It's funny, I worked for a large company doing enterprise architecture and building secure real-time systems.

When I switched jobs to game development I quickly realized how easy the business coding and architecture really was when compared to working in game development and especially graphics / animation / AI.

Most Common Misconception I've come across:
- You can make an MMORPG in a month with no prior programming experience. Assets just materialize so you don't need a year or more of time from multiple artists. A design document for the typical MMORPG is about 4 pages in length and always contains the sentence 'has many totally new features the current MMO games don't have'.

- You need to develop using C++ to make a commercial PC game.

Quote:What's game programming like?

Teh shizzle.

One of the things that's always kind of bugged me is that when I was in high school, I made a lot of really intricate tech demos (GMM with texture splatting, some random shader stuff, shadows), and people weren't impressed at all. In about 3 days, I hammered out a crappy 3d-movement snake game, and everybody was awestruck. Although... It is a good incentive to write games and not engines, I guess :).

- If your idea sounds fun on paper, it will be fun to play. All those games that had boring aspects were boring even on paper. This includes blending your favorite systems of 20 different games.

I have another one to add that I just remembered. I was reading a book and reviewing it for my professor. It was about software engineering in computer games. The misconception is something like this:

With todays processing power, the Windows GDI is capable of making 3D games and maintaining a decent frame rate.

I looked in the book and found that "decent" was defined as 15-20 fps with only a couple objects on the screen.

I'm a newbie looking to create the next MMORPG!!!!

May we call it a paradox, misconception o oxymoron?

Luck!
Guimo

Quote:Original post by Emmanuel Deloget
It seems you are in the 3% of self-taught that are more efficient than the average 'guy with a degree' - thus, you are in the 'though not always' part of the world. But what helix said is still true: most of the self-taught guys are producing code that is hard to decipher, hard to reuse, hard to debug. Most of the time their code is wacky. Of course, it works, but nowadays having some working code is not sufficient enough to do teh job right.

Hope I wasn't too rude.

I just don't get this...I've seen code from more than a few 4-year CS college grads and a good percentage of it wasn't very good.

You may well be right that a large percentage of self-taught programmers write ineffecient code, but how can you say the opposite about college grads? I can goto an art school and learn all about composition, perspective, the golden ratio, etc. and understand it...that doesn't mean I can paint like Michelangelo.

I happen to be self-taught, and you don't have to attend a college to get college books! In the few college courses I did take they covered what was in the book...well, I read that already...

Plus the streets smart team on Apprentice made more money and did better than book smarts, so that says everything right there. :)

[Edited by - Chris81 on June 21, 2005 5:34:23 PM]

Misconception:

Drag-n-drop game-making packages are incapable of producing quality games.

See:
The Spirit Engine
Eternal Daughter
Super Ken Senshi
Streambolt

Quote:Original post by Chris81
I've seen code from more than a few 4-year CS college grads and a good percentage of it wasn't very good.

I don't doubt this in the least. But what a 4-year degree says is "I worked at something for 4 years and accomplished it". My college prided itself on that fact that when its students graduated, they'd survived an education meant to weed them out. Game programming is hard, and tiring, and you have to work hardest at it when you're most sick of it, and you're not done til it's completely right.

The last thing an employer wants is someone who gets 75% done with something and then gets bored and moves on.

Of course, a 4-year degree doesn't prove that you're good enough to finish a game, only your name in a shrink-wrapped game does that! So it makes sense that many employers immediately toss out anyone without a shipped title. A 4-year degree also doesn't prove that you have the necessary attention to detail, which is why you also need demos/screenshots.

It's like how colleges view SAT scores... when you're searching through hundreds of applicants, they need to be catagorized initially (think radix-sort). What do you think they say about someone who didn't bother to take the SAT? "Oooo, this guy has style!"