like a spaghetti plate full of hacks and tricks. I recommend it.
I do find years in enterprise made me uniquely prepared for organising my game code. I definitely see the spaghetti in there, but it's at least neatly contained in the bowls I've set out.
But it's definitely the hardest software domain I have ever tackled, and if only it were just software! Game dev is realy 6 other disciplines in a trenchcoat. Which disciplines they are depends on your game and whether or not you have help.
> Clean code will slow you down
Hard disagree. In fact, learning how to apply clean code and architectural patterns in game dev has kept projects manageable and on track and done nothing but level up my general software ability.
Normal maps are a good example of tricks in games, why make a watery surface millions of triangles when you can just fake how light reflects off of it and trick people into thinking its got millions of triangles
One esoteric route would be to try and specialize in an area where talent is scarce. There's a lot of gameplay programmers, few engine programmers, fewer graphics programmers, and very few physics programmers (in my experience at least).
As such you could try to specialize in this area (collision detection, ray queries, rigid body simulation, constraints, solvers, softbody sim, fluid sim etc.). Of course this isn't for everyone as it requires skills and interest in: low level concurrent programming, maths/linear algebra and physical behavior intuition. If you do find these topics fascinating and can demonstrate some ability in them, your skills will certainly be in demand.
I worked on the software dev side in the games industry for years. I have never seen a worse time to be attempting to make a living doing that, it's pure madness. The endgame being pushed, and looking increasingly technically viable over a decade or so, is the user, holodeck style, describes what they want and it is assembled in front of them. There is a lot of cope in the games industry about this ever happening because of how disruptive it would be.
In the mean time as others have mentioned I know people, industry pros, that make money on Roblox and UEFN. The valuable part is a talent for creating gameplay systems, which is not in any way related to low level programming or rendering algorithms, then you stand at least a small chance, but due to how crowded the market is the returns on this get smaller every day.
To anyone wanting to make a living from the games industry I would advise simply going outside and doing something else.
Edit to add: I have noticed than when I started in games over twenty years ago people knew hard work was involved. These days if you tell people you work in games you are met with a response that you basically play all the time and are not serious, and to some extent this reflects the changing nature of most of the work being done in that period.
> if you tell people you work in games you are met with a response that you basically play all the time and are not serious,
That was how people responded when I told them I worked I was a game dev ~20 years ago too.
Can you believe we get paid to do this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAFLfx3mvIg
> There is a lot of cope in the games industry about this ever happening because of how disruptive it would be.
I don't think it would be that disruptive, we already have a sea of sloppy half-baked games to swim in and it hasn't destroyed the industry.
I think what people will quickly find in their holodeck reality is that the average gamer can't think up good games, that the shared playerbase is half the fun, and that there would be a serious shallowness to the experience.
I think what will really happen is that game studios will start pumping out even more shitty mobile games with AI, and the type of people who binge 20 advertainment games per week will be sufficiently numbed.
Meanwhile everyone else will continue to desire the same more genuine and substantive games from studios, that is my prediction.
> that the shared playerbase is half the fun,
unironically I think this is the next frontier. If "other players" constitute part of the experience, how do you create/attract/curate a "quality" playerbase?
++. I find it kinda baffling that people assume that the ideal endgame is "AI makes whatever the user wants". What I want is to have interesting novel experiences crafted by talented people. I have no interest in playing a randomly-generated composite of a bunch of existing games. What would be the point?
> the user, holodeck style, describes what they want and it is assembled in front of them.
I think people have their head in the sand about how disruptive generative AI will have, not just to the game industry, but all entertainment industries.
It has started with music, 2D and 3D art, text to voice (voice actors no longer needed). Entire 3d environments, and then worlds, characters, story lines will be generated on the fly. The people holding IP will be the big winners (Disney, etc). If you don't hold any IP then you'll be shit out of luck.
I too started in the games industry 20+ years ago, and would not have recommended it even then. Crunch was brutal, the pay was low, and I left feeling like I hadn't learnt software best practices or really progressed in my skill set compared to people working in "boring" enterprise shops.
What's the point of IP if the conjecture is that creativity is solved? Why not just generate different IP?
Because the value of IP is stored in cultural zeitgeist. People don't want to go to "A mouses fantasy location" they want to go to Disneyland.
Convincing people to give a shit about your IP is a totally different issue to producing it, in my opinion. There are already countless talented artists a big producer could hire to make them new IPs but it is still incredibly rare for a new IP to take off.
Art keeps getting cheaper and easier to make yet as a society we are addicted to remakes and expanded universes, new seasons of shows that ended a decade ago etc.
Creativity absolutely has not been solved. Theft, however, has been solved.
> the user, holodeck style, describes what they want and it is assembled in front of them.
