What is the education required to become a video games designer or programmer?
Since small days, I’ve been obsessed with video games and would love to make it my career as well. Can someone tell me the required skills and education needed to become a video games designer or programmer? And a mention about the paycheck would be helpful as well.
right.
first of all you should consider getting good grades especially in maths and physics (if you still at school.)when you go to college (or whatever the alternative in usa) study maths – you WILL need it.
then study programming in uni or try your luck and try to apply for a job.
you probably wont get million sfrom the start but probably $15k when you start -perhaps more, depends what company hires you and depends what you are doing. your midrange woul dbe aproximately $40k-50k. if you get to the top you might get somewherere in the region of $70k- but that is prob tops.it all depends. if you work for a big company like ubisoft you might get way morethan this. if you work on abig game you may get more. but in terms of an average dont expect more than 40k for the first 5-7 years.
Game programming is a specialized field for programming. To be a game programmer after finishing your school you will need to complete your bachelors degree in computer science (If you are asking in terms of what academic qualification is required). In your course work you will learn programming languages and get to know how to use programming languages and graphics, how to manipulate hardware and what are the technologies to use to develope different kinds of applications and games. Some famous ones that people are using include "Open GL", "Direct X", MS XNA e.t.c.
You cannot directly start keeping game programming in mind. Game programmers are very good programmers with very strong basics. Due to the hardware limitations, speed requirements and memory management issues they have to be really really good at the basics to write highly optimized code.
About the salary , if you know game programming with some 3d Engines or have some experience (academic) with Game development practices and code you will probably be making 50 – 60K (In US). Which will gradually increase with experience. And can really increase once you switch your job after gaining a lot of experience
Note that game design and game programming are two separate fields. A game development team commonly has designers as well as programmers (as well as other crew to manage other assets of a game, like sound, music, art, modeling, quality assurance, etc…)
Design, sometimes, can be broken into two distinct forms (depending on the game – sometime it is all wrapped into one): Technical Design and Story/World design. A technical designer designs mechanics and gameplay features of a game title, while a story/world designer creates an entertaining story, world, characters, etc…
Game development requires a proficiency in programming in fast executing languages (C++ is still a big draw for game developers). However, even a knowledgeable C++ programmer may not qualify for the demands of game development as these programmers have to deal with programming AI, game-based user interfaces, and workign with 3D engine programming. A lot of good programming practices and math ability is a big plus here.
A nice in between start for people looking to get into game programming and/or design is to work on scripting/building. This is where teams of people usually use a script language or a toolkit (think like UnrealEd or The Elder Scrolls Construction Kit) to build areas of a game a player would be playing through.
A few school are popping up offering courses in game design these days, not sure how serious game companies take these degrees yet.
As for pay, well, from what I have seen it is consistent with the rest of the IT/software development world. The hours are VERY long too (at times), esp. a few months before a big game show demo or a release to manufacturing (going "gold"). Luckily a good game dev shop may have perks other than the pay that you may enjoy… and the love for game creation may outweigh any downsides you might experience.
I.T. –that’s my course