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Comment by wheelie_boy | Hacker News Reader

Game dev is a meat grinder.

While making games is a great way to learn programming, and is a lot of fun, the working conditions make it an untenable career choice for most.

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Only way is to either make it a hobby project, and work a day job that pays well.

Or, take the risk and go indie - effectively a lottery ticket.

Highly recommend against the latter, unless if you’re willing to do it for free. The glut of indie games in the past few years means that the average indie dev will get paid literally pennies per hour or less.

Do it for fun if you want, but doing it for the money will lead to heartbreak.

Yeah in like a 3 year period it went from under 1000 new indie games on steam to over 7000. Past successful devs like the guy who made Binding of Issac have tried making new games recently that would have done amazingly back in the day, only to see them buried and get next to no attention. The space is now saturated. Indie game dev is now as difficult as publishing an award winning novel.

Lottery tickets don't demand that you wear multiple hats and grind for years. Even if you bought a ticket every day it's probably cheaper than quitting your job and eating into your savings for a chance at an indie moonshot.

The hobby project route is pretty much the only way.

If you are young, single and healthy, and can work on important parts of a game (engine), do it for 1-2 years, have a blast, ship an AAA game, then escape to more stable FAANG, where you will be a highly paid guru. You can even write a book or two then, documenting your tricks and achievements.

Why? You’ll come out older, less healthy, poorer, and full of regret that you spent your time building casinos for children and people with gambling issues. If you’re going to work for a FAANG anyway, at least you can sell your integrity for a much higher price and better conditions.

I mean only if you can work on "core", something that is extraordinarily difficult and you can impress everybody with it. I am not talking about joining a team working on end credits scrolling etc.

"building casinos for children and people with gambling issues"

Ouch. That really puts things into perspective said like that.

> building casinos for children

At least it'd be good practice for building casinos for non-children. Slot machine development uses a lot of the same skills (and often the same stack; IGT uses C# and Unity3D for their slot machines if their jobs postings are anything to go by).

You’re talking about Bob Nystrom, right?

http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com

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