I just recently began working at a local games studio in Vienna. It goes without saying that this marked a major milestone in my personal life. After a lot of hard work and learning I finally landed my first job in the industry. Having reached such a point in my life I thought it would be a nice idea to take a look back and share what I have learned and experienced so far before moving on.
Game Development – Isn’t that hard?
Yes and no.
Yes, because building an AAA quality, massively multiplayer, cover-based shooter with roleplay elements (just throwing around buzzwords, but you get the idea) involves insane amounts of effort, dedication, money and technical know-how. Even aiming lower, developing a professional quality Flash game for example, is a damn hard piece of work.
No, because the first steps are not that bad. While I was at UAS Technikum Wien for my master’s degree, I held a game development workshop for highschool kids aged somewhere between 15 and 18. Whenever I told a group that we would be making a little game over the course of the next 2 to 3 hours, they would always look back at me in a mix of shock and disbelief. After they recovered from the shock, I went on and showed them how to develop a small Mario Kart clone in Processing (which can be found here: