Hi, I'm a second year CSE student from India and have got an internship in a Web Development Company(which is sort of like a startup) for the summers. I'm interested in both game development and web programming, but more in game development. However, I haven't got any internships in game development companies. My plan for the future is to have my own game development startup in which I'll be coding mobile/online games. Would it be a good idea to join this internship(even though its related to web programming), to get an idea of what startups are like, or should I stay at home and develop games on my own? Right now I can code platform/tile based games pretty well.

Quote: Original post by kvsingh
Would it be a good idea to join this internship(even though its related to web programming), to get an idea of what startups are like, or should I stay at home and develop games on my own?

Hmm, portfolio vs. resume...?
Experience vs. practice...?
I tell you what, this is a tricky decision. Read http://www.sloperama.com/advice/m70.htm

In my own experience, my first professional programming job was a small web dev startup company as well.

There were 3 of us... one was a salesman, one was the founder (who coded a lot of stuff to start out) and then me who took on all the coding responsibilities.

It was fun (mostly) and I learned a lot and I was paid 25% of the net income, but that turned out to be about 15-20k american a year which is really not that great.

My problem is i stayed there for 5 years hoping it would get better money wise but it never did.

After that I was easily able to get another programming job though at a more established company making about 50k.

After working there just 6 months, I found a game dev job starting me at 55k, but since I had been a hobbyist game programmer first I knew my stuff and they bumped me to 65k...

A year and a half later i found another company that was interested in me that bumped me up to 70 and now I'm making 75k a year and a half after that.

Your mileage may vary but this is the path I went and it turned out pretty well.

Maybe you can intern in this non game company AND work on some games of your own at the same time? (:

Oh and btw, in my first gaming job, I was able to use my web dev knowledge to link the game to web technology (to be able to do content sharing in game, uploading in game video recordings to youtube and some other stuff) so it worked out pretty well.

Later on when you do your mobile gaming, the web dev experience may help you do some neat stuff in your games that you wouldn't know how to do otherwise so it might not be a total waste of your time from a gamedev pov