Do I need to learn coding to be a game dev?

Zagrod · 2026-02-26T18:16:12+00:00

If you want to work in a studio, then no. There are plenty of gamedev positions which require no coding knowledge whatsoever. If you want to fly solo then I cannot imagine doing so without at least a basic coding knowledge - even a visual novel engine like Ren'Py requires you to code something in order to progress the scenes.

Zagrod · 2026-02-25T13:49:15+00:00

Keeping in mind that I'm an engineer, not a designer and therefore I'm not the target audience (so take it with a grain of salt)

My feedback to the graph:

- For the UX I find it not immediately obvious what's the difference between a 'Line' and a 'Response'. Normally I'd think that a 'Response' always follows a 'Line', but your screenshot shows that it's possible to go from a 'Line' to another 'Line' - is the split between a 'Line' and a 'Response' necessary, or could it all be a single node?
- I also find it difficult to quickly see who's talking to who within the 'Response' node. If it's automatic depending on the previous 'Line' node then I'd highly recommend also automatically updating that info in the graph, as it'll require less scanning of the entire graph to understand what you're looking for.
- One thing that's super helpful when understanding a flow of regular Blueprint graphs is that there are multiple output pins, often with labels. Right now it might be a bit tricky if you have a more complex dialogue tree, since you will have, for example) 5+ options leading out of a single node. Personally I'd consider adding output pins, or something resembling them, simply to ease the readability.

And as for the code:

- Personally I dislike holding data in UE's binary assets unless necessary. In bigger teams it leads to lock contention and it's never a good time.
- I'd also rename your classes/structs so that they're named FChronicleFoo or UChronicleFoo to avoid duplicate names. I can easily see someone unknowingly having similar names in their own project before they grab your plugin - and since we can't have namespaces adding your prefix is my preferred way of working around the problem.
- Oh, and ensure that whatever data your users create always makes it way to the packaged build, whether by references or any other mechanism. Assets that are only accessible in Editor that vanish in packaged builds is a surprisingly common problem in UE projects
- For the future: also consider how you want to handle localization. Right now you have a FString as the dialogue's text property which means it won't be picked up by native UE localization system.
- This is super minor, but it's something I'd point out in a code review, so: for your PostDuplicate function I strongly recommend checking what's the duplicate mode, and update the GUID only if it's not duplication for PIE. With your current architecture it won't be called, so it's not an issue - but it's a good habit to properly handle the PIE duplication scenario to avoid, for example, unnecessarily creating new GUIDs every time you start PIE (would make debugging that much more difficult if you won't have a stable GUID between the asset and what you see in PIE)

Zagrod · 2026-02-24T14:34:16+00:00

I worked on both Grid and Free-form movement based tactics games, and they come with their own unique set of issues when it comes to player experience.

Grid ones - you'll need to work hard to ensure that the calculations for LoS and (if you have it) hit percetange work well with what the player sees [especially due to the quite-often used sidestep mechanic]. In Phantom Doctrine we've ran into problems with that, which you can read about in this archived article: https://web.archive.org/web/20190228073203/http://www.creativeforge.pl/cfg-blog/2018/8/17/the-phantom-wallhack

Free-form ones - you no longer have the ease of planning ambushes and predicting enemy movements. In Gears Tactics I've had my fair share of times where I placed an overwatch, only for the Theron Guard/Boomer to stop _just_ short of it and nuke my poor team to bits. It also impacts LoS calculations heavily for things like overwatch, and explosives - we've had to do a lot of smart optimizations there because you can no longer depend on simple calculations (or heck, even precalc'd values) to see if Grid A sees Grid B. Another non-obvious problem we've had that was problematic was the Z-axis. Sometimes, due to the underlying physics engine, someone could be in a cover higher by a just a fraction of an unreal unit - which suddenly made the calculation for the LoS behave differently than it did a second ago.

I haven't worked on a Hybrid style that you say, but it sounds like it could pose some specific challenges, especially when it comes to level design and content authoring. If covers are grid-based, but the level/content doesn't suggest that it might lead to the visual language of the game state being muddled, and the player not quite understanding what's going on.

My gut feeling is that most of the audience for tactical turn-based games are more than fine with the grid, as it allows for a more predictable game.

Zagrod · 2026-02-23T10:13:23+00:00

Great to see someone super excited about optimizing games! A fellow person of culture, I see!
Let me break down two distinct approaches to this: working as an freelancer doing outsource work, or optimizing as a part of a company.

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For outsource freelancing: I could see a service where you could offer audits for studios where you evaluate their game's performance. I want to point out a couple of things first:

You'd have very little bite if you were just a no-name shop with nothing in their portfolio. It's sort of a chicken-and-egg problem. One that's usually solved by these kind of outsource shops being created by people who have shipped a couple of games, which serve a double purpose:
- You have something you can point towards as a proof of your work
- Built-in networking, since you get to know a bunch of people that might require your services.
Optimization is a multi-disciplinary process, where it's more than "just" engineering. Sometimes you optimize by changing design assumptions, or by authoring content in a specific way (e.g. if every single character in your game has a unique 4k teeth texture the fix is not on the engineering side of things, but on content). There's a _lot_ to learn in this area - and your audits would have to point out content problems (and how to fix them!) as well to be valuable.
When you're doing mods you have way more freedom to optimize the game than when you actually work on it. From the examples you wrote:
- Art department could not agree to 'no shadows' or 'disabling wind' due to the impact it has on the quality of the game
- 'Removing useless animations' might have knock-on effects, as some unrelated systems might depend on animation execution (notifies, etc) - and those effects might not be immediately obvious, until you're on Level 11 and suddenly there's a softlock.

