the big stickied thread is getting cluttered with lots of new people and the “how was your week” thread isn’t a great fit for introductions, so it seems about time to make this a dedicated thread of its own so peoples’ posts aren’t getting lost.
tell us a little bit about yourself, folks. don’t gotta be too specific or revealing, just whatever you want to put out there. this’ll be a good way of getting to know all the people you’re now on here with
Hello!
I’ve been a Redditor for 11 years - I was even in the Century Club subreddit (it’s not nearly as interesting as you probably think it is).
I work as a AAA game programmer. I previously worked on the Battlefield series, but EA laid me off earlier this year as part of them shutting down my former studio. Now I’m working on a new AAA title I can’t really talk about.
Before I worked in the AAA space, I worked at Disneyland! I used to be a skipper on the World-Famous Jungle Cruise. I also worked as a host at the Tiki Room (fun fact: technically, this is considered part of the Jungle Cruise), a conductor on the Disneyland Railroad, and an “archaeologist” on the Indiana Jones ride they have there (although I disliked working Indy).
As a hobby, I have a model train layout. It’s in N-Scale (1:160). I’m also part of a local model railroad club that periodically meets up and puts together modular layouts. We meet at local convention centers and whatnot, where we string together a bunch of 4x2-foot layout sections that we each individually own/maintain and make one big mega-layout.
I’m super excited to be here!
Nice! I always wanted to make video games but then I was torn between that and cyber security and ended up doing cyber. Do you know programmers from other industries? Is there a gamedev-specific skillet required or could other programmers adjust?
Yeah, people come from all over. Game dev isn’t just “make the game”; there’s other things to think about too.
If you’re making a multiplayer “live service” title then you have to deal with things like AWS or Azure, and everything that comes with that. Tools engineers write the tools that get used to make a game, and generally those tools have nothing to do with the game itself - they’ll be written in Rust or Python or whatever.
Cybersecurity in gaming is a little more niche. The closest thing you have to it are anticheat guys; they’re usually “reformed” (or so they claim… I have my doubts 😉) cheat developers. They’ll try to hack our own game and tell us what they find, and we adjust to counter their hacking. Of course if a game does in-app payments you have to worry about wallets and such getting hacked, and if it’s something like EA where people have their own accounts you gotta handle that too.
And of course - there’s nothing that says you have to keep doing the same thing forever. You can always change what you specialize in and enter a new part of the field - or enter a new field entirely. One of our tools engineers was actually a construction worker 10 years ago, believe it or not.