Do you need a Degree in Computer Science to create a game or get a Programming Job?

Well first off I am not trying to deny the crux of the OP's question and I am pretty sure I know the OP better than you do, you need to actually be living in a country to get a job writing such high complex software. And even in a first world, 90% of programmers will never be writing anything of the sort. This is why we have Unity Engine or hell why Unreal Engine 4 has blueprints. Nobody is going to bother building an Engine when you can just use Unity or UE4 to create a game.
I get what you are saying but realistically most of us will not be building an engine or creating an OS.

And this here is what really is going to separate a CS degree from a CIS. Its true the job position says CS degree or related degree so this also means CIS. But if you are creating an Engine or an OS or a new language. Obviously for all intends and purposes a CIS degree is NOT a CS Degree. For every math course a CS degree has, a CIS Degree replaces it with a business course.

What is a computer scientist and what is a software engineer? one is focused on the science behind the field and the other is focused on the business aspect behind the field. The scientist knows more theory and the engineer more practical. But the average customer has no interest in the science behind something they just want their product on time and on budget.
The scientist is better suited for a big company doing research.

 

If you learn the theory well, you should be able to apply it. Therefore, you have experience needed to do the job.

 

Yes they do. At my office here, the staff uses it along with Xamarin, Unity, Unreal along with custom game engines.

 

You either live in Europe, North America or Asia. Or a big country with a big workforce.

Our culture is carnival all year round, very few people here are into programming etc Its mainly due to us being oil and gas exporter, our economy is hydrocarbon. So 90% of Degrees are mechanical, chemical, petroleum, electrical engineering. Its different here in an island of 1 million people especially with this carnival culture.

 

har har. But interesting to consider it from a technology perspective. It doesn't matter if you're written a thousand programs if they're in cobol, basic, etc. Technology changes so quickly that your body of work must always be fresh and new!

 

You're right. We didn't know what "carnival" was because until that post you didn't explain it. Who would have thought that something would be unknown until the definition was actually given for it?

Yes. If you don't have a degree then you need to be able to make up for it. Would you want to hire someone who doesn't know the software, doesn't have a portfolio, etc in addition to not having a degree? I know I wouldn't.

 

Up until now I was purposefully avoiding posting in this thread. You have a habit of showing up on these forums, creating a thread that could be considered bait for a flame war, and then disappearing after it has run its course. My question now is the same as my questions were then.

Have you started learning game development on your own? Past responses have been a resounding "No", but I'm hoping you've finally decided to start learning on your own rather than waste your time with potentially meaningless threads.

I'm not holding my breath though as I feel strongly that this is yet another thread trying to spark a flame war.

 

That's the third time you've tossed that word in needlessly to make your point. You either have no idea what political correctness is, or you are deliberately trying to steer this conversation into an argument about PC politics. Either way, you should stop. Literally nothing in your post had anything to do with political correctness, nor the one above where you could "smell" the PC coming off of @landon91235, a person who was trying to be helpful.

This seems to be the crux of the post, or some kind of evidence to point to something, but you never go anywhere with it. Are you saying this is an example of political correctness?

Look, you either want to know if getting a degree is important to getting hired or you don't. Either way, you've received plenty of answers here telling you things one-way or the other. Alternatively, you could just email hiring managers of various companies and ask them. They're actually, on the whole, very approachable and love a chance to impart wisdom on potential candidates, if not just to make their own jobs easier in the long-run.

 

Some more extreme posts were pruned. The rules for this thread going forward are: if you disagree keep it civil and polite, don't judge, just stick to facts from your POV. Thread bans otherwise. It got too heated and we got complaints.

 

It depends, maths and physics are powerful tools/skills to bring to the game development table on the technical side.

But if you are not breaking new ground then the technical problems have probably already been solved, so a good basic grasp of maths will allow you to harvest the solutions and adapt them to your game.

Or short answer maths good, programming better.

 

In addition to that you need LUCK and people skills.

People that have several degrees and still cannot get a job are not unheard of.

