Yes, most game dev is not a magical utopia of coding whatever you feel like and watching the magic happen. But it's also not a horrific grind where you are treated entirely as a code monkey for someone else's art.
There is an entire continuum between these points and different companies and teams will lie at different points on it. I have worked on games where I was so deep in the bowels of tools and tech that I couldn't even tell you how the game was played (maintaining the UI editor for Madden, which was actually a lot of fun). And I've worked on games where I sat right next to the designers and artists and had a lot of influence on the game itself (Henry Hatsworth, where I wrote the level/animation editor and in-game AI engine).
I think overall, most game dev jobs do have a few things going for them compared to other domains:
* You get a greater opportunity to work on cross-discipline teams. During my time at EA, I worked closely with artists, UI designers, producers, technical artists, sound designers, etc. It was wonderful to not be in a programmer monoculture. It's good for the soul to be around people who think differently.
* People outside of your work have a more immediate understanding and appreciation for what you do. There is some prestige to being a game dev and at the very least most people can at least visualize a video game. If you work at a typical non-famous non-FAANG software company, your job is almost totally invisible.
* You're working on a game. You might not spend much time literally playing it, but it's still more fun when debugging to poke around a football field or dungeon than a spreadsheet full or insurance rates or whatever stuff most typical CRUD devs are dealing with. Game development often feels concrete and tangible in ways that other software doesn't.
But there are some downsides:
* The market factors the intrinsic rewards above into compensation, so game dev pays less than other software fields. The massive number of young people who want to do it also drives salaries down.
* The overtime is often awful.
* A side effect of the above two is a constant brain drain. Experienced devs age out and leave when they want to start a family and have sane hours, to be replaced by another crop of fresh-faced kids who will work for peanuts for the cachet of being a real game dev. That means there is often a large lack of software engineering maturity on teams. Tons of spaghetti code, broken processes, poor estimation, and other self-inflicted wounds.
I really enjoyed my time at EA (except for the overtime and often crappy code), but I'm also glad to not be working full time in games any more.
Well sure, when you're doing the fun bits for fun.
> It’s a type of coding that is much closer to actual artistic creation rather than engineering.
Unless you're in a team with both artists and coders, which is, y'know, all of the commercial ones with a chance of success.
> The sheer amount of creative & engaging stories, puzzles, real-time strategies and on top of this entirely multiplayerable online allows for an infinite amount of types of entertaining creations… all made possible thanks to code.
It's the game designer who gets to do all this creating, not the coders. Unless (see point 2) you're in a tiny team hoping to win the lottery. See also "the kid fresh out of gamedev boot camp who wants to be a designer and is confused when nobody wants to join their team because everybody else has already has their own great ideas for a game which they've been working on for 10+ years while they also learned to code or model."
> But surely building “yet another react form” feels like coding an already solved problem.
Try building "yet another 3D model loader (that has to handle the quirks of three different modeling programs and eleventy different graphics cards)" - it's just as much reinventing the wheel, but with the added bonus that if you really cock it up you can hard lock your computer. Or my personal favourite, "debug this third party open world game engine which is clearly just a model viewer with a for() loop around it and the object loading part in a separate thread with zero synchronization." :D
> You’re not approaching the creation with the usual “what problem am I trying to solve” but rather “what’s the most fun thing I can build?”.
Sure but 99% of professional game coders don't get to do this. This interdisciplinary paradise is the domain of hobbyists who never get paid and of the tiny minority who are there at exactly the right place and time (and also probably never get paid.)
Career traits: Fun, lucrative, attainable. Pick any two. This applies to gamedev as much as any other line of work.
This rant brought to you by distant, slightly salty memories of my brief stint in gamedev.