It's as simple as that, says Boss Alien's Alex Trowers
Speaking at the opening session of today's ExPlay festival, Alex Trowers, designer at Boss Alien, has revealed a number of insights into making games, targeting much of his talk at the conference's student and start-up contingentgent.
His key piece of advice was a simple one, given in response to a question from the audience on securing a job in the industry.
"Make a game," Trowers said. "If you've made a game, you're in the games industry. And if, by your question, you're talking about looking for a job at an existing games company, then make a game. It doesn't need to be polished, but it shows you have what it takes."
"If you can't make game, make a mod for a game by the company you're looking at, and if you can't make a mod, make a level, and if you can't make that, leave me alone. If you make something, it shows you have the drive, and that's all I want from you."
He also suggested developers should not fear making their titles challenging, and suggested young games makers look to the indie scene.
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"If you're looking for inspiration, look no further than the indie games scene," Trowers stated. "There's one obvious reason to do that; it's inspiration. They're a lot more agile, creative and risk averse than the games made by the big boys."
Trowers went on to suggest that indies could do more to deliver quality UI, and insisted anybody with the drive could ape Markus 'Notch' Persson's success, though he did admit luck was a big part of a games industry career.
Trowers also devoted some of his talk to highlighting the continuing problems with crunch.
"I've had dark moments in my career," he said. "Sometimes you have to work ridiculous hours, and we like to blame that on bad planning. We call it crunch, and it's horrible. It will ruin your relationships, and make you loose weight and make your hair fall out. It's really horrible."
I totally agree. That's how I started 26 years ago. I made a game (well several, and demos) on my Spectrum and hawked it about at Earl's Court.
Later that afternoon, I was sitting in a big red sofa signing a contract.
I ALWAYS look for games people have made themselves on a CV. I HARDLY EVER look at what kind of degree they have.
Similar to @1, my career began in the late 80s and I got my first games programming gig because of various Spectrum and Amiga games/demos I'd written. My CV was meaningless: "went to school and did GCSEs", but my games and demos spoke for themselves.
Unless I'm hiring a physics engineer, degrees are meaningless - show me some drive and passion, and you're in with a shot.
If both you guys are in positions in your company that allow you to hire people, I welcome this attitude, and even though I've only served a third of your time so far, I also believe that the ability to show is much more important than the ability to tell.
However, Boss Alien is an Indie developer with one shipped title, as far as I can see, so their stance on hiring might not be the most representative of the industry as a whole. In my experience, especially with bigger studios, you first have to make it through a screening by HR, and I don't want to fling poop, but they're usually not the most adequate people to judge your expertise and are more likely to choose a person with a degree over one without.
Sure as Boss Alien they've released one game...
However, if you bothered to look at their site blog (or did a little research before posting), most of the devs worked in the industry for many years on different platforms. The blog author worked in games since the Megadrive.
http://bossalien.com/blog/
I totally agree that graduates (from programming, design, animation and art) need to get stuck in and make something. A lot of students seem put out by the whole 'jobs says I need experience, but I need a job for experience' mentality. But not enough people tell them that they can make their own experience by creating and designing and modding their own projects.
I've worked in a couple of big companies and a couple of small ones, so I've been through various hiring situations. The first big company hired people with NO degree (even though HR sorted through first) due to his extensive games modding experience. He got into the design team right away and is doing well to this day. Another chap started at QA and worked his way up.
In the other big company, the Leads all had a look through applications then HR phoned up. Before big or small companies put up ads they also are likely to ask their current team if they know anyone. Referrals happen often too.
Studying is very important, but also it's extemly important to DO something.
Get together with friends / fellow students and make a dev team. Of you want to go solo make sure you self-teach how to code and make art assets. If you want to be a concept artist make tons of artwork for a mock-game idea. If you're a designer try making a design document! Anything!
As many have said already, if you have the drive and prove that you can work on a project for hours and hours and days and days, then that's pretty good show of experience right there.
I agree these things aren't reliant on a final degree, but the problem with judging a "self taught" games amatuer against a degreed university student is that both were probably working on their own without the help of a larger community. Shown one applicant's awesome mod against another's degrees, striking background, and great mods (the degrees representing shows and theories beyond one mod, and work being possibly hindered by the of school, work, and life limitations of that individual), it would be clear to me who spent more hours and years of their life working at this idea, and even if there were equal contextually, sometimes any inequality would be about what job to put them IN, not whether they deserved a job at all. Giving everyone a balanced chance is spot on, but not unless you really do it. At least be okay with showing young adults what you really want or expect from great employees in depth, not the bare minimum it takes to get hired.
Sry, mobile typos. My point is that decent students already do hours upon hours of work. Sometimes they explore a theme or follow a project for years. Another person's time shouldn't be ignored because they weren't at a particular school, but a student's work and drive shouldn't be ignored because they had other things they did/had to do.