Also, it is not true that you can make a living in "any" industry in this fashion.
In long-established professions degree is often required. Example of those professions are law and medicine.
You're unlikely to become a brain surgeon without undergoing proper training first.

In artsy type of professions you can get by without it. The reason why it is possible to get into programming without degree is because profession is sorta artsy and is not long-established (programming is less than a 100 years old).
Still, having a degree may help. A big, long-established company will be less likely to hire you without a degree, if you have little to show. A lot of that depends on your area/country/etc.

 

OK, I'm breaking my own rule of 'no polemics' here, but anyway:

I totally disagree with some posts here. Of course these things vary wildly depending on where you are (heck, sometimes people have extremely different point of views a block away), but I've had some experiences and I believe they reflect somewhat accurately the most common scenarios:

Do you need a degree in Computer Science to create a game?:
Obviously no. You need /knowledge/ and persistence. You also need some skills if you want to create a decent game.

Do you need a degree in Computer Science to get a Programming Job?
In the majority of cases: yes; not specifically that degree though.

Is math mandatory?
For a programming job: Absolutely NOT! I know some /decent/ programmers with absolute nil math knowledge/skills.
For game development: Depends. For any kind of programming and even game design (esp. probability) IT IS in my opinion. Basic Math is enough though. But hey, math is fun!

What if one wants to build mobile apps for Android?
Don't get me wrong, but I find funny that people associate 'degrees' with 'production' like some kind of fail-safe guaranteed chemical bond. There are lazy and terrible coders out there with degrees from renowned universities. Luckily, for software development you don't need a big infrastructure like a chemical laboratory with access to controlled substances or expensive equipment to learn everything they teach on the universities. Without spending a cent and from the comfort of your room you can be as knowledgeable and productive as anyone who went to the university. Please note that I'm not saying you shouldn't go to the university.

Would an employer want computer science?
For most cases, not THAT SPECIFIC degree, but certainly some related 'formal' superior education is very important. Employers don't want to take chances, and to some extent, a degree PLUS a test will significantly increase their confidence that you can do the job.

Or a CIS degree with ability to create software be good enough and you can learn CS Algorithm Design online yourself?
As I said, generally something just 'related' is good enough for MOST jobs. Employers are generally receptive to the idea of you learning new stuff online. However, they are not going to pay you to learn how to do your job online. You're supposed to know that from start. They want you to update your knowledge and stay up to date on tech, and if you can do that online it's good.

What if you learn all the math on your own; would that be enough?
To make games: Yes. I know a lot of very competent and extremely productive game developers who are completely home-educated AND self-taught.

Degrees are more linked to knowledge than productivity. You don't need a lot of knowledge to make a game. If you're willful enough you can go from zero to a decent game in a week. You need some substantial knowledge to make a game employing good practices and to achieve a high-quality, maintainable and 'orthodox' design. You need to know the conventions, practices and patterns. Experience counts more than a degree in this case.

It's expensive to select people for a job. Employers don't want to spend money selecting all candidates thoroughly to make sure what's the absolute best among them, that's why they rely on things like degrees. It not only tells them you've received training to do that job, but also that you /can/ do the job (i.e.: actually learned). They can't rely 100% on that though so they have their own tests.

All of that being said. If you're absolutely exceptional on what you do, you can very well get a quite good position on most 'modern' companies, because they tend to care about what you can deliver/provide them, not what paper you have on your wall. The problem is eating an paying your bills until you reach the 'absolutely exceptional' status.

Even big 'traditional' gaming companies may hire you if you have a really impressive portfolio/demoreel, let alone the ordinary startup/indie studio. These smaller, and specially the 'newer' companies are very likely to hire you only with a really impressive tech demo. The important word here is 'impressive'.

EDIT:

This is a catch-22 if you absolutely /can't/ get a job (thus experience) without a degree. Especially considering that most people can't just acquire experience by working on personal/open projects because they have bills to pay.
I'm not disagreeing with you, and in my opinion sooner or later an opportunity always appears, but I just wanted to point that out.

