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Game development includes a number of disparate disciplines and sub-disciplines:
- Art
- Engineering
- Design
- Audio
- Production
- Community
- QA
- Marketing
...And I am certainly forgetting some.
Beneath these are more. For example:
Art...
- Character Modeling (modeling the heroes, villains, NPCs, etc.)
- Rigging (giving the characters bones for the animators to animate)
- Animation (making characters move)
- Environment Modeling (cliffs, buildings, sidewalks, cars, tables, etc.)
- 2D (hand drawn concept art, icons)
- User Interface
- Lighting
- Tech Art
Production...
- External (dealing with licencing interactions such as Marvel, or outsourcing providers)
- Build Management (how this works can be seen in more detail from an article I wrote a while back on my personal blog https://hereticalreflections.wordpress.com/2014/01/13/the-video-game-pipeline/ )
- Internal Process (making sure that the eighteen-jillion steps something has to go through to reach the final build happen)
Design...
- Powers (hero and mob)
- Systems (e.g., Omega, [REDACTED])
- Itemization
- Achievements
- Missions
- Writing
- Level Design (blocking out maps for environment art to make pretty later)
- Game Modes
- Player Experience Design
- Transactional Design
Engineering...
- Gameplay
- AI (Artificial Intelligence)
- Internal Tools
- Server Architecture
- Client Architecture
At very small studios - even smaller than Gazillion - you will
usually find people wearing more than one hat. At large studios, these
disciplines can become even more specialized.
Some of these disciplines are VERY hard to crack into, just because
lots of people have the skills in question combined with relatively few
positions - for example, don't expect to get a dedicated writing
position on most video games unless you are already a mainstream
published fiction writer.
For Engineering, a CS degree is pretty much a must.
Specifics past that depend more on the sub-discipline, but I'll let
someone more familiar with those intricacies to speak to that.
For Art, school is much less important, but you
categorically must have a portfolio, and probably an awesome one at
that. Be aware that 2D art tends to have a LOT more people applying and
relatively fewer spots.
Unless you are impassioned by 2D specifically, I would recommend
picking up the skills for 3D. For 3D, things like Maya, 3D Studio Max,
Zbrush are the tool sets you should learn. Photoshop and Illustrator as
well, of course. Most of these can be acquired relatively easily with
student or non-commercial licenses.
For Design, you can sometimes get a leg up from
taking the various design programs; they weren't around when I was
starting, and have since then gone from being an awkward joke to
actually being pretty good in a lot of cases.
Other routes into Design include starting in QA or Customer Service,
or simply being that rare individual who is both a fan of the particular
game they are applying to and having the ability to think abstractly
and innovatively about that hard-to-pin-down thing called "fun".
If you at all can, find a game, or use Unreal, or Unity, or anything
else that has the ability to create a game experience or mod and make
something. Preferably several somethings. Release it. Iterate on it.
Support it. Talk about it. Figure out what you did wrong the first time
and either fix it or make it work better the next time around. Doing
this well is probably the single best thing you can do to break into
video game design as a professional endeavor.
For Production, routes in are much like Design, but
the design program part is obviously less important, and Customer
Service is probably somewhat more likely a route than QA (whereas with
Design, the reverse is true, though I have seen exceptions for both).
QA or Customer Service are, in the
game industry, usually entry-level positions. Both studios and
publishers will usually maintain QA groups. Some studios (such as
Gazillion) are also their own publishers. Getting into a studio QA group
is generally better in the long-run if you want to get into Design, but
you can also leverage experience in a publisher QA group (e.g., Sony,
Capcom) to parlay yourself into something closer to the action - this
is, in fact, exactly what I did. (Most publishers as well maintain their
own studios in addition to any third party studios they work with).
It is also very important to recognize that the TYPE of game matters a
lot. Studios generally make games within a particular type - mobile,
console, MMORPG, ARPG, exploration, FPS, etc.
Play the kinds games you want to develop. If you don't play MMORPGs,
don't expect to easily get a job at a studio focusing on MMORPGs.
There are, obviously, lots of exceptions to the above, and lots of
places where you can jump these streams. Some sub-disciplines are more
amenable to this than others.
Studios - even departments within the same studio - may weigh
differently such factors as how much of a fan you are for a particular
game, a particular genre, communication skills, etc. It can be a bit of a
crapshoot, so keep trying.
If you, as I do, interview fairly awfully, working on interview
skills and taking practice design or code tests - you can find both
online - can be a genuinely valuable tool to increase your chances even
further.
Hope some of this is useful.