If you get a job at a game studio and you think your first day is going to be something like them giving you a big room for six months and them saying "give us a masterpiece" and them promptly ignoring you. You're going to have a bad first day.
Of course I don't think that! In fact I may have come across wrong because I never said I didn't "like" uni work. I don't, but hear me out...
The difference between my university work that I do not want to do and any work I might do for a job that I "don't like" is that the job work actually has a purpose and a benefit. When you work at a game studio, you are part of a team right? Everyone in the team does what needs to be done because they all care about the fundamental product involved. If I get asked to rename 1000 files to a new naming convention as part of a job at a game studio for e.g. I'd be perfectly content to do so. It's not a very fulfilling task, but if needs to be done for the game to work, it needs to be done; it's probably because of a technical issue that makes some logical sense and I can't fault the situation on that. Jumping through hoops at university on the other hand is just to prove that you can jump through hoops. That doesn't really have a point to me, and that's the source of my de-motivation. Anyway, I assure you that I hold no illusions as to what working in a game studio is actually like, perhaps other than how truly horrific crunch time at the end of a product cycle can be. I've dealt with crunch time before, but I imagine I have never dealt the level of pressure that a studio requires its employees to work under. Nevertheless I do /expect/ high pressure situations and am quite self-aware with regards to my abilities, strengths, weaknesses etc and I still think I'd have what it takes to do that sort of job well. I also expect to have to learn a lot of new things very quickly if and when I did get work at a games studio because the development can't 'wait' for me to be trained up by them; the quicker I learn, the more of an asset I am. Thankfully I love the nature of the work in general and will always do my best to find enjoyment in these things. Conversely as I say, I see uni work as a monumentally enormous pile of pointlessness - it's different.
I've decided to attempt to suspend my studies leaving me the option to return in a year. This way I can spend a year on my own work and see how well I do with it, and by next year I'll know whether to complete the honours year. I do hope at the very least I've made it clear that I'm not a quitter just because I'm choosing not to finish.
