Recently a journalist emailed to do a story on gaming as a career for their education supplement, unfortunately I was on vacation and by the time I read his email and sent in the answers they had already done their story. Since I had all this written I though of having this blogged.
Question: Gaming is a multi-billion industry but still India's share is minuscule. Why is that in spite of having being acknowledged as a leading software talent pool, India is lagging behind in gaming industry?
Building fun games is unlike building useful software - where Indian software talent pool lies.
Gaming, where art merges with science, is a perfect blend of artistic excellence, acoustic symphony, engineering excellence topped with great planning and management and thus it requires a collective team work of highly motivated and skilled people in their individual of expertise. This fusion of extreme art forms makes games development very challenging yet fascinating.
Also games development is more of a passionate profession, there can only be two reasons why a great programmer would leave his stable software job to work with a smaller games company; either he gets paid more or love games.
When I got my first games job at the beginning of year 2000, there was not more than couple of dozen people in India who were making games. Today the number has increased reached few thousands yet it is an increase in numbers only otherwise qualitatively we leg behind.
Yet despite the hardships programmers, artist, designers can be trained to develop good games. It is a time consuming training and like any new industry it will take sometime to grow and expand.
I am confident that it is only matter of time when India will become one of the major game development hubs across the globe. India is already very well known for building new as well as porting existing mobile games.
PC and Console games take much longer to build and require bigger budgets and none of the Indian Companies are doing any end-to-end games, but I definitely see this too happening in times to come.
Question. In India, gaming is in nascent stage. What are the challenges in this industry?
Personally I feel that good talent with the right mix of skill and passion is missing. Gamers who are passionate about making games; either don’t have the necessary skills or have misconception that making a game is only about ideas. Good programmers lack the love for games; excellent programmers are not convinced enough to leave their software jobs. I know many friends and acquaintances working in games and they are always on a look out for the right mix.
Secondly, Game development companies in India are not taking aggressive steps in building a healthy ecosystem, where there is a consortium of Game Developers, publishers, educational institutes, who would help train and guide the young talents on to this line. There have been few initiatives like IGita (Indian Games Industry and Trade Association) and IGDA’s (Indian Game Developers Association) Indian Chapter but certainly there is need for more.
Guidance in the right direction by the right people is necessary. A friend on mine who has been working in the games industry for sometime has started a social Meet-up group in Hyderabad, which now has almost 120 members, where like minded youth, interested to learn art of gaming conducts regular meetings, trainings and sessions on various topics on games development. It has yielded results as many members have got the desired jobs. This is a good initiative but a minuscule one, more planned and organized initiatives are needed before the nascent stage starts maturing.
Question. If someone wants to take up gaming as career, then what will be your advice to him/her?
My first advice would be to
spend time researching and gathering information on what are the various fields of expertise, what skills are needed and how can you build those skills.
There are many game developers spread across various online forums and communities who are always willing to offer help, there are tons of website which give clear information on various aspects of game development. www.sloperama.com is one of the best websites.
My second advice is to the gamers who want to be game developers - don’t be mislead and think making games will be just fun like playing games and no sweat. Your job is to make a FUN packed game, whether you have fun making them depends on whether you love spending endless hours and sleepless nights working hard to deliver a great experience. Games development will challenge you and push you to your creative and logical limits.
Another advice, think of your life as a series of games and the objective of the first game is to get a job in the games industry.
Like in any good game you will face tough obstacles, have a limited set of resources, a set of rules and multiple ways to reach your goal. You will need to upgrade your skills, overcome challenges and play for long hours though many days to finish this game and …. While doing all this if you are having fun then you are fit and ready for this industry.
Question. What are the various opportunities available for someone who wants to take up gaming as career and what qualities are needed to excel in this field?
Games can be delivered to the end user via mobile phones, PC, Web, Console there are others like interactive TV, kiosks etc. Each of there platforms has its own process of building games.
The future of Mobile games development is bright in India, there are dozens of companies actively and regularly hiring.
There are broadly three areas of expertise to choose from:
– Technical, which requires the candidates to possess strong programming skills (J2ME, BREW are the most commonly used programming languages to make mobile games, Symbian is another interesting platform but can be a bit challenging for a new comer). Your job would be to program the game to behave as per the design specification given by the game designer, which might include writing code for Game Logic, AI, Graphics as well as sound effects.
- Art, requires the candidates to posses strong artistic skills accompanied with knowledge of optimization as there are challenging memory and space restrictions in majority of the mobile phones available.
Artist should be skilled enough to make art by actually moving one pixel at a time, so the name; pixel artist. There is also some room for good low polygon 3d modelers for small but growing 3d mobile games.
- Test, which requires the candidates to posses a strong eye for detail and good memory, some of the good testers I know can find one stray pixel on the screen as well can recollect last 10 buttons they pressed while testing a game. Recording the series of steps to reproduce a glitch is always beneficial.
Console and Pc games development requires bigger teams and take much longer to build, currently most of the Indian game companies are providing services to foreign game development studios. Services come in the form of providing art assets, modules of code and even quality assurance.
- Technical, requires programmer to be fluent in languages like C++, with sound knowledge in APIs like DirectX, OpenGL are norms. Firm grip on topics like Data Structures, Optimization and multi threaded programming are must.
- Art, there are various sub fields within the art domain, you can choose be an Animator, who is responsible for making the characters and objects in the game act and move. Due to the lack of motion capture facilities in India, good animators are in huge demand. If animation is not your cup of tea than you can choose to be a modeler, who is responsible for creating characters and the objects in the game; proficiency in tools like 3DS Max and Maya are essential. There are various other art positions like Level Builder, Texture Artist, Concept Artist and lighting experts.
Online Games and Casual Games market has also become huge and is growing. Macromedia Flash is one of the most popular tool to build causal games, though the programming tasks remain quite the same with network and muti-play programming an added requirement, the artists are required to be proficient in creating Vector art. Lately there has been a huge demand for good vector artist.
There are also positions available in Game Design and requires the candidate to have in-depth knowledge in subjects like Game theory, user interface design and story telling, this may sound like an easy job but game designer is one of the toughest positions to get in. Most of the game designers got into games development as a programmer, artist, tester or manager and then through constant demonstration of passion, creativity and hard work got into the designer’s shoes.
Required qualities differ with the various aspects of game development – programming, art, design, test, audio management. Hence it is essential to find your area of interest or rather I would say passion, followed by your area of skills and accordingly pursue it.
In general, the game development companies are always looking for someone with required above mentioned skills in each field and along with it an eye for detail, a good team player, a creative thinker and who is adaptive to change.
Question. What kinds of a salary can a professional in this filed can expects?
Salaries is something that depends on the skill and experience level – if you are good in what you do then the salaries are as competitive as in any other similar level software workplace.
Though the salaries for entry level positions are a bit lower but this is changing as the industry grows. I know people earning 8k a month as well 150k a month.
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