Times have changed a lot since Garry broke through with the infamous Garry's Mod. That's where I got my first taste of programming - writing a PID controller for a tank turret so I could point the tank's gun using my mouse.
Today, it's easier than ever to get started making games (even I can do it! [0]) but standing out in a crowded marketplace is very difficult. The music industry saw a very similar trend about 10-15 years ago, with the release of consumer recording equipment. In both cases it lead to a 'de-professionalization' of the industry, where most participants are amateurs but most of the success still goes to established studios - barring one-in-a-million outliers such as Garry's Mod, or other indie darlings like Hollow Knight, Balatro, Stardew Valley.
The article highlights how to get into the modding industry. While that is part of the games industry, it is a small fraction of the larger game production business.
I've hired many game programmers and the key to getting into the industry is demonstrating a few critical skills:
1. Sufficient technical skill in whatever your field is.
2. Curiosity applied to problem solving. How can we make this work?
3. An ability to finish what you start. Get it done.
If you're a new programmer looking to start out on this journey, I recommend picking an engine and just start making stuff. Participate in as many Gamejams, Mods or minigame productions as possible. Ship things; Finish them. Then, when you're interviewing for a 'real' game job, you will have some experience to share and discuss.
For technical candidates, there's a minimum threshold that you must cross to be considered. For programmers, it's often C++. So learn the basics, get proficient, use the tools. Read the books on programming interviews and learn the types of things that are expected.
show comments
h1fra
He quickly mentioned it, but good god, coding for a game is the hardest thing ever in the field. If you are a good software engineer, there is a good chance you are a bad game dev. It's so different, convoluted, mostly relying on tricks, clean code will slow you down, nothing works as you expected, and you have to learn so many things around coding (the engine itself, physics, texturing, modeling, lighting, etc.)
show comments
lentil_soup
if I may offer some advice as game/engine programmer.
If you want to get hired at a company as a programmer, make really really small things, like tiny games. I am talking start with hangman, then sudoku in the console. Then move on to minesweeper and tetris. If confident do space invaders. At this point maybe get started with 3D? Maybe Unity and Unreal?
There's SO much stuff you'll learn making those games. Maybe you end up making a fancy menu, or adding sound effects. Maybe you come up with some basic particle effects. It doesn't really matter, what matters is you went through it and have something to show.
Don't get side tracked with big projects and trying to be a designer at the same time. Keep it small.
If I am interviewing you and see some solid and polished small games and we can talk about stuff you found cool you're already punching way above most entry level coders.
show comments
manas96
One esoteric route would be to try and specialize in an area where talent is scarce. There's a lot of gameplay programmers, few engine programmers, fewer graphics programmers, and very few physics programmers (in my experience at least).
As such you could try to specialize in this area (collision detection, ray queries, rigid body simulation, constraints, solvers, softbody sim, fluid sim etc.). Of course this isn't for everyone as it requires skills and interest in: low level concurrent programming, maths/linear algebra and physical behavior intuition.
If you do find these topics fascinating and can demonstrate some ability in them, your skills will certainly be in demand.
fidotron
I worked on the software dev side in the games industry for years. I have never seen a worse time to be attempting to make a living doing that, it's pure madness. The endgame being pushed, and looking increasingly technically viable over a decade or so, is the user, holodeck style, describes what they want and it is assembled in front of them. There is a lot of cope in the games industry about this ever happening because of how disruptive it would be.
In the mean time as others have mentioned I know people, industry pros, that make money on Roblox and UEFN. The valuable part is a talent for creating gameplay systems, which is not in any way related to low level programming or rendering algorithms, then you stand at least a small chance, but due to how crowded the market is the returns on this get smaller every day.
To anyone wanting to make a living from the games industry I would advise simply going outside and doing something else.
Edit to add: I have noticed than when I started in games over twenty years ago people knew hard work was involved. These days if you tell people you work in games you are met with a response that you basically play all the time and are not serious, and to some extent this reflects the changing nature of most of the work being done in that period.
show comments
jayd16
I wonder if this is a stealth ad for s&box.
