I was signing up for courses for university, and a question suddenly popped up in the career of game design and programming. I don't really intend to go into this field since I'm terrible at mathematics and prefer social sciences and arts, but nonetheless from the influence of this forum I got curious. These questions are mainly directed at game designers/programmers for both iPhone and other consoles such as PC/Wii/PS3/360/etc; What subjects did you study while in college/university? What degree(s) did you get? If you didn't intend to be a programmer did you only take other courses such as animation, or was programming a core part of any career? Do programmer also participate in the area of designing the game's story and animation, or are they just facing lines of code all day, and similarly do animators and idea/storyline developers have to participate in the coding also? What exactly is the education requirement of the person who writes the story and comes up with game ideas (ie, the names of characters, how each stage should be, what weapons to use, etc), because to me it seems like a much less "professional" job than the animators and programmers if that's all s/he does, or does the game project leader simply come up with the ideas and participate in the coding/animating as well?
Wow, there's a lot of questions in that one Personally, I self taught myself programming based on my love of video games, and have worked professionally in the industry for a few years, and freelance for the rest of it. If you learn programming, be aware that you always have the option of developing your own indie-level games with a small team, whilst using your abilities to code to develop in really any computer related manners (javascript, flash, java, etc.) for "real" income. Alternatively, if you work for EA etc, you're probably only going to be doing a very small slice of the work, mostly in whatever you specialize in. So if you like AI, you're probably going to be doing AI related tasks almost constantly. With that though, if you're abilities get you a lead position, you have an enormous amount of input simply by relating the ability of your team's scheduling compared to what the "designers" want out of the product. Until actual general AI has the ability to write complex interdependent code based on "small words"- ideas, general concepts, etc. your skills will always be in demand in the workplace. So the next 50+ years you'll have steady work if you keep up with the current trends etc. Chris.
