Any professional or hobby game developers hanging around here?

[Ozzy]

Just wondering if there are any soulmates hanging around ... ?

[Kai]

I'm planning on taking a game design class in the Spring semester just for the hell of it. Don't really know too much right now. I had to make pong in an intro programming class last year.

[ElNono]

I'm here. Haven't done much game dev in the past couple of years though.

[Ozzy]

Hey, nice to see that some people here are interested into gamedev. I have started my first job in the industry two months ago at Sproing Interactive Media (www.sproing.com) in Vienna. Before that I worked as a researcher at university for a number of years and also worked on two quite high-profile amateur projects (remakes of the Ultima games) on the side.

Kaizoku: Great decision :-)

ElNono: You were working as a pro?

[fyatuk]

I used to work on text-based games. Never really got into graphics. Most graphical thing I did was a black-jack game with really ugly looking cards ;) I did play around with some XNA stuff last year, but never really had time to devote to it.

Although I am studying Blender3d off and on.

[I. Hustle]

I don't know. I tried to put something together on my home computer but I am not sure if I had enough gigaramz. I bought some Megahurtz on ebay and plugged them into the motherframe but for some reason it didn't take. What I think I did wrong was when I put in the memory I didn't have enough bytes to support it. I guess I'll just reinsert my floppy disk into the quad core and keep an eye on the thermistor so it doesn't get too hot.

[ElNono]

Hey, nice to see that some people here are interested into gamedev. I have started my first job in the industry two months ago at Sproing Interactive Media (www.sproing.com) in Vienna. Before that I worked as a researcher at university for a number of years and also worked on two quite high-profile amateur projects (remakes of the Ultima games) on the side.

Kaizoku: Great decision :-)

ElNono: You were working as a pro?

That's cool. You definitely have to like gaming. Sometimes crunch time can be excruciating.

I started with gamedev writing emulators. I'm actually one of the early team members of MAME (http://mamedev.org/). That landed me a job interview at EA Tiburon (http://www.tiburon.com/). This was over 12 years ago. They already were making Madden for EA. Their studio was fantastic. The interview went well, but ultimately we couldn't make it work with the whole work visa situation.

After finally getting a visa with another company (over 10 years ago), we really toyed with the idea of developing something, but we didn't have enough infrastructure or capital at the time to pull it off. So we did other more profitable stuff (healthcare, security), and expanded our horizons a bit.
We still did some contract game dev for studios like Midway when they were still around (taking a look at the original Atari source code for Primal Rage arcade was very rewarding).
The opportunity to put out a few games showed up again when the iPhone came out. We made a couple of games early, some of them sold well. We also have done contract work for other smaller studios porting their engines to Objective-C/iPhone. I also helped a bit to build parts of cocos2d (http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/) when it was still somewhat infant (we made a game using that engine and chipmunk).

The market for games in iOS turned into too much of a lottery, so we decided to focus on other things instead. We have a couple of products paying the bills nowadays. I'm still in touch with a couple of game developers that are still out there, and maybe if we get a good offer we'll jump back into it.

[hater]

messing with Android these days. Android games suck! The market is so open there lots of opportunities.

The market is way too saturated on Apple side. IMO for single/amateur developers Android has great potential.

Good thing about Android is you don't need great graphics or designers. A simple text based game if good will get around and that helps get money for the next.

[Ozzy]

Yeah, the market is getting quite saturated, I agree. On one hand there are more and more platforms coming out... on the other, everybody wants to be a developer today. And the tools that exist actually support this ...

ElNono: Really nice story. You really have some great experiences.


That's cool. You definitely have to like gaming. Sometimes crunch time can be excruciating.

Yes, I was well aware of what I am getting into... crunchtime and all other things. I guess having a job and working on a mod in the evenings was a good preparation. I am actually looking forward to my first month of pro crunchtime ... (as long as it doesn't expand into a year of it, of course ...)
But, the studio head is quite a great person in that regard and really tries to organize things in a way that minimizes crunch time. Of course it can happen, but judging from the information I got from other employees that is not a general everyday practice here.

[z0sa]

I've done some modding (mainly for RTS games) so I suppose I fall into hobbyist developer