A Perspective on D from game industry

Nick Sabalausky via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Mon Jun 16 00:54:36 PDT 2014


On 6/16/2014 2:56 AM, w0rp wrote:
> On Monday, 16 June 2014 at 05:46:22 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> Geezus, that garbage is still going on? "EA Spouse" alone was well
>> over a decade ago. That, and all the many, many other examples (often
>> less extreme, but still entirely unacceptable IMO) was exactly the
>> reason I decided at the last minute (in college), to change my
>> long-standing plans and not pursue a career in that industry after all.
>>
>> Several *years* ago, I was under the impression that problem had
>> finally been changing? Is that not so?
>
> I was considering getting a job in the games industry, so I applied to a
> bunch of places in the UK during my final year of university. When you
> filtered out the jobs that were looking for years of industry
> experience, then filtered out the jobs that expected you to work
> terribly long hours, you got to the positions that said, "We'll get you
> started as a tester."
>
> I switched to web development, where I work roughly 9-5 for a good
> salary, and I never looked back.

Yea. I never even bothered applying anywhere in gamedev (although 
nothing exists in ohio anyway and I didn't particularly want to move, 
but still). So instead, my first summer in college I got an internship 
with one of the web teams at a major corp around here and learned webdev 
on the job (ASP, back in in the pre-.NET days, even did some WAP/WML)

The 8-5 on that (incl lunch) was enough of a hell for me (even despite 
being a rather decent company) - so I certainly wouldn't want anything 
in an industry that does crunch mode. Been kinda stuck in web dev ever 
since. It's not all bad though, as much as I hate about web, there are 
some aspects of webdev I've come to enjoy. For example, the various 
problems of making web dev less painful has gone from survival to a 
genuine interest.

I've known some people who did go into AAA games though. One guy who 
rose the ranks from tester to full fledged programmer back on the PS1 
(and later worked on Undying, which was a pretty sweet FPS). And an old 
college friend of mine joined up with Volition as a character 
designer/artist for several of their games. He's not there now though, 
and we pretty much lost contact after college, so no idea what he's up 
to now. Although if things are going well for him, then I have a couple 
good guesses.

But anyway, I'm rambling again. :)



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