Anyway....it looks pretty neat. I feel like the industry as gone from a time of mods, through an era of AAA unmoddable games, and now we're landing on "all games will be mods.". I guess we're chasing Minecraft and Roblox and Fortnite models now.
show comments
proteal
He mentions s&dbox, his new engine/gmod spiritual successor. They maintain an interesting devblog over at https://sbox.game/news if you are interested in how the sausage is made.
I worked for a studio for about half a year. You have to be willing to completely enslave yourself if you want to go down that path and succeed. Making an impact in a AAA studio (or one of their contractors) requires fairly extreme output on a constant basis.
The only alternative is to have enough runway to quit your day job and self-publish a game to steam. The biggest problem with this (beyond the money) is having a game concept that is marketable in 2025. If you have both the money and a good gameplay mechanic in mind, this would be the most sustainable path. Setting your own schedule makes all the difference if you can afford to.
PeterHolzwarth
I have decades+ in the American games industry. Bluntly speaking: don't join it. There are too many people chasing diminishing, shrinking (relative) job counts; large studios are offshoring more and more of their work; funding has dried up and we don't see the light at the end of the tunnel; there are too many games.
Are you from the UK or Europe? Have at it! American game jobs are quickly relocating to those cheaper places. If you are from the US, the costs have gotten too high and the pressure is massive to reduce those costs: large projects are seeing an increasing percentage of the total number of people on the project be from partners outside the States.
The trend is bottom-up: outsourcing partners are providing cheaper staffing starting at the bottom of the org chart, steadily going up said chart. The growing desire to have a smaller primary-studio footprint means more outsourcing in general. A desire to cut costs means more and more of that outsourcing is going to cheaper locals. Often, the majority of people who work on a game are not from the "parent" company - and a quickly growing percentage of those are not in the States.
The model that we are slowly converging on, bit by bit, is maybe 20-30 percent "home studio" in the States, with the rest being partners from non-American, cheaper areas. The pressure that drives this is massive and inexorable.
Some of this came from the lead up to, and the full stretch of, the covid years: up until just a couple years ago, it was quite difficult for an American studio to hire staff - it was a wonderful time to be looking for a job, and salaries for non-engineers (who were cheaper) rapidly went up.
Now we are in a situation where the costs are just too high, so the pressure has mounted to manage those costs. Outsourcing to cheaper areas is the solution, and the pace is increasing significantly.
Again, if you are an American interested in the games industry: don't do it. It has become deeply unreliable and unstable for anyone who isn't quite senior.
//edit - i have more thoughts. These will be deeply unpopular, but I feel compelled to express them.
A well-intentioned union drive in the popular press (a great idea when focused on bottom-of-the-heap, poorly-treated QA teams) accelerated annoyance with American development teams by studio and publisher leadership, leading to more exasperation-driven offshoring. I don't have a strong opinion on this topic, but I have to admit to myself it is a real issue.
At many American studios, covid-era hiring goals changed in a way that placed value on things other than immediate raw skill - instead favoring a more holistic stance on staffing. This was an approachable concept during ZIRP, when funding was more generous, but has put studios in a tough position in the new era of an absolutely brutal filter of pure output.
A passionately-defended work from home thing means that, just as everyone predicted during covid, studio leadership has realized that if they forego the power of intense in-office collaboration, why not just remote those remote jobs to cheaper places? After all, west coast studios still get a couple hours overlap with UK development teams: get better at slightly out of sync development, and suddenly US-timezone jobs don't seem as massively necessary as they once appeared.
show comments
bstsb
roblox is a good suggestion. i know it's often criticised, especially for its profit margins, but developers get a massive potential audience, free unlimited multiplayer hosting, and many monetisation streams with little setup.
the company could definitely do with better PR, and their child safety features are good but not perfect by any means. i'd still say it's a good choice if you're trying to make a game easily and quickly
disclaimer: i've made money from Roblox's DevEx program
bentt
25 years in the industry here. Started at studios and been indie for 10.
My best advice for today:
Make something in your craft, whether it is art, a game, code/tools, music… that gets significant attention from an audience online.
If you cannot get enthusiasm for your work online, it is unlikely you are going to get a job.