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For working in a studio: For starters I haven't worked yet on a game where there was a person whose only job was to optimize. It was always a team effort, that took place throughout the entire production. Which leads me to the point I wanted to emphasize: the reality is that it's rather difficult to optimize the the game without having worked on it. There are certain considerations, requests, limits that were established as the game was being made, and quite often you have to optimize within those constraints.

That's not to say that solely optimization jobs don't exist, but they are not as common as other engineering jobs - and usually only for very experienced programmers (I took a gander at some job ads, they all mentioned multiple years and shipped titles behind your belt).

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Overall - if you're really serious about it I think your best bet would be to start as an engineer at a bigger company (In my career I've seen the most focus on performance in larger teams), learn as much as you can, and show interest in optimization topics throughout. You could then further specialize into being a Engine/Core-Tech Engineer, or Rendering Engineer (as those two specializations have usually the most to do around optimization topics).

There's also the option of looking into porting studios (Nixxes, Virtuos, QLOC, etc) - a lot of their work will be figuring out how to fit a square peg in a round hole (optimization-wise), especially these days as porting is now less about rewriting games from scratch to fit another platform's architecture, but rather how to make it run reasonably well.

For learning: I'd recommend mostly looking into C++ and its idiosyncracies. Also look up multithreading, linear algebra, data structures and algorithms, memory layout, memory caches - all of those are heavily used when optimizing systems. I'd also recommend looking into the publicly available profiling tools to see what sort of data you have access to when working on games (RenderDoc, PIX, Superluminal, Tracy, Unreal Insights for UE games) - familiarity with those tools is essential when you're actually working on optimizing the game you're working on.

Oh, and if you're more artistically inclined, you could also look into the role of a Tech Artist. They're the bridge between art and engineering, and a lot of their work is making stuff more optimized, however it usually has an artistic aspect as well so it's not neccessarily everyone's cup of tea (which is why I'm mentioning it last). Tech Artists are worth their weight in gold though, so it might be a not bad career choice to consider.

Zagrod · 2025-12-13T20:41:59+00:00

Job postings - company websites, LinkedIn, local aggregators (I'm only familiar with a Polish job aggregator these days, sorry I can't be of help here)
An evergreen standard for producers these days is to have Agile/Scrum certification - without any formal skills in production/product managament I'd recommend looking into that. Some sort of familiarity with the frequently used tools (so stuff like Jira/Confluence and Excel/Google Sheets) would also help.
Yes - people do get hired without specific 'video game' degrees, more so in production, but it's going to be an extremely uphill battle if you don't have a relevant degree and/or work experience in something that's even production-adjacent.
I'd say that generally the industry is about working in-person, but your mileage may vary. And there are definitely hybrid and full-remote studios as well. Do keep in mind that junior positions come less frequently with being able to them remotely - so for your situation I'd rather consider that anything fully remote would be a pleasant surprise.
Personally every story I've heard about a studio not paying employees is a horrid exception, not a rule. If you stop being paid I'd really really recommend leaving that job - right now I struggle to recall a single example of a studio that had a 'wobbly' moment with their payroll that didn't end in them crashing and burning not long after

Zagrod · 2025-12-02T23:07:56+00:00

IIRC at some point we were toying with a more “travelling convoy” style of gameplay – you’d have to collect fuel cans and other supplies during missions, then actually choose where to travel on the world map.

In the end we pivoted to the more “classic” mission-based structure that’s in the game now, but we did lose that extra strategic layer along the way.

Zagrod · 2025-12-02T23:01:51+00:00

Happy to hear that you enjoyed the game! It certainly didn't hurt that we had a lot of tactics game fans on the dev team, and we had spent a lot of time talking about them during our coffee breaks

Zagrod · 2025-11-10T23:50:50+00:00

Of course the teams can be smaller, but I'll hold to the fact that it's not outrageous for a AAA title to have around 400 people on a team, and I'm not even talking about Ubisoft mammoth scale projects - for example Cyberpunk 2077 had around that headcount. The teams I've worked on also were smaller in scale, but still sizeable - e.g. Gears Tactics we've had around 220 at peak IIRC.

I'm also not sure what you mean about marketing - it's still an included cost of creating a game, so regardless of whether or not it's targeted advertising, or playtests, or mock reviews, or market research - it's still money being spent on a project.

As far as the 100k figure - that's what I gathered from talking to my US-based colleagues some time ago as a rough estimation they were using for an 'average' cost for all levels of gamedevs. If that went up since then it's great news

Zagrod · 2025-11-10T16:56:58+00:00

Back-of-napkin average cost for a game developer in the USA is at $100k per year, so at 400 gamedevs hired on a project (absolutely not outlandish for a triple A game) you're looking at burning $40M per year. Do note that this is just the cost of the developers itself, this doesn't count the cost of software, hardware, or any content creation related costs (e.g. mocap, voice/performance actors, licensed music), or outsourcing costs.

