Re:Ask HN: How to move from traditional tech into game dev?
by cellis on Sunday January 08, 2023 @02:46AM
(#34297010)
Oh, yeah, game mechanics or game physics engineering is amazing, but understand it's about 1% (if that) of what makes a successful game. I was watching my nephew play Fortnite over thanksgiving and thinking to myself "gee, the graphics are shit, essentially low-poly with some nice shaders!". And CoD Black Ops puts the physics to shame (and thinking that old timers used to tell me the physics of that were bad compared to e.g. PubG/Battlefield). But Fortnite is super colorful, and for a kid just coming off Roblox, it's accessible enough to play. So the HUDs and UIs and leveling and map dev and a million other admin tasks are where the majority of your game dev experience will be. Even doing some (gasp!) web dev, for things like in game stores and so forth. The gameplay mechanics and physics math of particle engines or calculating missile intercepts or inverse kinematics (jacobian matrices anyone?) for skeletal animations are mostly solved problems, but they can still be interesting to reimplement.
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Re:Ask HN: How to move from traditional tech into game dev?
by oriolid on Sunday January 08, 2023 @03:37AM
(#34297227)
To me it sounds like someone's still making a living from R&D even though the big money is at casual games and selling diamonds or hats in in-game stores. The question is just how to get that job.
Re:Ask HN: How to move from traditional tech into game dev?
by ngc248 on Sunday January 08, 2023 @03:26AM
(#34297196)
Back when there was no commoditization of game engines, every team starting a game had to do their own engine, tools etc.
Now that you have unreal and unity etc, you can actually concentrate on game design and gameplay instead of worrying about the engine and tooling.
I agree though writing a game engine and physics engine is very interesting. I used to work for the R&D team of a casino games manufacturer. We created our own in house game engine. It was fun, but adding any new feature would take a very long time. In the end we shifted to unity.
Re:Ask HN: How to move from traditional tech into game dev?
by m00x on Sunday January 08, 2023 @04:46AM
(#34297617)
Wouldn't you just use an off-the-shelf rendering and physics engine instead of working on your own?
Re:Ask HN: How to move from traditional tech into game dev?
by 867-5309 on Sunday January 08, 2023 @04:54AM
(#34297651)
indeed, Fortnite uses Unreal engine
Re:Ask HN: How to move from traditional tech into game dev?
by Jensson on Sunday January 08, 2023 @08:10AM
(#34298820)
More accurate to say that fortnite is developed alongside unreal engine, they make unreal engine in house so they make their own engine. For example unreal engine 5.0 was very buggy, since they made it to work with fortnite first so only fixed the features that game used.