I’m learning English via RareJob service. RareJob is providing online English conversation. The tutors are young and excellent college students. Tonight, I received a lesson with this conversation material about the University.
In a fact, I quitted my University. I don’t have a good memento about my University. So this material made me overcast face. Probably my young tutor had a hard time with me. But, I couldn’t answer questions about my University, because I didn’t graduate!
When I was a college student, I had a big dream and a high hopes. I couldn’t enjoy the University life as well as my friends. I became unable to understand why I was there.
I wanted to leave the University and go to Tokyo. Tokyo was a dream city for me. I believed that I can do something in Tokyo. My parents got angry and stopped supporting me. My family was destructed by my selfish hope. And then, I left from Nagoya, went to Tokyo and got a job that is news paper delivery.
There were various co-workers — college students, aspiring actors, professional newspaper delivery men and fugitives from debts. I was working with them and tried to grab for the chance. I took a part in video game development. But I couldn’t grab a chance in there. And then, I became an animator to create Japanese animation movies. I was happy but very poor.
After that, I got a job in a certain research institute to research the structure of entertainment. This institute gave me some common senses, educations, modern programming, responsibility and salary.
I settled with my parents and returned to my country in vacations. When I returned to my country, my grampa was dead. He had wished my success. I was very sad.
So I decided to get a creator job again. I went back to Tokyo, developed a small game engine and tried to find a job. Because I don’t have an academic background and enough experiences as a modern game developer, it was very difficult to find a job. But a certain company employed me.
If I had graduated the University, I got a good carrier? Who knows?
But, I got much both of good and bad experiences after I quitted the University. There are mixed feelings. I brought back the past by this conversation material and got the mixed feeling. Sorry, my online tutor.
A Game Programer in Japan 
I’m in a situation very similar to yours. Indeed, I’ll start taking classes by the next week and I think it’s very hard that it might be any more valuable in reaching out for my aspirations as a game developer than to simply study game development in its essence, alone (or accompanied by dear friends who share the same ambitions), and to develop something that would grab the attention of some japanese company, or perhaps some non-japanese company wanting to reach the japanese market by actually creating japanese-styled games.
I am also developing a simple game engine in C++, and I wanted to know what your notion of “small” would be. I mean, this engine you said you’ve developed.. what kinds of games could be derived from it? Simple 2D games? Or perhaps simple 3D games? And could you give me a small sample of it? My engine used to be open-source, but we decided to move private at least for now (the beginning). You can check it here if you are interested: http://code.google.com/p/sonetto/source/browse/#svn/trunk/libsonetto/src.
Cheers!
Hi n2liquid,
If you’ll take math classes and physics classes, it’s valuable for game developers. Even if you will not, college student time gives you enough free time.
My game engine was 3D base and consists of scene-graph, mesh, textures, shader, math libraries, simple component system and XNA-like API. My references were OGRE-3D and XNA. These weren’t full of requirements of common game engines. So I called this “small”.
You can read my old code base here:
http://sourceforge.jp/projects/buddha/
I heard that the biggest reason why my company had employed me was that my paper test was high score. The secondary reason was that my animator carrier was interesting. So, perhaps my experience isn’t good reference for you.
Well, would you like to create 2D games? If your wish is an engineer job, I think 3D programming knowledge is useful for you.
Regards,
minahito
Hello, Minahito,
Yes, I’ll take math classes (not sure about physics; I think just a little bit if at all), and I’m sure that (math; not necessarily math classes) is useful.
Regarding your engine, I’ll sure look at it more thoroughly than I did right now, thanks for letting me know. I understand what you mean by “small” now. It is very general purpose (like Ogre itself, only with embedded input support and stuff) and really there are many things in a game that would go “on top” of that and that could have been abstracted away with a few more layers.
I am interested in 3D programming, yes. Currently, my project is geared towards a mix of 2D+3D in the likes of Tales of Destiny: Director’s Cut for the PS2, though my ultimate goal would indeed be to develop games like Tales of Vesperia or Tales of Graces.
But one of the things that grabbed my attention to your blog wasn’t exactly whether university will be used or not; that was just a plus that made me actually write to you :] I think I saw some post in this blog saying you develop for the PS3, and some others saying you use C++ to do your job.
It’s not much too uncommon for some tension between me and the other Sonetto (my game engine) programmer to rise when questions like whether or not should we be using advanced C++ features in our code. Recently, I have stumbled upon some interesting comments in this subject, and I would really appreciate knowing your personal opinion about it. These comments can be seen here (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/832810/modern-c-game-programming-examples), here (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/829656/c-for-game-programming-love-or-distrust) and some other places I don’t really remember.
I can see you’ve used polymorphism in your code (I can’t imagine a C++ program that doesn’t use this; I mean it..) and have implemented a SharedPtr smart pointer. I would like to know whether these (and especially other things like exception safety and templates) are employed into console games’ development.
I see that your BuddhaExampleMain.h file uses code that’s not exception safe and that could have easily been made exception safe by using the standard, zero-overhead auto_ptr smart pointer. Do the games you professionally develop have exceptions disabled?
I ask that because exceptions are really useful in some cases (for example, exceptions could be used to make a disc read failure to be reported and handled by code that would display a “Potentially scratched disc surface detected. Please, open the disc tray, clean the disc, put it back and press any button to continue.” message of the likes), but are notoriously badly seen by game developers (I think).
Exception handling can be slow and don’t fit well in highly parallelized environments like PS3’s Cell unless very well thought. This “unless very well thought” probably makes many people just ignore its existance and simply find other ways around the problems that could be solved by it.
Templates may be used to make “trays”, as you called engines like Unreal Engine and Gamebryo, much more effective (that is, extensible and lightweighting). But this very pro is a con: aren’t games unique to their bare underlying code? So isn’t writing very well abstracted and extendable engines pointless to a certain extent?
Moreover, templates increase code size. In platforms such as PS3’s Cell, this can be troublesome, right?
What I wanted to know is what features of C++ are generally avoided, though they can be useful at times, because of hardware limitations or because the required initial efforts are too high? Getting to know these issues more precisely and practicaly would be of much help to me. You could even make a blog entry on the subject, as it would possibly be many topics to cover! ;]
Please, let me know what you think. I’m really sorry for such a big comment, but I just had this much to ask! 🙂
Best regards,
n2
Hello Minahito-san,
I quitted my University because I dreamed to continue my study in Japan.
But, my parents could understand me well. That’s because they knew how much I put my effort since I was in the second year of high school.
My mother said to me, “It’s you who’s study there, so you know well the feeling of being there. We should not to force you to keep study there.”
But, I’m still unable to reach my dream. I feel like I’m carrying a heavy burden on my shoulder.
But, they still support me. This year, I will put forth all of my effort to reach my dream.
Quitting my University gave me one important lesson.
Responsibility.
I decided to quit, so I should to take a responsibility by proving that I can reach my dream.
Though I only passed 4 months in my University, I have a lot of good memento with my friends in my University.
🙂
They were so kind to me. We still keep in touch till today via facebook.
Even we took our class year photo after I quitted.
I’ll never able to forget them.
How about you? Are you still keep in touch with your friends from your University?
Let’s do our best to reach our dream. 🙂
Regards,
Astrini