EDIT2:

If *I* was an employer, that would be my main requirement too. And I agree that a casual talk is enough to select people. Language is a problem though. Generally the impression people have of me when speaking in English is that I'm on a 'retard' level . Pressure is something important too; from the moment you tell me I'm being evaluated, my QI would drop to negative levels. I would hire *me*, so I'm not too harsh when people freeze due pressure cause I know how that works. That's one of the reasons why I love gamedev too. If there's a bug somewhere, it's not like some nuclear power plant will explode or bank clients will have their accounts zeroed. I only freeze on 'live' tests or huge responsibilities though. I've worked as a freelancer for many years (5-starred every platform) so deadlines are a cake for me. If necessary I just double my working hours and still have plenty of time to sleep. The joys of working at home.
As an example, I can clearly tell who I would hire based on my casual conversations on IRC.

EDIT3Funny:

Mine does. .

 

Hey man thanks for taking time out to do such a well detailed post and answer all my questions, you really hit all the key issues. I totally understand where you are coming from with the whole you gotta eat and pay bills while you gain this experience learning programming. I think you certainly put a really positive light on things and you understand reality and the real world.

Luckily for me I live in the Caribbean and I have my own land and weather is always great here so I have quite a number of trees planted. Okra, Cauliflower, Eggplant, orange, coconut and squash well a few other stuff so I have significantly cut my food bill down to almost nothing. And I have my own house and I live rent free, water here is practically free and unlimited, you don't have to pay any taxes here, 0 bills to pay except a tiny electric bill cause I hardly ever use the AC since, my brother has his house like 200 feet away he has Fibre to the Home so I use his wifi password so I got that cleared up. I also have a web design and PC repair sign infront my house so I sometimes get work with that, and I advertise online and so I get website contracts with that.

So yeah I guess I am fortunate compared to others and other countries. I should mention, I don't know if I did before BUT I have an Advanced Diploma in Computing from NCC UK AKA ASc Degree its known as in some countries. This means I am 1 year from completing my final year BSc in Computer Science. BUT this is not a computer science degree with Calculus or anything like that it has maybe relational algebra for databases, stuff like that but its not your traditional CS Degree. But like you say you don't need any kind of advanced maths to be a programmer here let me show you the link

Click here to download the BSc Computer Science final year brochure from University of Hertfordshire.

If you ever get some time please have a look and let me know what you think of it, here I m also posting a link to the exam paper for the Further Object Oriented Development (FOOD) module, it has stuff like Java 8 exams maybe you can have a look at it and tell me what are your thoughts on it, this is the best I can do when it comes to Universities.

http://www.filedropper.com/food-coursework-3

If anyone here has some free time and would like to have a look at the brochure and the exam paper and give some feedback I would appreciate it. Offcourse the FOOD exam paper I provided is just 1 part but it gives an idea of what I will be asked in the exam room.

 

Shop around, find an education provider who will provide you with a course to your preferred degree course.

 

Absolutely! Once you have the experience, you're set. Getting the experience is all about leveraging opportunities when and where you can. And more importantly, keeping an eye out for them. If you don't have a degree, there are plenty of opportunities in related fields or entry type positions where you can show your skills and turn them into roles that continually add up. I have seen engineers and producers come from QA. Some of my first engineering projects came from being a graphic designer. I would produce something that our company's engineers would say couldn't be done. So, I showed them how it could be done. Eventually I became a "front end engineer". It was just about making sure my skills were known to others.

Without a degree (and really, also with only a degree), no one is going to jump into a senior, or critical/key role. Folks still have to work their way up, regardless of how they got their foot in the door, or where they obtained their knowledge

This. And given the amount of people interested in game development these days, 'impressive' really does need to be impressive.

Our real "minimum" requirement for entry level at our studio (with the exception of interns) is at least 5 years professional game development and several shipped titles. Given the other applicants, often the bar is much higher. Stuff like education, isn't really considered. (unless they did something truly notable as a dissertation or school project).
.

