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Comment by kayoone | Hacker News Reader

I can only recommend for any programmer to get into graphics/game programming even if you dont have any prior knowledge. The required skills are vastly different from web development for example. While in Web Development its alot about Architecture, Services, binding countless of Technologies together in the right way, game/graphics programming is alot more about programming clever and well-performing algorithms and math. Add some network programming (multiplayer) to the mix and you have one more extra level of complexity to master. Gave me alot to learn!

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There's a lot of binding technologies together in games programming nowadays too.

Component oriented programming makes it rather easy to pick a technology, make a component out of it and adding it into your system.

Especially if you use a prebuilt/popular component system like Unity3d you can almost just click and drag technologies together.

It's true that if you need any of your components to perform extraordinarily then you'll have to dive deep and become an expert, or make sure you find an expert to help you.

Ofcourse, if you want to do everything yourself, then you might have to learn everything yourself , and you'll have to master a lot of things. It is true that games programming covers (almost?) every field in computer science. I guess this is the result of games basically being simulations of (part of) the universe.

I agree with this comment. Developing a game is one of the most complicated and rewarding projects you can perform on your own. I would go as far to say that developing a complex game may even be on the level of operating system development.

I know dozens of independent developers who work on their own games (myself included) - people who work in fields completely unrelated to CS/video games, but still work on games simply because they are such complicated projects to develop.

If you're the kind of person who thrives on difficult algorithmic and code architecture problems, I highly suggest giving game development a shot.

Game dev certainly also requires a lot of high-level architecture work. Making a good modern game basically requires being world-class at everything, all at once.

And being paid significantly less for it.

You mean for triple A games? Yes.

Right now, I am writing a text adventure bushcraft game and the coding is almost tedious and boring.

>Making a good modern game basically requires being world-class at everything, all at once.

Or you can use a framework which makes everything easy, like Unity.

Yeah, until you run into a performance problem and have no clue how to even approach solving it.

Getting into embedded system is also a very good exercice to structure your mind and pay attention to your algorithms.

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