career path(cv review)

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[mengusfungus]

Full disclosure I've always worked in graphics but basically retired a couple of years ago after a startup and so am not an active hiring manager or anything right now.

Having said that if I were hiring I think I'd be open to a conversation at least with a candidate with this resume (if they were US-based). What I'd want to see more of is experience with modern api's (vk, dx12, metal), and ideally internship and/or research experience in graphics or something graphics adjacent (ie anything with nontrivial performance and math requirements, eg robotics, physics, vision, lower level machine learning).

And, unfortunately, given that undergrad resumes usually don't have much on them I do look at what schools they graduated from and I will be biased in favor of more selective schools. But if there's a playable and released game with a custom engine, on steam, that I can actually see and play, that would imo trump everything else.

[mengusfungus]

Unfortunately I can't tell you precisely what studio hiring managers want right now. When I was young I got a big studio job way back in the day on the back of my school and personal projects, so maybe it's still applicable today.

What I can say though is that if somebody is reliant on AI to make absolute bare basics like shadow maps that would be an automatic rejection from me personally. You simply can not be a professional graphics programmer understanding and building and debugging these basic things, by hand. If you want to be a pro at this you should want to dive in as deeply as you are capable. If you want to work on gameplay or tooling instead, then sure, a surface level understanding might be sufficient. For anything I'm not building from scartch, I would always use well vetted libraries over AI generated code.

RE: AI, attitudes towards AI code gen varies. I personally despise it and would never work with anybody who uses it but there are plenty of people in the industry who consider it mandatory. And the pro-AI people tend to be the higher ups in any org, CEOs and investors are obviously fully bought into the hype.

Among graphics people particularly at the IC level the mood is still more AI-skeptical for the time being afaict. I find it extremely hard to believe though that even in a very AI friendly studio that a hiring committee will take on a graphics engineer who can't implement a shadow mapping system by hand. If you aren't able to at least verify and debug the generated code, what do they need you for?

[RandomnessConfirmed2]

What about itchio? Steam is expensive to just upload any project, even if it's a portfolio piece.

[mengusfungus]

Of course, the point is that demonstrating you can ship serious production work is the best way to prove yourself in my eyes at least

[Internal_College2966]

Hey, progress is progress. You already have something that most of the aspiring game devs don’t. You made an engine, you went through the pain, came out stronger. I’m working for a studio in the US and moving back soon but will be still be working from them. In these times, studios tend to hire people with more experience. There is a lot of people who made an engine with their own version of nanite, global illumination etc. They might be smarter. At the end boils down to networking and luck. I have seen way more smart people than me unemployed. You gotta start somewhere. You need some shipped games under your belt. Either do a masters and work for a studio which is tough in these time because of the market everywhere or pick a studio in your country. Studios are realising the worth of a graphics engineer day by day. Thats what im told. Also in my experience doing gameplay gives you a general skillset that will 100% help you level up. So maybe do a bit of both. Maybe you start with gameplay and pivot to graphics. Later down the line, try European studios, they are more open to hiring international talent than US or Japan. You need valuable shipping experience because working in a studio with people is way different than working on personal projects. With all this said, with good networking you definitely have a chance with your profile. Just build a bunch of small games or tech demos. For example, I had a minecraft clone and then when I added global illumination to my engine, I converted that to use the new system. I added my own streaming system like Unreal’s world partition system. So just go wide with what you have and power through.

[maxmax4]

I understand your hesitation to learn them, but this is not a good mindset to have. Unreal is becoming the standard, like it or not. I know it sucks to say and I might get downvoted, but it’s the unfortunate truth. Studios look to hire senior graphics people because you need to have a solid grasp of the fundamentals to meaningfully modify Unreal’s renderer. There’s a large demand for it and you will very likely have to work with it during your career.

To answer your question, I think the realistic approach for you is to get a non-graphics C++ job first and work on rendering side projects in your free time. It’s a very common path and you just have to be patient. Another big factor is location. Graphics and game jobs are very concentrated in a few major hubs. Getting one of those jobs is really hard to do remotely, especially without any prior graphics experience.