 

We have what is called distance learning here in the Caribbean, so we have University of London which is the best but its a CIS Degree. Then we have the local University of the West Indies (UWI) which is probably on the same level of London but they offer hardcore computer science with very advanced calculus. Its about the level of difficulty as Stanford and MIT. So you need A scores in A levels to gain entry. Those 2 university you would need to start over from scratch as my advanced diploma from NCC UK is not respected by those 2 universities.

Then we have London Metropolitan University which offers BSc in Business Computing which I seriously do not want as it has very little programming, University of Greenwich CIS which is really good has lots of programming and finally University of Hertfordshire BSc in Computer Science which has a lot of programming. But all these 3 Uni will accept my Advanced Diploma for entry into their final year.

After shopping around comparing prices and syllabus, I decided on University of Hertfordshire.

i will find out more about this one University of Greenwich you can see the structure of the Degree here its really good

http://www.sbcs.edu.tt/programme/view/15

^ but honestly they removed the (Object Oriented Programming) module in favor of this development framework thing. Which is just learning about RAD. so IMO I think this greenwich CIS now sucks just like the "business computing" from london met uni.

Seems hertfordshire is my best bet. If you get chance have a look at the pdf I posted and let me know what you think.

 

OR you can simply take a degree and learn it by your own effort.


Like what Zombie (Scott) and others said, it's your skill-set that counts. Have you considered making an Apps portfolio, a list of apps you made earlier? That would help tremendously in your job search.

 

My pleasure .

In my opinion, you should complete your final year and get your CS degree. Whatever they teach I bet it's relevant, and it's always good to learn new stuff. That extra year on your papers may make a huge difference in the future. You should take this with a grain of salt though, because, as they say, the burnt child dreads the fire. I know someone who was the top of his class on one of the world's top universities, so much so that he was offered a terrific job and dropped out, but that costed him dearly in the future. In his field and in his country, that extra year on the paper suddenly became the determinant factor for the employers (it's a very specialized field). I always found that a total absurd, so I'm somewhat traumatized with people dropping out of college on the last year.

If you don't have to worry about bills, taxes, and all the boring responsibilities we poor mortals have to deal with, then you could just 'make it work'. I mean, if you're really decided that you want to be a gamedev, and you can dedicate time to it without worrying about finances that much, then I'd say you're on the right place amigo. Considering that you're almost a CS bachelor, Unity will allow you to start making games very quickly. Take some time to follow some tutorials and get a grasp of how gamedev works and what it's all about. The first thing you have to accept is that it isn't as cool, rewarding and fun as you probably think.

I for instance just didn't have the option of failing. I was decided since my first QBasic text game that I wanted to be a gamedev. I did a lot of side jobs like websites (sounds familiar? ), AVR microcontrollers programming, and Archiviz. I'm still not doing solely gamedev, but I'm getting there eventually, and now and then I have time to do my personal gamedev projects, what is very important to me.

TL;DR: Why aren't you making games already?

Wow. Multiple engineers? That's what I call an achievement.

I've had similar experiences in a much lower degree of course. Unfortunately destiny wasn't on my side and none of the opportunities I got by impressing people ended up very fruitful. I was discussing something like this recently on this forums. It's really surprising how software developers (esp. gamedevs) can lack basic creativity.

A company in my city was migrating from an old text-based system and they didn't know how to migrate the data. I wasn't there for a job, but one of their employees was complaining that they were typing all the data again. That was something bizarre to me. Their in-house developers couldn't find a way to read the data from the old system db, and it really was hard to make sense of that data, but as a fan of Python I ended up making a program to operate the db client program and open all areas from all entries, and it read the data directly from the db client memory. It took a day to make the program (it wasn't that simple as it sounds) but it ran for 30 mins for a total conversion of the whole db to plain text data. They had like 8 guys typing the whole day for weeks and only had 10% of the db typed (with errors and lots of info missing).

