I've been thinking lately that if I were to make a nice portfolio with a few small games I could possibly land a job at epic games which is not too far from where I live now. I don't have a computer science degree or any work experience in a computer science related field but I feel I meet the basic requirements. I think I could prove my worth if I were given the chance. So I was thinking after I transfer to NCSU and get my associates I could try to get a job as an intern while I continue to work at my current job. Hopefully I can show them that I am capable of working as an engine programmer.

Anyway, I was wondering what landed most of you who are working in the industry your first game development job? Was it your degree? Was it your work experience? Was it your portfolio? Or was it something else?

I don't know if this is applicable to TODAY'S market, but I wrote a mode13h quake-style clone in DOS in the late 90s...my level editor used 8-bit bmp textures and ran in DOS, and I had 2 engines, one in DOS and a win32 opengl port..at the time I had no degree and all my work experience was PC tech stuff with some website programming, all the 3d engine experience I had was on my own, and reflected in my resume demo..

Writing an engine from scratch isn't needed so much these days, but if you can come up some piece of core technology that you built yourself I think that would say a lot..

As far as making actual "games" I don't know if that would help, these days it's fairly easy to get the functionality going (look at Unity) and it seems like the majority of work with that is in the design and content creation (which is more on the art side), that's not as applicable to core engine programming...

If you can find a decent artist willing to handle all that and just stick to coding that might be your best bet, if you try to tackle it all yourself you will probably spend more time on non-programming things than anything else..

I got tired of university and decided to take a break. Applied to a local game studio, was invited for interviews, got the job. I had a few internships and personal projects under my belt but nothing all that visible (SlimDX being the top of the list). I don't know exactly what it was that led them to call me back, but I didn't have any particular portfolio.

My experiance was basically this;

- send CV to company applying for job without degree. Heard nothing back.
- 3 months later sent same CV to same company for basically the same job but with my degree confirmed, 2 days later hear they 'desperately' wanted to talk to me.

Make of that what you will.

By the time I entered the game industry I already had a good track record with another software company and a long list of non-gaming consulting gigs. I also did volunteer mod programming work for the company that wound up hiring me, which was what sealed the deal.

Basically, I had a lot of proven success as a programmer before I ever cashed a paycheck from a games company.

I have a CS degree, not from a top university. I also have Math as minor. I had a few games on my belt, some are coming from school projects, and some of them are personal projects, but nothing spectacular like an MMO.

One of the interviewers was also impressed that I had some experience working on ANNs, and training them, and actually got them working. Quite uncommon for a BS major.

I got the opportunity with my portfolio, I had academic certificates related to programming but it's very hard to use those in the industry. I have also shipped a game on my own so that pretty much counts, especially when you see that from the employers perspective, taking a game from the concept to the end while going through design, technical stuff and production; yes this counts.

I think when you when play with multiple areas in the game-development thing you get yourself better chances, I mean you have to be an expert in a thing but it very useful to your employer if you had a history with the other fields like story-writing or graphics.

A guy I knew knew a guy at a start up publlishing company that wanted to get into iOS apps. I had experience with OpenGL and was working on side project more complex than what they were looking to do. So my option were get paid to do a simple game project or work a bigger project for free.

My experiance was basically this;

- send CV to company applying for job without degree. Heard nothing back.
- 3 months later sent same CV to same company for basically the same job but with my degree confirmed, 2 days later hear they 'desperately' wanted to talk to me.

Make of that what you will.

I'm actually quite interested to hear *your* take on this. Do you think it was just a coincidence? Or the combination of "degree+portfolio with personal projects" is very powerful, in contrast with "just degree" which in reality you could have without having any idea about programming at all, or "just portfolio" which gives the impression of "guy sits and hacks alone in his basement"?

Mostly I suspect the no degree version simply never made it past whatever HR drone looked at it first; the CV as it stood had personal projects, the fact I'd worked as a developer for a year and a half as the only programmer in a company (a real one, not a bedroom one.. even if I worked from me bedroom... *sigh* best. job. ever.) and the credits for my chapters in More OpenGL Game Programming in it.

The addition of the degree, and only a 2:2* at that, just seemed to get it past whatever drones intercepted the first one.

(* For those who don't know UK degree classifications go, from best to worst; 1st, 2:1, 2:2, 3rd, pass with the first 4 being 'with honors'.)