In some ways, it’s never been easier to know if you are good enough. It’s never been easier to learn.
It’s never been harder to stand out. And imposter syndrome is too often confused for “you just arent good enough yet”.
So if you keep making stuff and nobody cares, figure out how to get better or quit wasting your time.
show comments
Joof
Garry Newman seems like a really real guy.
pphysch
Chris Wilson, (legendary) co-creator of Path of Exile, also recently answered this same question on his new YouTube channel.
Definitely a controversial question in this economy.
chickenzzzzu
While I love Garry's Mod, I don't love this article, so I'll give my pithy advice:
1) Yes, learn to program.
2) Yes, learn 3d art.
3) Enthusiastically do those things almost every day of your life.
4) Don't follow too many tutorials, just enough to unblock you.
5) Let the debugger/screen punch you in the face. Learn to love being told when you are wrong.
6) Keep your expenses low, but probably you still need to go to a relatively good college.
7) Why? That's because a large part of our world is based on needless credentialism.
8) Build tools that people literally use. This is how you know you're ready for interviewing.
9) Grind leetcode and brain teasers and common interview gotchas for your language/domain of choice, but only an hour a day max.
That's basically what it takes to get a real and good job in the industry now. No magic bullets, just hard work and acceptance of some arbitrary BS.
show comments
smeeger
people say that its hard to stand out with a game. theyve been saying this since 2013. if you look at the vast, vast majority of games they almost try purposefully to be bad. they blatantly ignore users and entertain their own fantasies about what is fun and what is not. if you make a game that is clean, simple, straightforward and thoughtful then your game will be good. exceedingly few games manage to do this and never even tried to.
i have a hobby of watching movies. i watch a new movie, new to me, almost every other day. after doing this for years i can tell you something: the vast, vast majority of movies made before 2010 were horrible. almost every movie ever produced has at least one glaring flaw that could have easily been fixed. but the idiot at the helm entertained delusions about their crappy writing being interesting. this was all before netflix slop and AI slop… it was all professionals. there is something deeper at play here than indie devs. if you can actually have a rational, clear and accurate opinion about what makes something good then your game will are better than 99% of your competition
Times have changed a lot since Garry broke through with the infamous Garry's Mod. That's where I got my first taste of programming - writing a PID controller for a tank turret so I could point the tank's gun using my mouse.
Today, it's easier than ever to get started making games (even I can do it! [0]) but standing out in a crowded marketplace is very difficult. The music industry saw a very similar trend about 10-15 years ago, with the release of consumer recording equipment. In both cases it lead to a 'de-professionalization' of the industry, where most participants are amateurs but most of the success still goes to established studios - barring one-in-a-million outliers such as Garry's Mod, or other indie darlings like Hollow Knight, Balatro, Stardew Valley.
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/3627290/Botnet_of_Ares/
The article highlights how to get into the modding industry. While that is part of the games industry, it is a small fraction of the larger game production business.
I've hired many game programmers and the key to getting into the industry is demonstrating a few critical skills:
1. Sufficient technical skill in whatever your field is.
2. Curiosity applied to problem solving. How can we make this work?
3. An ability to finish what you start. Get it done.
If you're a new programmer looking to start out on this journey, I recommend picking an engine and just start making stuff. Participate in as many Gamejams, Mods or minigame productions as possible. Ship things; Finish them. Then, when you're interviewing for a 'real' game job, you will have some experience to share and discuss.
For technical candidates, there's a minimum threshold that you must cross to be considered. For programmers, it's often C++. So learn the basics, get proficient, use the tools. Read the books on programming interviews and learn the types of things that are expected.
He quickly mentioned it, but good god, coding for a game is the hardest thing ever in the field. If you are a good software engineer, there is a good chance you are a bad game dev. It's so different, convoluted, mostly relying on tricks, clean code will slow you down, nothing works as you expected, and you have to learn so many things around coding (the engine itself, physics, texturing, modeling, lighting, etc.)
if I may offer some advice as game/engine programmer.
If you want to get hired at a company as a programmer, make really really small things, like tiny games. I am talking start with hangman, then sudoku in the console. Then move on to minesweeper and tetris. If confident do space invaders. At this point maybe get started with 3D? Maybe Unity and Unreal?