I'm a fan of Python (x2). I use it for everything. My gamedev clients often get curious on what are the *.pyc files in the project folder since I use small Python programs for a lot of small tasks like image converting (e.g.: for Steaming Assets), sound files volume equalizing, metadata fixing (e.g.: reordering metadata so unity files work properly with git), or just lazily converting a list of filenames to a C# array of literal strings for tight-coupling bad practices hehe. Most of them are cli but I like how you can easily build an ugly UI with tkinter (not really ). Some clients don't like my sense of humor though. Neither do I.

 

hey yeah well my country don't have jobs for game development its mainly IT business programming, solutions for clients who wants to make their businesses more accessible through apps and websites so it would involve a lot of database SQL, C#, C- and Java also javascript. Things of that nature so what I did was I went on freelance and had a look at the kind of project you would typically find people asking for. So I am trying to decide on which one I would like to work on while learning my programming.

I am unsure as to if creating a game would have the same effect, should I apply for a job and show it to an employer as opposed to creating something similar to say instagram or mobile news app I think these days mobile news apps are popular. But thats my plan I want to offer a package to my clients, when I create a website I will provide a logo along with a mobile app. I know there are businesses here that would want mobile apps for their credit union and banks etc.

In the past I lost website contracts because what the person asked of me I could not do, like one person asked to create an interactive website that offers project management courses, you click the correct answer from the list, its was like an E Learning site but unlike Lynda.com you would be doing an interactive test and the site would also accept payment. I could not do it but I knew someone who could, I then told her the cost would be $1200 USD and she said don't bother because she can't afford it. Now some people just don't want to pay and there are those who really have no clue how much something would cost. Now if I could have built that myself instead of hiring someone else and taking my cut for doing so, I could have just built it for her within her budget which was $800 USD.

Its always risky sometimes these people can pay any amount and sometimes they can't and you never know which it is unless you take a gamble. But yeah you get my idea, the idea of creating a game was so I could publish it on steam and try to make some money

 

You have a good point here this I will certainly do.

 

My son just switched his major from Computer Science to IT with an emphasis in game programming. Kind of scary to me, but it is what he loves. The CS was great but he is switching schools and the new school does not have that program. He is not really interested in the theory of CS or the architecture of the computer...he just wants to code and learn more programming. The CS program had only a few programming classes and a lot of math and theory, while the Game Programming degree seems to concentrate more on actually using the programming.

Not sure if this will hurt him when trying to find a job but I am encouraging him to take some practical IT courses as well, not just game classes. Hopefully that will help.

 

Well as the saying goes most jobs are pretty much about turnkey sw. For example nobody is going to build a website from scratch for the average person. You could learn a million things about computer science but chances are you are going to end up on theme forest spending $30 from your credit card and getting a totally complete template for exactly what the client wants. And it will take you a couple days to finish a website with that.You could learn to do a lot of custom scripts and stuff without a computer science degree

Or Unity Engine the real hardcore computer science isn't needed unless you are creating a game Engine.

 

I'm not lying to you, the scenario for game developers ain't easy.

In terms of jobs I'd say the average programmer working for the big companies isn't really happy. There's too much pressure and generally in AAA companies you just have to follow the GDD (or a tiny excerpt of it), so it's not 'game development' but just doing the list of tasks they ask you. It doesn't feel like you're developing games at all because you can't implement your ideas, even if they are going to improve the game considerably. Also, the AAA companies nowadays are all about 'milking' the players as much as possible, they just want to make money and recently threw the ethics book out of the window. Most serious game developers don't appreciate that.

I didn't want to believe that the big companies went 'full evil' besides warning from people wiser than me, but I had an irrefutable proof when I released my mods for GTAV. My 'persistance' mod was released a few days after my friend Alexander Blade 'cracked the code' (in a good sense) and while Fabi (Gallexme) was still working on the initial Lua Plugin versions, it was released very early so people called it the first 'actual' GTAV mod (not trainer), and it's a complex mod.
I had fun programming that mod and especially understanding how the GTAV "API" works (imho, it's terrible). I've helped the guys figure out the nativedb, and I don't regret making all my 5 mods at all.