I really don't think this is what most gamers want - and I think they'd like it even less if they tried it, for the reason you highlight 2 sentences later...
> The valuable part is a talent for creating gameplay systems
Beyond that, gamers like a sense of "community" - being able to talk to people who play the same game, have a shared framework for achievements and the like, etc.
I do believe generative gameplay will be the next big thing, but not to spit out an entire game by any means.
> The endgame being pushed, and looking increasingly technically viable over a decade or so, is the user, holodeck style, describes what they want and it is assembled in front of them.
Maybe this is just more cope but I think its important to remember that anyone who can write will still read books written by others. AI will be disruptive but art is ultimately about sharing and receiving what someone else is trying to share.
https://archive.is/ofX2x
I wonder if this is a stealth ad for s&box.
Anyway....it looks pretty neat. I feel like the industry as gone from a time of mods, through an era of AAA unmoddable games, and now we're landing on "all games will be mods.". I guess we're chasing Minecraft and Roblox and Fortnite models now.
He has an interest in getting good devs hyped on S&box, but he's being pretty open ended and honest here. Want to be a game dev? Make a game and ship it... all of the resources for the in between steps are out there and it's only getting easier, but for everyone else just as much as you. I grew up in the gmod mini-modding scene and it's still one of the most impactful parts of my life. First there's editing existing scripts, then there's recognizing what people (or yourself) would like that doesn't already exist, then there's the grunt work of turning it from idea into reality, then there's releasing it with your name attached. It's very rewarding. Still working on releasing something with a price tag attached but this post a good reminder and motivation.
And yeah, the steam workshop was way ahead of its time, and feels like a new, higher tier of sandbox game. I don't think there's any other game that came out around the same time as gmod (2006) that has had comparable momentum and staying power.
Is Fortnite particularly moddable? I know next to nothing about it, but didn't think it had a comparable modding scene to Minecraft and Roblox.
He mentions s&dbox, his new engine/gmod spiritual successor. They maintain an interesting devblog over at https://sbox.game/news if you are interested in how the sausage is made.
It feels like his new goal is directly challenging the niche that Roblox sits in. They have their work cut out for them if they hope to pull people away from that ecosystem.
roblox is a good suggestion. i know it's often criticised, especially for its profit margins, but developers get a massive potential audience, free unlimited multiplayer hosting, and many monetisation streams with little setup.
the company could definitely do with better PR, and their child safety features are good but not perfect by any means. i'd still say it's a good choice if you're trying to make a game easily and quickly
disclaimer: i've made money from Roblox's DevEx program
Chris Wilson, (legendary) co-creator of Path of Exile, also recently answered this same question on his new YouTube channel.
https://youtube.com/@chriswilsonvideos?si=qD1rbztnI0nY7pDf
Definitely a controversial question in this economy.
While I love Garry's Mod, I don't love this article, so I'll give my pithy advice:
1) Yes, learn to program.
2) Yes, learn 3d art.
3) Enthusiastically do those things almost every day of your life.
4) Don't follow too many tutorials, just enough to unblock you.
5) Let the debugger/screen punch you in the face. Learn to love being told when you are wrong.
6) Keep your expenses low, but probably you still need to go to a relatively good college.
7) Why? That's because a large part of our world is based on needless credentialism.
8) Build tools that people literally use. This is how you know you're ready for interviewing.
9) Grind leetcode and brain teasers and common interview gotchas for your language/domain of choice, but only an hour a day max.
That's basically what it takes to get a real and good job in the industry now. No magic bullets, just hard work and acceptance of some arbitrary BS.
Grinding leetcode and learning art seem at odds here. If you're a dev grinding leetcode, you'd likely be working in AAA where your time would be wasted making assets.
Can you elaborate on your eighth point?
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In British English, 'college' does not refer to University / higher education, it's closer to high-school. Garry's british and probably went to a UK college at the normal age for someone in his cohort.
The post even references this
> Our college is free and normally vocation targetted. People who leave school usually either get a job, stay on at school for 2 more years, or go to college.
To be more precise they are called "6th Form College", and take 2 years to complete. At the end you take A-Level exams* which determines which type of university you can apply for.
My mates went to Cambridge/Oxford, I didn't.
* This information may be out of date!
How much privilege do you need to go to a free college?
Where I grew up, there were kids in high school that left high school as soon as they were able to get jobs because their family needed them to help put food on the table.
So at least some privilege?
As an aside, ARC Prize Foundation (behind ARC-AGI) is on a 6 month sprint to build 100s of mini games as a part of ARC-AGI-3 [1]. Rationale here [2].
We’ve stood up a mini game studio to make it happen. If anyone is interested, happy to share what we’ve learned. We also have open slots for more indie game devs.
[1] https://three.arcprize.org/ [2] https://arcprize.org/arc-agi/3/