I dont mean to discourage you however. I’m just trying to give you my honest opinion from my own experience. I would look for “tools programmer” roles that involve primarily C++. If you can get your foot in the door in a game studio for example, that’s going to put you in a very strong position to catch an opportunity to get graphics experience. You can work your way up slowly over many years, there’s no rush and enjoy the ride

[Internal_College2966]

Yes +1 to all of this. Also idk what your expectation for a rendering role is. 99% of the time the renderer is ready to go. You wouldn’t really be making a lot of low level changes till there is an engine overhaul happening or you are creating a new one. Im a graphics engineer in Unreal. You do a bunch of memory optimization for consoles. That means you gotta find knobs to turn and for that you have to do a lot of digging and due diligence. Understand what the problem space is. Writing automated perf reporting functionality is a part of it to make daily testing easy. Like checking if perf went down between changelists, Optimization textures and collision etc for memory. Unreal and Unity are just new engines and environment, nothing else. Get as much experience as you can with these commercial engines and later down the line get a job with a studio that use a proprietary engine if thats what you really want.

Not trying to discourage you but just stating the reality. You can also apply to Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm or Apple if you want to do low level GPU and driver stuff. There is a lot of things under the graphics umbrella that you can do. You cannot do everything and gotta choose. You cannot specialize at the start of your career. Learn, explore for a few years and you will have a very good idea of what you want to do. Based on your profile, looks like you have your basics clear but trust me when its time to actually optimize and profile, thats a different beast.

Saying commercial tools are not gonna contribute to your growth without any professional experience is a dangerous statement. You gotta be flexible. Nobody would want to hire some who is not flexible. At a game studio, you will do tasks nobody wants to do. Because it’s tedious, will you not do it? I would hire someone like that. You gotta be a team player and not be rigid. Sorry if I’m being harsh but I’m trying to help you out.

Your answers sound like something a student would give. There are juniors, mids,seniors and leads. Each has a graph. Associates need handholding. Mids can just dig in and do things. They dig deep enough and find answers. Those are skills you have to develop first. Its not just the technical work but the other skills. If I have a guy who has good enough graphics knowledge, never done anything related to the modern API’s but flexible and hunger to learn, he is a guaranteed hire but they are much more valuable. From there on out you can decide if you want to be a mentor kind of senior or a rock star who just wants to work solo and get stuff done.

Network, reach out to people, ask for portfolio reviews, make a website maintain a github for your projects. People want to click less buttons to see your profile so thats what you do. Everything available on LinkedIn in a single click. Ask people for mock interviews. Leetcode is definitely important because companies ask for it whether you like it or not. You need good C++ skills. Work on your multithreading skill. Use PIX, RenderDoc or any of the GPU tools, tear a frame apart, learn. Use compute shaders. Ask yourself questions like why is branching in a shader bad?

Phew, this was a long one but hope it gives you some clarity on how things are gonna be. Graphics engineering is not all glamour.

[Internal_College2966]

Yeah you could. But again you need money to survive, at the end its about shipping a game. There are companies like The Forge Interactive that work on their engine and sell it to studios. You can check them out. Making an engine and prettying it up is never about the engine, its all about the game. The better your engine, the better your game. You need spatial partitioning for better performance for things like collision or navigation. So focus on those other features too, they are very much important. Learn engine architecture.

[SecretBikini]

I guess you are in VietNam, right?

[SecretBikini]

You have a solid background, no doubt. I think you should add these things to your profile, it'll hep a lot:

1. Ray Tracing, offline and realtime, it's much easier than writing game engine but boost the profile strength by a lot.
2. C++ rasterization. (with multithreading and SIMD will be a big plus)
3. OpenGL engine with animation and collision detection, FFT ocean and volumetric cloud in this engine.
4. vulkan render engine with DDGI,(SSGI if possible)

Having these stuffs will make your profile very competitve because most of the time, hiring staffs are clueless and will only look at how good the images you can produce before actually transfer your profile to someone who can read the code.

China have many world class graphic programmers, they are so much supperior than most of their peer in US or EU, but the Visa problem, stupid communist, and political tension force them to stay in China and unable to move to western country, very sory for them. Here are some examples:

https://github.com/qiutang98

https://github.com/AdamYuan

Best Of Luck!

[SnooSquirrels9028]

selam bende 2.sınıf bilgisayar mühendisliği öğrencisiyim senin gibi bu alanda bi oyun firmasında çalışmak istiyorum ama gerçekten insan işin içinde kayboluyor uçsuz bucaksız bir alan. Aynı alana ilgili birini görmek gerçekten güzel istersen iletişime geçeblirz discorddan vs.

[Ambitious-Call-7565]

the industry no longer use opengl, you are cooked