However, when I started getting some serious feedback, from people re-buying the game on PC solely because of my mods, the overall reception was so positive that I even though Rockstar would want to hire me, but the opposite happened. They absolutely didn't like that I've modded the game even though it increased the sales and increased the value of the product (substantially imho), they see us modders basically as criminals. They don't want to sell 'single-player' GTAV like that; they want to 'milk' players on GTA: Online. Modding the single player to make it better goes against that.
After that experience it became crystal clear to me that some (not to say most) big AAA companies, especially western ones, simply aren't for me. That is the reason why there are so many 'hanging fruits' in games from these companies these days. It's by design. I know I'm going to be bashed for saying that, but at this point I don't really care.

So, definitely game development isn't a good field to find a 'traditional' and 'stable' job/position. Even when you think you found a good stable position in a big company you can be fired the next day for reasons beyond your control. It's a very 'volatile' market, and unfortunately 'ethics' are not in the textbook of some big game companies.
I decided I won't be part of that, so 'indie' is the way to go for me, but it's a very bumpy road and I'm afraid no 'sane' parent want to see their children going that direction. Even though you don't like it, I can only advice you to always support him because that way it's going to be much easier.
I for instance am still a 'closet' game developer. Most of my family don't know I dev games and it's going to be simply impossible to explain that to my German grandpa for example. I hate blaming other stuff for my failures, but the lack of support from people around me really could have changed things considerably.

 

Depends on the scale of game.

 

Sad that you have to be a closet developer!

My son is interested in being an indie gamer as well. We have talked about what he can do to make money and still develop games, including part time jobs and all that. He has the creativity to do it, is very familiar with all sorts of games, from his own DnD settings and campaigns, to dozens of board games and video games. He has a notebook with lists of game ideas and some even seem fun to me...which is rare. lol

His father and I support him 100%. Both of us worked or still do work for corporations and while the money was steady, the fulfillment was not there. Fortunately, his dad still works and supports the rest of us so we can follow our dreams. One of my daughters is a very talented artist. I need to post some of her work on the art thread sometime.

So yeah, most sane parents would not encourage their kids do something risky. But times have changed. Small businesses are viable now to some extent due to new health care laws. Kids are graduating from college with degrees like engineering and having a tough time due to the loss of manufacturing jobs. Pay is as low now or lower than when I started my professional career, a long time ago. Layoffs are commonplace it seems. Service jobs are the only thing still viable and most of those are very low pay.

Why not? It helps that his dad and I are making a game..with him a big part of the project. Hopefully we can help him get his feet off the ground.

 

Math is not important for most programming (basic math yes). Degree is not important but experience is. I got "my foot in" to a tech company based on "my potential" and a small portfolio of websites I made for friends. I have no degree. After getting my foot in, I studied hard on my own time (self-learning from books) and learned on the job. Showed that I could learn quickly and was every bit as good or better than the other college degreed folks. After staying there for 4 years I had enough experience that lack of degree didn't matter.

Your mileage may vary. Perhaps I was lucky to get that first job. Or it was destiny haha.

 

It should be noted that the game industry is huge and diverse. I'm not disagreeing that is the case with some AAA big titles, but want to point out there is a wide spectrum in professional game development. Certainly with something like GTA, a lot of the roles are going to be somewhat rote, but there are also many folks in roles that are making the design decisions and creative calls. (When you have a 150+ people working on the game, you have to have a clear vision.) The secret is that you want to be the one making the calls. Like anything of scale, there will be a hierarchy, and like anything, things are more fun and interesting the higher up the food chain you are.

But there are also tons of mid range and even big companies with much smaller teams. (Personally, I prefer the smaller teams.) Blizzard and Crystal Dynamics, (even small teams in EA) come to mind, but also a butt-ton of startups and spin offs and new studios. Certainly not all are puppies and flowers, but there are enough around that is kind of a matter of just finding the right groove. I have friends that have come from places like Blizzard, on the same project and yet have radically different opinions the environment. Every studio has its own culture. And there are hundreds if not thousands of studios of all sizes and cultures.