There's SO much stuff you'll learn making those games. Maybe you end up making a fancy menu, or adding sound effects. Maybe you come up with some basic particle effects. It doesn't really matter, what matters is you went through it and have something to show.
Don't get side tracked with big projects and trying to be a designer at the same time. Keep it small.
If I am interviewing you and see some solid and polished small games and we can talk about stuff you found cool you're already punching way above most entry level coders.
One esoteric route would be to try and specialize in an area where talent is scarce. There's a lot of gameplay programmers, few engine programmers, fewer graphics programmers, and very few physics programmers (in my experience at least).
As such you could try to specialize in this area (collision detection, ray queries, rigid body simulation, constraints, solvers, softbody sim, fluid sim etc.). Of course this isn't for everyone as it requires skills and interest in: low level concurrent programming, maths/linear algebra and physical behavior intuition. If you do find these topics fascinating and can demonstrate some ability in them, your skills will certainly be in demand.
I worked on the software dev side in the games industry for years. I have never seen a worse time to be attempting to make a living doing that, it's pure madness. The endgame being pushed, and looking increasingly technically viable over a decade or so, is the user, holodeck style, describes what they want and it is assembled in front of them. There is a lot of cope in the games industry about this ever happening because of how disruptive it would be.
In the mean time as others have mentioned I know people, industry pros, that make money on Roblox and UEFN. The valuable part is a talent for creating gameplay systems, which is not in any way related to low level programming or rendering algorithms, then you stand at least a small chance, but due to how crowded the market is the returns on this get smaller every day.
To anyone wanting to make a living from the games industry I would advise simply going outside and doing something else.
Edit to add: I have noticed than when I started in games over twenty years ago people knew hard work was involved. These days if you tell people you work in games you are met with a response that you basically play all the time and are not serious, and to some extent this reflects the changing nature of most of the work being done in that period.
I wonder if this is a stealth ad for s&box.
Anyway....it looks pretty neat. I feel like the industry as gone from a time of mods, through an era of AAA unmoddable games, and now we're landing on "all games will be mods.". I guess we're chasing Minecraft and Roblox and Fortnite models now.
He mentions s&dbox, his new engine/gmod spiritual successor. They maintain an interesting devblog over at https://sbox.game/news if you are interested in how the sausage is made.
https://archive.is/ofX2x
I worked for a studio for about half a year. You have to be willing to completely enslave yourself if you want to go down that path and succeed. Making an impact in a AAA studio (or one of their contractors) requires fairly extreme output on a constant basis.
The only alternative is to have enough runway to quit your day job and self-publish a game to steam. The biggest problem with this (beyond the money) is having a game concept that is marketable in 2025. If you have both the money and a good gameplay mechanic in mind, this would be the most sustainable path. Setting your own schedule makes all the difference if you can afford to.
I have decades+ in the American games industry. Bluntly speaking: don't join it. There are too many people chasing diminishing, shrinking (relative) job counts; large studios are offshoring more and more of their work; funding has dried up and we don't see the light at the end of the tunnel; there are too many games.
Are you from the UK or Europe? Have at it! American game jobs are quickly relocating to those cheaper places. If you are from the US, the costs have gotten too high and the pressure is massive to reduce those costs: large projects are seeing an increasing percentage of the total number of people on the project be from partners outside the States.
The trend is bottom-up: outsourcing partners are providing cheaper staffing starting at the bottom of the org chart, steadily going up said chart. The growing desire to have a smaller primary-studio footprint means more outsourcing in general. A desire to cut costs means more and more of that outsourcing is going to cheaper locals. Often, the majority of people who work on a game are not from the "parent" company - and a quickly growing percentage of those are not in the States.
The model that we are slowly converging on, bit by bit, is maybe 20-30 percent "home studio" in the States, with the rest being partners from non-American, cheaper areas. The pressure that drives this is massive and inexorable.
Some of this came from the lead up to, and the full stretch of, the covid years: up until just a couple years ago, it was quite difficult for an American studio to hire staff - it was a wonderful time to be looking for a job, and salaries for non-engineers (who were cheaper) rapidly went up.
