I''m going into my Junior year in college in about a month, but I have wanted to be in the game development business since I was 11. How do you break in as a writer? From everyone I hear it is insanely hard. I am thinking about getting the book Break Into The Game Industry.. I think that''s the name of it. A little about me though. I know C++ quite well and I am currently teaching myself how to program in Win32 and OpenGL. I also am good at editing levels and other stuff, but how do you really gear yourself towards breaking into the business. I''ve talked to teachers and they''ve told me classes I can take to get me ready, but that''s it. I look at gamejobs.com and there is usually nothing there for writers. I lost track of where I was going with this though. Any advice any of you have would be greatly appreciated. - Joe

Well, do you mean write or program? In order to write for a game, first you need creativity. In order to be a writer, you should first know someone. What I did was I wrote for a few independent games, then I made my own (well, I had a team, I''m not a good programmer).

My best advise (untested) is to go to game company after game company. Write some example storylines and a resume, the worst they can say is no. The preferred method is to climb the ladder. Don''t just look around ONE site for jobs, look around all over the web. I needed a co-writer for a game thats finished now, I posted it in Garage Games.com and got a HUGE response. That''s the best advise I can give you.

I would like to be either a writer as in coder or involved in writing the storyline. I love to do both, code and write storylines. I''m not the best at coding graphic games though, which is why I''m in the process of learning to program Win32 applications and learning how to program using the OpenGL API. I plan on trying to get an internship somewhere next summer. I live in Alabama though so chances are I''ll have to travel a good ways. I have a year to find one so hopefully I''ll be able to. Just trying to get the foot in the door.

- Joe

I am learning that it's good to have some program experience before you start writing also.

That way you have some sort of sense as to whether or not it's possible to take what you are writing and actually port it into a video game.

A decent writer is good. A decent programmer is good. A mixture of both is great!


[edited by - Sloan on July 21, 2003 5:28:38 PM]