To be fair, they asked me about jobs in "the games industry" - not specifically "games development" - otherwise my advice may have been different. But overall, I was trying to be as positive as possible. We get enough negative press already without us portraying a career in games as being an impossible dream. We need to encourage kids at 12/13/14 to consider games as a serious career option if we're going to increase the pipeline of new talent.

It could be a career option, but for now and the next few years, with so many studios closing and reducing staff for one reason or another the market is saturated with great talent in the uk gaming industry. Any idea how many studios have closed or made redundancies over the past few years... i'll give you a clue...its loads. Its one reason why the iphone app market is doing so well is people cant get jobs making games for a company so try and go it alone and unity give them that easy option without hardcore coding.

It's been tough for a lot of dev's. I won't deny this, we see the impact here when CV's come in from closed/downsizing studios. But honestly, there are lots of great studios recruiting right now. There are some very positive vibes at many UK companies. It's not all doom and gloom. I spoke to 3 small/medium sized developers last week alone that have have some projects starting/getting signed off as we speak - so they're ramping up. We've got vacancies for developers up and down the country in all sectors. The Iphone app market is exciting, fast paced and a real "back to the old days" form of development - so its attractive - but there's some great companies looking for talent.

I do agree that more should be done to give kids at school useful advice and information if they show an interest. When I was at school and told a career guidance person that I wanted to make games when I grew up I was treated as if I was being daft.

As it is I didn't land my "dream" job... I did make it as a software developer, just in a very different field :p

Even in my different career now though, I look back on the absence of help there was in school... where the only computer related stuff we were being shown was word, excel and access. Everything else you had to strike out and learn by yourself.

I’m an aspiring games developer
I’m 18 just in my second year of college doing an BTEC IT Practitioners course, in our first year we did programming with VB6 and that is about as deep into any sort of programming they go into... recently I’ve been looking at university courses such as computer science and games development, i have also spoke to the company Train 2 Game, while not accepting any courses as of yet, I’m looking for the best option into entering the games industry preferably with programming and development in mind, there are a lot of courses out there but none tailored to the specifics, hopefully i will be talking to some university’s in the near future to get a better understanding of their courses, there is so much bad or distorted information on what courses cover what, and what you will come out with at the end of it and weather or not that is even going to give you a shot in the industry, sure you might have the skills but then am I going to have any experience that the industry actually wants.

Also new to this website hi!
found this in the process in looking for information in getting into games development.

Hi Paul, I thought I'd share my experiences having recently graduated from a games programming degree. I hunted and hunted when I was in your position looking at several Universities and trying to determine who would provide me with the most valuable tools and employability.

I ultimately decided on the University of Teesside, which in turn was the best decision I could have made. They teach you pretty much most of the skills you need to take the first step on the ladder in the industry, with a solid focus on C++, the first year is a bit slow for some, but from my understanding most degrees are, just an attempt to bring everyone up to speed I expect.

The 2nd and final years are where it's at. You get to focus on what's important in games with module choices that allow you to specialise in your area of interest, this is all great and the majority of lecturers are ex-industry who do know what they're on about; But this isn't what swung my decision, it was the careers service they provide, with great connections to companies all over the country they really push to try and get you a job, especially if you decide to go on placement which is a great idea for all, you get the much needed industry experience which opens up a lot of doors whilst the companies get cheap unspoilt employees which they can mould into what they really require, which means you have a far greater chance of obtaining a job straight out of Uni, which is what I did.

Ultimately you need to search around and find the course that gives you the best tools you need to get a job, because I can tell you now once you start work you will realise that what they teach you at Uni is the minimum requirements and you will be expected to push and expand your knowledge of your own accord, ie. plenty of passion and dedication is needed.

Hope this helped!

Thanks for the advice!
i will deffinatly take it into consideration
next week or so ill be looking into all the different university courses, there are a few near by, moving away from home owuldnt be too much of a problem for me so its a case of finding one that suits me best i guess.
once again thanks!

Paul, remember that if a course is not difficult then it's not worth doing.

There are a lot of mickey mouse courses out there. You want one that is full of actual programming and maths, not messing about with HTML and 3D modelling.

Excellent advice above for you Paul. Would echo everything said. Please feel free to contact us for other options/info on courses. We visit 30 Uni's every year and also run a competition called Search For a Star - aimed to highlight the UK's best grads/programmers but also to improve the courses on offer. Check out Search for a star on Twitter and Facebook - or via our site. Train2Game - I won't comment directly but all I would say is research other, academic based courses thoroughly and do some internet research, get some feedback from current/previous "pupils". Also check out GamerCamp - have only just come across these guys but what they're doing looks great.

Just looking at the aardvark swift site there are 175 jobs available with about 50pc of these as lead /experienced / senior / manager roles etc.. which dont really apply to graduates, and if you take away the other roles that are pretty standard across the board for companies probably leaves only about 70 dev positions available. Now when I went to university of teesside there were more than 70 students all hoping to get jobs in the game / film industry and that just at one uni. I feel its oversaturated at the moment and the proability of getting a job within games developement is slim. I spent several years at EA before moving on and I know many veterans of the industry that have been made redundant more than just once over the past couple of years. Just saying be careful listening to the hype and dont base 3-5 years at uni and alot of debt (10k pa if the government gets its way) on a jobs market that is very volitile at the moment. If you are intending to get you name on the credits of a triple A game then aadvark swift is a great place to start just follow it up with a great portfolio.

Once again thanks for all the advice, im deffinatly going to look at all options before i make a decision on anything final, the reason i spoke to the t2g guy was just to see what he had to say and i knew before i even rang them i wasnt going to take their course, but i wanted to see what they had to sell and there portrayel of the industry, and while convincing, also contradicting, but here isnt the place to discuss that.

And also thanks for the advice jsw, i see what you are pointing out, sure there is lots of hype but your right, even at my college now our IT course is the seconf biggest course they do now, next to child care which is 99.9%(over exageration) of all females in the college. and when you ask them what they want to do as a career, most of them will say make games, while thats what they say, allot of them still dont know exaxtly what they want to do and just believe making games is there future. Programming is deffinatly something i want to do, in and/or of the games industry, i enjoyed the small bit in colege and the small ammount i did for Grand Yheft Auto:san andreas, for the multi player client the game modes scripted in PAWN/amx ( not the actual game obviously ( I WISH)).

Once again i cant thank you all enough for your advice!

@jsw: Reading your posts it is almost as if you are discouraging people to become games devs. Yes, there is a lot of competition at the moment, but guess what, if people don't go to uni now to study relevant courses then in about five to ten years time when hopefully the economy will have recovered there will be a massive skills shortage. Plus, why shouldn't people want to become games devs, despite the problems with the industry climate at the moment?