Origins of developer

[tr-Thanatos]

Hello all Developers/want-to-be-developers,

 

Quite simply, this is a thread where one can post how they got into the game development industry, how they cut their teeth in learning to be a developer(for example, from who/what you learned DirectX), and what their goals as a developer have been.

 

ok,with me:

 

I dont plan on being a prof. game developer, I am mainly more of a hobbyist. Therefore, I really dont have that much interaction with the game development community, atleast not as much as I would want. I have been a programmer for under 2 years, and during that time I have tought myself C/C++/PERL/PHP and the OpenGL and Win32 APIs. I am currently working on learning DirectX, but I am mainly focusing on getting linux programming skills under my belt as I love the open-source community. My goals as a Hobbyist mainly have been to learn as much as I can about a broad subject, and to improve my math skills, as well as push the boundries of hardware(although so far, not in the way I would like,i.e. memory overflows).

[Maeljin]

Hiya tr-Thanatos,

 

I'm a Developer and a HUGE fan of Black Isle / Obsidian games. About five years ago I broke into the industry via a Production Assistant internship at a fairly high profile strategy game company (who I won't name here).

 

I believe that I got my big break because of my approach and my background.

 

I had an *extremely* refined and articulate cover letter / resume. At the time I realized that this would be extremely important because of the sheer amount of competition that I would be facing for the internship position. I took the time to make sure that the presentation of my resume was really slick. I really put a lot of time into the effort and spared no expense when making copies and mailing my resume. I used the best possible paper the local copy shop had access to, enclosed it in a pretty nice report-binder, and shipped it via FedEx.

 

I also had a fairly unique educational background. I created my own major in college within a program called Integrative Arts (keep in mind this was well before the days of the game design degrees that are springing up nearly everywhere now). This major allowed me to combine both programming and fine art. I did this assuming that I could specialize in either direction later on, or simply do production if I felt it suited me.

 

I drove for several hours out of state to interview for the position. Despite being a bucket of nerves, I think that my enthusiasm for the industry was apparent to the Producers. To make a long-story short: I was offered the position, quit my full time job at the university - and then the wife and I had to make an extremely scary transition to a large city with only one income (it was an unpaid internship). Three months into my internship (read: extended interview) I was offered a job as an Associate Producer, and the rest is history.