Now we are in a situation where the costs are just too high, so the pressure has mounted to manage those costs. Outsourcing to cheaper areas is the solution, and the pace is increasing significantly.
Again, if you are an American interested in the games industry: don't do it. It has become deeply unreliable and unstable for anyone who isn't quite senior.
//edit - i have more thoughts. These will be deeply unpopular, but I feel compelled to express them.
A well-intentioned union drive in the popular press (a great idea when focused on bottom-of-the-heap, poorly-treated QA teams) accelerated annoyance with American development teams by studio and publisher leadership, leading to more exasperation-driven offshoring. I don't have a strong opinion on this topic, but I have to admit to myself it is a real issue.
At many American studios, covid-era hiring goals changed in a way that placed value on things other than immediate raw skill - instead favoring a more holistic stance on staffing. This was an approachable concept during ZIRP, when funding was more generous, but has put studios in a tough position in the new era of an absolutely brutal filter of pure output.
A passionately-defended work from home thing means that, just as everyone predicted during covid, studio leadership has realized that if they forego the power of intense in-office collaboration, why not just remote those remote jobs to cheaper places? After all, west coast studios still get a couple hours overlap with UK development teams: get better at slightly out of sync development, and suddenly US-timezone jobs don't seem as massively necessary as they once appeared.
roblox is a good suggestion. i know it's often criticised, especially for its profit margins, but developers get a massive potential audience, free unlimited multiplayer hosting, and many monetisation streams with little setup.
the company could definitely do with better PR, and their child safety features are good but not perfect by any means. i'd still say it's a good choice if you're trying to make a game easily and quickly
disclaimer: i've made money from Roblox's DevEx program
25 years in the industry here. Started at studios and been indie for 10.
My best advice for today:
Make something in your craft, whether it is art, a game, code/tools, music… that gets significant attention from an audience online.
If you cannot get enthusiasm for your work online, it is unlikely you are going to get a job.
In some ways, it’s never been easier to know if you are good enough. It’s never been easier to learn.
It’s never been harder to stand out. And imposter syndrome is too often confused for “you just arent good enough yet”.
So if you keep making stuff and nobody cares, figure out how to get better or quit wasting your time.
Garry Newman seems like a really real guy.
Chris Wilson, (legendary) co-creator of Path of Exile, also recently answered this same question on his new YouTube channel.
https://youtube.com/@chriswilsonvideos?si=qD1rbztnI0nY7pDf
Definitely a controversial question in this economy.
While I love Garry's Mod, I don't love this article, so I'll give my pithy advice:
1) Yes, learn to program.
2) Yes, learn 3d art.
3) Enthusiastically do those things almost every day of your life.
4) Don't follow too many tutorials, just enough to unblock you.
5) Let the debugger/screen punch you in the face. Learn to love being told when you are wrong.
6) Keep your expenses low, but probably you still need to go to a relatively good college.
7) Why? That's because a large part of our world is based on needless credentialism.
8) Build tools that people literally use. This is how you know you're ready for interviewing.
9) Grind leetcode and brain teasers and common interview gotchas for your language/domain of choice, but only an hour a day max.
That's basically what it takes to get a real and good job in the industry now. No magic bullets, just hard work and acceptance of some arbitrary BS.
people say that its hard to stand out with a game. theyve been saying this since 2013. if you look at the vast, vast majority of games they almost try purposefully to be bad. they blatantly ignore users and entertain their own fantasies about what is fun and what is not. if you make a game that is clean, simple, straightforward and thoughtful then your game will be good. exceedingly few games manage to do this and never even tried to.
i have a hobby of watching movies. i watch a new movie, new to me, almost every other day. after doing this for years i can tell you something: the vast, vast majority of movies made before 2010 were horrible. almost every movie ever produced has at least one glaring flaw that could have easily been fixed. but the idiot at the helm entertained delusions about their crappy writing being interesting. this was all before netflix slop and AI slop… it was all professionals. there is something deeper at play here than indie devs. if you can actually have a rational, clear and accurate opinion about what makes something good then your game will are better than 99% of your competition
Deleted