 

Just wanted to stop and say that your family seems great. I wish all of you the best of luck. You and your husband seem to be doing an absolute amazing job with your children. Keep your husband close, he's got a tough role with a lot of pressure. I must admit that I envy your kid's childhood; meant in a very complimentary way.

 

Thanks, Landon! I feel pretty fortunate. I have great kids and we have a lot of fun together. We did go through our share of teenage angst with the two oldest kids, but the younger ones seemed to have learned from their mistakes. lol I wish I had been a younger kid!

My husband works as an engineer manager so he is doing okay. He helps with the game on his down time and is having a blast. He loves both his jobs, fortunately, although the commute is a bear.

 

I'm glad he enjoys his job, I was thinking it was simply for the check. I guess I read into it too solemnly at first. It's always great to see and hear about people enjoying their line of work. It's the only time you get really good at it.

 

What about i you glad for i aswell? I am one of you guys now.

 

Yeah, he is one of those rare people who went through college and graduate school and actually ended up doing something they love. He is a very good mechanical engineer too.

He likes programming games too! I am so lucky. lol

 

So go make your first game. Try making pong, a very basic game. Although it is very basic, doing it, you learn game fundamentals.

 

I will take this advice.

I thought it might be too simple but you are right I will do this as my first game. Would you recommend I use Unity or doing it from scratch? I guess if I am doing it from scratch I would have to create something like an Engine?

 

Not really, engines are typically built specifically to be multi purpose (or adapted to be so), you can just build a game, it doesn't need to be an engine. But I would recommend starting with unity, it's a good way to understand what goes into to building a game without having to pile on a ton of concepts all at the same time. After you get comfortable with that, you'll have a deeper understanding of the elements involved if you want go farther and build from scratch.

 

Try this:

And this:
http://unity3d.com/learn

 

^ thanks dude I am trying it. This is an ok way to learn programming aswell right? even if most of my work will be business mobile app and website related?

 

When you do this kind of task for the learning purposes, the right way to go about it is to implement it without asking how to do it. That way you'll learn a lot more.

If you start asking for advice for every single step, it'll take longer and you'll learn little.

I think that people who get good at programming do not ever ask those kinds of questions. They won't go around forums asking how to implement a raytracer, how to make pong, how to do this or that thing, they dig up the info, write the stuff themselves, with little or no external help, because the problem is fascinating for them.

Anyone who aim to be a self-taught programmer will need this kind of drive/passion.

 

I don't know about you, but --

You really need to find a business-case whether if game-development is applicable to mobile or website development.

 

thanks guys I will do this on my own, my way and see how it goes. I will do it just for the experience!

 

Cool thread!

Other than Degree's, do you guys know of any notable certifications that are good skill/knowledge indicators? Such as stuff obtained online, or certs from Microsoft.

 

For a job in the industry, these certificates are surely a plus. Especially if it's from the company you want to work on or if it's related in some way (parent company for example).

Of all the indie studios I know, none of them care about these, and they care only a little bit about a 'degree' but only if you really don't have much to show. Once you have some good work to show, at least in the 'indie scene' all those papers become mostly irrelevant.

The Microsoft certificate is not high on my list of reliability, because I've seen so many 'certified Windows professionals' say very wrong things on the web. Heck, I'm not even a Windows enthusiast or something, but the few stuff I've learned by using the system normally is more than what some of these 'certified' guys know.

 

I read that programming certs are a negative actually. Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer (MCSD) for example subtracts rather than add to your resume. I have no idea if this statement has any merit to it but many claim MCSD shows that you were too lazy to get a Degree and all it proves is that you can answer some multiple choice questions about ASP or C#.

It in noway shows you can design Algorithms or solve problems etc

In all honesty I think the most important thing is to have a successful app on the google or apple store. Especially an App that is relevant to the kind of work the company you are applying to does on a regular basis. Who would you hire a man with MCSD and no track record? or a man with nothing but a successful game that has actually made a decent amount of money?

A guy who has actually built moderately complex software that has been a success is far more likely to increase revenue of your business than someone with a degree just out of school and no experience. I have not be fully accurate but I am pretty sure I got the important bits correct.