Every now and then someone tells me that their child loves video games and wants to get into the game industry, then asks me how they do it. So here's a blog that I can paste a link to.

I've got to say first of all that I don't know if I ever got into the game industry. It's my main job but I don't know how a real game studio works. I've never worked in a proper game studio.

So if you want to work on FIFA or GTA, I have no idea how you get there, sorry.

But if you just want to make games and not have to get a real job, I can tell you how I would do it.

I'm going to focus on the idea that you want to be a programmer. 

Being an artist isn't a completely different beast. It's still about getting really interested and really good at what you do, and then doing it. Artists have quite easy entry points in the industry now like making Skins that get sold in Rust - and they can make a good living off that.

But if you are thinking about being an artist, I would say that you can help yourself by being multi-disciplinary. If you're a 3d artist who is also a shitty programmer, you're still better than just a 3d artist. If you can model, rig and animate, you're more useful than someone who can only animate.

When I was trying to learn how to program games it was the 1990s. There wasn't any internet. I had to get books from the library and read magazines. I had no-one to ask questions to. It was hard.

When we did get internet, when I was about 16, it was dial up and we had to pay per minute. I had to set it up so I'd dial up, download a whole website to read offline, and then disconnect and read through it.

Even that was hard. The tutorials from websites were written more at my level, but it was still one way. No questions asking, lots of wrong assumptions.

When I was 16 I went to college.. and while I'm sure it taught me some stuff, I don't know how actually useful it was. 

Just as an aside, for any Americans reading - I think our college is different to yours. Our college is free and normally vocation targetted. People who leave school usually either get a job, stay on at school for 2 more years, or go to college.

Nowadays, it's a mixed blessing. I've got to believe it's much much easier to learn anything. You have the internet, you have discord, you have youtube, and you have ChatGPT.

I've got to believe that learning to program, or use blender is a million times more easier now we have things like ChatGPT. Not only can you ask it to break down stuff in a way you can understand, but it can know the level you're at and create a whole customized course for you.

A lot of people, when they start programming, will be printing Hello World in a command line and be frustrated. When do they start coding the car physics in GTA? 

It's going to be hard. You'll be sitting on your own for hours, looking at a monitor. You need to be the kind of person who gets off on attaining knowledge.

Does that sound like something you want to do? Wouldn't you rather be a streamer? Or mow grass, outside in the fresh air? Or be a rock star?

You hear about Notch making 2 billion from Minecraft and you think, yeah, that sounds better than the sausage roll factory. But how likely is it that you make Minecraft?

In 2024 there were about 19,000 games released on Steam. How many did you buy? How many people will buy your game? Why? How long will it keep selling for?

When I released Garry's Mod, I was living with my parents, and I figured out I needed about £700 a month to be stable, which was how much I took home from the dating website job I got fired from.

So with that baseline, selling at $20, valve's 30% and 20% uk tax, I needed 80 sales a month. That's about 3 sales a day. Some days I might sell 5 copies, so then I'll only need to sell 1 copy the next day.

Keep your expenses down. You don't need an office, you don't need to go to GDC, you don't need a social media manager.

It's a job. Sit at your desk every day from 9-5. Make a list of things you want to do and work through them. Improve your games.

Don't gamble. Your game sold 1,000 copies in a week. That gives you over a years runway. Are you going to stop working on the game that is released and selling, or will you work on a sequel in secret for a year?

Build a War Chest. While you're selling games, build a war chest. If you get to the point where your games stop selling, how long can you survive on your war chest?

You can make your own game engine, or use Unity to make your own game and release it on Steam, there are other emerging economies. These usually involve making a game in a bigger platform. The deal here is generally that they'll bring the players and you make the content. This is generally always a bigger win for the platform, since they get free content and free money, but if you can swallow your pride there, there's money in it.

Roblox is probably the most obvious. I don't really know the market, or the engine. I've heard developers make as little as 20% from stuff they release on there, but I don't know how true that is. They're all coded in Lua. It is said that the top developers earned up to $30m a year.

Fortnite is headed in that direction too, now. Income is based on minutes played, from a global pool. Coding is via a scripting language called Verse, which is probably the worst scripting syntax I've ever seen, and it staggers my mind that anyone thought it was a good idea. The top developer earned $20m in a year, I would expect this to grow and maybe surpass Roblox at some point.

We're hoping that s&box will be worthy to be mentioned in this section one day. We have the Play Fund, which is paid to creators based on minutes played, like fortnite, but we're not at the $20m level yet. Our top earner is about $1,500 a month in our pre-release test fund. We're currently working with Valve to let creators release their games made in s&box as standalone games on Steam. It's Source 2 based, you use GameObject/Components, c#, net9 with hotloading. It's awesome.

I can't speak from other companies, but I can tell you what I look at when we get an application.

You should really see it from my point of view. You want me to pay you? What can you do for me?

So when you're applying for a job, are you treating it like an apprenticeship? Are you expecting the employer to train you up and show you what to do? Or are you telling them, I can do this for you, I can take this weight, I can make this better?

If I google your name, am I going to find 8 years of you being an arsehole and endlessly crusading on Twitter? Or will I find 8 years of you being excited and inquisitive about what you're doing?

Are you going to make my life harder or easier?

I fucking hate recruiters.

If you really want to work at a particular company, apply directly - and tell them why.

If you go through a recruiter, you'll be in the same bucket as the other 20 people they mail-blasted that day. The assumption will be that like those other 20 people, you want ANY job, not THIS job.

If you're applying directly you're showing the company that you know what they do, you know their culture and their history, and you want to be a part of it. It's a massive shortcut.

So here's your career plan.

1. Get good at something
2. Make money from it
3. Make it last as long as possible