You can’t be a perfect developer but a perfect candidate for a game dev job.
For that to achieve, I’d suggest you to learn the following areas:
- C++. It’s a must have to land the best job. Though Unity with C# may be enough for some places.
- Design patterns. Here is the real line between a good programmer and a great programmer. Learn and use every single design pattern from singleton to observer. Design Patterns and Refactoring
- How 3D is displayed in games. Have some basic knowledge about shaders. Unity is a great tool to learn how to create various shaders.
- Networking. There’s no game which is truly offline. Even offline games usually send usage data online to let developers analyze player behavior. Mobile games always do this, always! Have some knowledge about how players in multiplayer games send data over to each other and how clients communicate with a game server.
- Visit GDC Vault and register to watch every single video lecture over the last 10 years of GDC! It’s gold if you want to learn in depth about how the big guys do things.
- Write your own game systems like a camera system for TPS where the camera has to stay behind the player but the player can rotate it, pinch it and the camera has to automatically move around an object if it goes between the player and camera. Don’t just code it until it works, make its movement so smooth and intelligent so that the player forgets there is actually a camera in the game. The PS3 game Journey had a camera system with over 50 different rules and became one of the few games where you actually forgot about the camera while you were playing. There’s also a GDC video about it. Beside a camera system, you should write at least one player movement system, inventory system, quest system, item system, level editor, localization system, etc… If you want to land a great job, you have to already know how these systems work.
- UI. You should know what type of components there are in a UI system and what kind of parameters they should have in a good UI system. You don’t need to write your own solution - however it’s one of the most challenging and neverending task -, you should at least know what kind of problems need to be solved, like text effects (shadow, grafient, outline, texturing), aligning components, masking components, scroll lists with masks, buttons with various states, resolution dependent spacing between components, tab comtrol, texture atlases, etc….
- Have a finished and published game. It doesn’t need to be complex but complete. It helps people understand that you can complete tasks and dont give up.
- Game optimization => debugging and profiling. Use Microsoft Visual Studio for Unity. There’s a Community Edition for free. Learn how to debug scripts and how to read Unity’s profiler.
- AI. It’s good to know at least how steering behaviors work, what are different ways of pathfinding (and when to choose which one) and what are neural networks and finite state machines.
You can also specialize in a field to increase your chances of getting hired. This field can be networking, AI, graphics, physics, UI, gameplay.
Nobody knows everything. Get some experience by finishing your own games then try to apply for a junior game programmer job.
There’s an alternate route, sometimes it works. Start working for a game dev studio in a different role, for example as a tester. When you are already inside it can be easier to get promoted to a scripter or eventually to a junior programmer. I know some guys who became professional programmers as a previous tester and 3D artist!
