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Comment by 999900000999 | Hacker News Reader

>The sad truth – most developers will never finish their game

You don't need to finish to learn.

>The skills are not transferable

I've never seen a statement so wrong. I taught myself how to program with Unity and I showed off my game during an interview and got my first salaried job. Definitely wasn't a game industry position, the point is they made mobile apps and I had a game on the app store.

Unity uses C# and it's not radically different outside of Unity. It's much more effective to learn by building projects , vs going though a learn to code book.

I want to make amazing games, programming is merely a tool for this. For my current project I actually have a web component ( Flutter Web is the most fun I've had in years) that integrates with the game.

I don't get what the author is trying to say. You used Godot which is known to be much rougher around then edges than Unity. You're then upset it takes longer to get things done.

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The curse of failure for many is trying to bite more off than they can chew. Author mentions "art, music, AI, level design, dialogue, story" as things one needs to learn. That is a lot to do by yourself. A few friends would help a lot.

People often want to replicate projects that took giant teams of very talented people years to accomplish. This is true in all industries. I remember my film teacher warning us how long a good 5 minute video can take to write a story for, film & edit.

My first game & the first game I teach beginners to make is a Trivia game. It's easy. You can finish it in less than an hour. Than you can improve it.

Automated Twister spinner is another one I recently did.

For something more advanced https://js13kgames.com is an awesome source of inspiration. Lots of great open source games that you can try to replicate & improve upon.

The author comes off as over the top negative.

I've participated in game jams, I do my little part as a member of a team and then I move on with my life. It's not a great tragedy if my side project doesn't make me 7 million.

I've never really put too much effort into art for my games, I either use stuff from the asset store, or hire someone else to do it. Occasionally I have artistic friends who contribute as well.

The only thing you really need to do is level design. Go on the unity asset store, buy an AI kit for 10$, or find an open source one.

Unity Learn is fantastic for new developers.

I think the entire point is to start small. There's no reason to try and build an amazing game for your first project. If you told me you started learning program two months ago and you just gave me pong, I'd be impressed.

Especially if you had it running on an Android device and on the Google Play Store.

Problem is that games development is a high risk business. Having experience to restrict the scope and goal of your game is probably as important as to be able to solve the technical challenges.

But even if you release a game, you have to have some luck to get people to play it since the market is well saturated. Much comes down to luck when you release and how your game is discovered.

Of course there is a difference if you make a mobile puzzle game or want to implement the game you always dreamt of which probably is massive in scope.

Agree though that the skills are mostly transferable.

Agreed... I became a data scientist in no small part because programming in pygame gave me an excellent base

Ok well let me tell you, that was a huge break to get that job with the game. Not that I dont think there is transferable skills in it, I agree with you there, but still not many people these days will take you seriously if you add your game to your portfolio. I naively used to think so, but noone emails me back when I do that. Goes double for any kind of music making program or tool. I can only assume my applications go straight to the trash when I do that. Never a peep!

Yeah, similar to other responses to you, I got into the industry in no small part due to building a game. I also built a recipe website to learn web development (which is pretty low hanging fruit).

It may have more to do with the quality of your code. I'm now in a hiring position (Director of DevOps), and I can tell you, seeing a game in a Github wouldn't turn me off at all, it would intrigue me. But I would also take a hard look at the code. Is it quality? Is it well written, well organized, good naming, good clear commenting, well documented? A lot of people let quality slip on their personal projects - and then if you share that, that makes a bad first impression.

Yeah this is probably a good point, and possibly what is happening. I just never really have gotten any feedback about it, so I can't know. I am proud of what I have done, and happy I have learned so much doing it.

And I should also say I have for the most part given up ever getting a computer job, I do a couple of hail marys here and there, but mostly these days just focus on the niche highly undesired things I actually love (like elisp and supercollider), instead of forcing myself to enjoy react or svelte or whatever. It has made me quite happy to give up, I just like to learn and make art, I can be happy as a lowly receptionist if I can keep doing that. :)

I have an amazing career and my games are on my portfolio.

A mobile app , even if it's a game, is still a mobile app.

What does the rest of your resume look like, did you finish college? I got to 6 figures sans degree, but college might help

I have a masters in philosophy, graduated with distinction and have top GPA for both runs, but I actually get more responses not mentioning any of that.

These days, as I have been told, getting an email back is less merit based than it is playing the right game for the initial algorithmic screening. Once you get through that though and do interviews, your merits become a lot more important, but the initial step is huge. It has taken me years to get to the point where I get an email back like... 1% of the time. Its a big black box, but you have all the room to experiment with it!

I am really happy for your success though!

This seems strange to me. The market for engineers is really, really competitive right now. I know we're struggling for applicants - to the point where we've started reaching out to people rather than expecting people to come to us. We're certainly not going to immediately pass on someone who applies with solid experience, especially if they have multiple personal projects that demonstrate skill.

It makes me wonder if there's something else going on here. Are you applying to positions that aren't a good fit for your experience or skills? Like only applying to senior positions when you've only had a few years in the industry or only applying to positions in languages you've never worked in (but want to) ?

I really struggle to believe that sharing code from personal game projects or music tools would hurt (rather than help) your application. (Unless, as mentioned in my other comment, you really cut corners in those personal projects.)

Edit: I see, reading your other comments I see you mention that you're in a receptionist job right now and I think that resolves my confusion. If you don't have any actual work experience, yeah, getting that first job can still be really hard. Everyone wants senior engineers, no one wants to hire juniors. Which fucking sucks, because we have to hire juniors for their to be seniors. But, again, putting good code you've written - even games and music tools - should help not hurt you. So I would examine the code you've written for those tools and make sure it is good, solid code. If not, take some time to clean it up and then try again. (If you can find that time.)

Ok well thank you that makes me feel better. I am constantly coding and making things, I think I am getting better (I am halfway through SICP!), so there is always something new to try out in the resume. But yes, as far as any initial screening goes, I am pretty disadvantaged because I have nothing on paper but my repos.

> The market for engineers is really, really competitive right now. I know we're struggling for applicants

> Are you applying to positions that aren't a good fit for your experience or skills?

I just applied to Google. Specifically, I applied for their lowest-level position, L3.

I "passed" the algorithmic interviews and was told to expect a round of lower-pressure "team fit" interviews the following week. Instead, after multiple weeks of zero interviews, they let me know they were rejecting me instead. So I somehow managed to fail a round of interviews I wasn't even given.

This is what a competitive hiring market looks like?

Most of us will never work in FAANG.

Getting an interview with a normal company is pretty easy though

> Most of us will never work in FAANG.

What's the relevance? Most people won't work there, so the hiring market is competitive? Isn't competitive?

If you meant to talk about me personally, that statement already doesn't apply to me.

this mean that is just too difficult for most of people

It took some time for me to find a job after I graduated as well. I didn’t have any experience, but also I wasn’t networking correctly.

I landed my first part time gigs from a software meetup, and then got a full-time job from networking at a computing conference.

I wouldn’t waste any time at all on emails or recruiters.

Not true. I was picked more than once out of a competitive pool of talented people because of my game development experience. It made me unique and stand out from the crowd.

That is really awesome! congrats

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