This post is meant to generate some opinionated responses because i would really love to get some insight on this. I am a college student, and i recently joined a game development club. I attended the first meeting last sunday and i was very surprised about some things. First of all, the top programming students in the school, that can make applications in a plethora of languages, know c like the back of their hands, and dream in object oriented theory were absent from the club. For some reason i thought it was the dream of every guy or girl, that grew up playing a lot of games and gets into programming, to eventually write games. Some of the guys i was thinking of are straight bit flippers and total genious... why werent they there? Instead of them, it was the "back of the class" bunch that would probably rather be playing eq or q3 then learning how to write a calculator with c++. I now consider myself a responsible programmer as in i program any type of application and i make sure that its done right. I havnt always been that way in fact i have dropped c++ before and settled with b''s in other programming classes that i could of aced. I used to be a much bigger gamer, but i am discovering that i only have time to either make games or play other peoples games. Is that why so many people fail at game programming for a living? Is it because they do not have the discipline and hard work ethic to crank thru thousands of lines of code that may not having anything to do with gameplay. Is that why so many crappy mods get made all the time? And mb why there are so very few ppl that actually make engines for mainstream games.(I mean are you telling me that Carmack is the only one who can write a great 3d fps engine?) I read a professional game programmers article about this same thing, and i really didnt believe it until that first meeting. Who really makes it as a game programmer? The hardcore gamer? or the hardcore programmer? How many people out there have the skills to make games that are writing PL/SQL instead for 120k a year? If the current situation is that game programming attracts the irresponsible 24hr/day eq freak or the "rail god" of q3, thats pretty sad. One thing i have learned is that game programming takes more hard work then most professions. Whats the ratio of professional atheletes to professional game programmers? Maybe some people need to wake up and realize that the only way into the elite is by hard work.

I think the problem boils down to the fact that there are two types of people in the world...And forgeting what I learned in Psych 101, we''ll just call them left and right brained. The left brained people(creative I believe) and the right brained people(analytical?).

With this in mind, you have to realize what it takes to be A) a talanted programmer, and B) A talented GAME programmer. It is a special breed to be the latter. (being a beginner game programmer I know how hard it is to become this)

Left brained individuals are creative and innovative. If you are this sort of person, you mostly lack the analytical skills to a programmer. This is were you find your gaming artists and graphic designers. It is hard to program if you left brained...but not impossible.

Right brained people are very mathematical and scientific. These make excellent programmers because programming is if nothing else mathematical and scientific. These people will usually find graphic design harder than programming.

Right brained individuals can write great word processors, web scripts, database programs, and very "does the job" type of applications. It is just a matter of ''this is what we need, this is what I need to do.''

Game programming however introduces many variables into the metaphoric equation by forcing you to realize what will be fun, not just do the job. What will look good, and not just ''work''. What will be new and exciting, not tried and true.

When it comes down to it, no amount of dedication or practice will allow a math-god to be able to think like a designer, or a designer to be able to flip through 1000s of lines of code.

You just have to have both...and I like your point...this type of person is probably rarer than a profession-caliber athlete. You have it or you don''t, and no amount of practice will change that.

Perhaps the people you expected to be at the club realize that they could write the ''Next Great OS'' (god know we need it) but not the ''Next Great Doom.'' And those gamers who did show, could give a sh*t about "real" applications and think it would be cool if they could make the next million dollar title.

And c''mon now, wouldn''t it be cool?

KalvinB-

--I wouldn''t join a club even though I''m a good programmer. What''s the point?--

Why are you here then? Isn''t GameDev.net just one big club?

RedDwarf/
Why do you assume that writing games has anything to do with joining some dumb programming club? The best people, with the initiative to find their own answers and learn for themselves, don't need the club.

If as you say, the club is full of novices, what's the point in the talented guys joining up? To write dodgy half finished rubbish because three quarters of the team either don't know what they're doing, or don't put the time in? Why teach if it's not your profession?

If games programming attracts large numbers of hardcore gamers, I honestly don't mind, because I know most of them will never produce anything, so my own work has a better chance to shine.

I personally suspect the opposite is the case, that too many games programmers are good application programmers. Filling their awfully conceived, badly executed games with fantastic code. The PC games shelves are full with this kind of rubbish.

Anon/
There definitely are people in this world who are analytically brilliant and extremely creative. Something I've realized from looking at a large amount of demos though, is that they are very rare. Usually you'll find the better the programming in a demo, the worse the aesthetics.

Edited by - simon_brown75 on August 6, 2001 5:04:35 PM

The game development club i joined is not about a bunch of pointless meetings it is an effort to collaborate with artists in an art school and programmers in my school to create a game as a team effort. It''s a bunch of ppl who are willing to dedicate a lot of part time effort into actually creating a commericial quality game not just a bunch of newbies looking to leech ideas.

And my comment about the "good" programmers at my school was not that they actually make games and dont want to join the club. It''s that they don''t make games they make useful applications and other stuff. They have all the discipline and hard work necessary as well as the skills but they do not game program... Is that because mb they are more grounded in reality and realize what it takes to actually make a game then the guy who just got done playing his favorite game and thought "I could make this game better, i want to be a game programmer" Or the guy that sits in the back of c++ and decides not to listen to the boring lecture about pointers and instead dreams up his totally new and wow creative idea for a game.

I guess the main point of my post is that i believe there to be a great many disillusioned gamers/"programmers" that dont have the hard work ethic to become successfull. From all the articles i have read about commercial game development there are alot of GREAT ideas that dont get realized because of the lack of resources. And really its not all about a new idea or incredable creativity that makes successful games. Whoever posted that here obviously doesnt realize that we have been dominated by only 2 genres. RTS and FPS.(How many times are they going to recreate warcraft or doom?) The same ideas have been used,reused and used again in many successfuly commercial games. And that is my point the disillusioned newbie thinks that they can make a great game programmer because they have a new or fresh idea. If you dont have the discipline to realize your dream you got nothing.

-Red Dwarf

"You can crap in one hand and dream in the other and see which one gets filled up first."

Sit around and ''talk'' with good coders?

You have to admit there is some irony here about starting clubs with people who stereotypically are not social people! lol. Maybe this has something to do with the phenomenon noticed here...



PS sweet sig quote Red Dwarf...