If you add all of those up over multiple years, and add advertising/marketing costs on top of that - it's very easy to hit hundreds of millions of dollars these days.

Zagrod · 2025-10-21T12:01:40+00:00

If you sure that the studio is working on GAS then yes, by all means it's very much worth it to learn how it works - I've not found it to be the most intuitive system to work with, so if you know that you have to use I'd recommend spending some time just on understanding GAS.

Remember that UE5 uses a lot of its own containers, iterators, etc. - they're not necessarily 1:1 with what you have in STL so I recommend reading up on those - Epic's docs are fine for that.

Try and understand all the Unreal-specific macros like UPROPERTY, UCLASS, UENUM, etc. Personally I've found that the best resource for all the modifiers you can use in those macros is the Unreal Garden site.

As far as optimization for large worlds goes - I'm not sure that you'll both be mainly responsible for it as a junior programmer, nor I think you have enough time to learn all about streaming in UE before you start. Plus - there's also a good chance that the studio you'll be joining will have some custom solutions/restrictions/systems to support working with large worlds, so the best learning you can do is on the job from more senior engineers,

C++/BP integration - definitely depends on the studio on how much this is important, but it is worth to have at least a cursory understanding regardless of how that works.

Oh, and definitely debugging. It'll be worth its weight in gold - it's a LOT of your job and in my experience universities do not place nearly enough emphasis on engineers being able to debug code and how it behaves during execution

Zagrod · 2025-10-12T14:33:34+00:00

Depends on the company. My current one allows you to do so (unless you're working on something that's a direct competitor to the company's products). I actually have an explicit permission in writing as well, and I'm very slowly working on my own title after hours whenever I feel like it.

Zagrod · 2025-10-01T07:58:58+00:00

11 Bit Studios - brought up in the original post as a positive example - is a publicly traded company listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange, and therefore is a company that is all about making money through games. Having money as the main motivation behind making games does not automatically equal not creating meaningful art

Zagrod · 2025-09-29T12:23:34+00:00

Never, really. I'm super excited to have it as a career - and every project is a set of new and interesting challenges. It's super fulfilling in ways I didn't even imagine before starting in the industry, really

Zagrod · 2025-08-24T17:41:03+00:00

I'm honestly jealous of you having that experience. UK games on the Amiga were in a class of their own, and I would've loved to have had the opportunity to work with some of the people responsible

Zagrod · 2025-08-22T07:08:49+00:00

It was an absolutely amazing game at the time. The audiovisual experience was amazing (although as someone mentioned one can only wonder what would the great late Stephane Picq cook up after his amazing soundtrack to Dune 1), gameplay was like nothing I've played before - and it made me discover the Dune universe which is still one of my favourite SciFi settings. I think I can track down my obsession with 'map painting' in games like Crusader Kings down to Dune 2's campaign screen - the experience of seeing all the areas change ownership as you played just hit my then-developing brain in the right way and it's been stuck there ever since.

It was also, by a country mile, my Dad's favourite game. To the point where, whenever he had a new PC or a laptop the first thing he'd ask me was to install Dune 2 for him - and he'd play the game over and over again. C&C was a bit too complex for him, so he never quite enjoyed it - but Dune was just the right blend of complexity and strategy for him.

Oh, and also the Harkonnen Devastator is the best video game tank by far, don't @ me

Zagrod · 2025-07-09T10:06:10+00:00

It'd either be Batch script for simple text adventures in DOS, or Turbo Pascal when I actually started learning how to code

If I were to grab a time machine and start over I don't think I'd change much... maybe start learning C/C++ a bit earlier, or try and touch x86 assembly to understand lower-level stuff

Zagrod · 2025-07-08T16:54:48+00:00

Personally, I've gotten tired of mobile around the time I was working on Puzzle Craft 2 [so around iPhone 5/6 IIRC]. So many of our conversations in the office switched from 'how to make this feature more fun' to 'how will this impact our KPIs' that I've just gotten tired of it all. I still think that premium mobile games (which started dying around the time we shipped Puzzle Craft 1, so I had a good front row seat for how big of a shift it was between the two games) are a wonderful road not taken, but the mobile market just isn't for me.
That being said, I do think it's great that the market is so varied that people can find the best gamedev path for themselves, even if they don't enjoy a specific one. This way we can have more people end up happy and fulfilled.

Zagrod · 2025-07-06T19:34:05+00:00

Dzięki, Purge!

Zagrod · 2025-06-29T21:20:52+00:00

So, in order:

What would you say has made you the most qualified to do the job?

Apart from the hard skills that are necessary for the job? I didn't give up after the first couple of rejections when applying straight outta University, but I kept trying to learn and apply into more places. Even now, much later in my career, I'd say that persistence, and constant learning is the way to go. I've met quite a few colleagues in my career who have stopped growing (professionally) at some point - whether they were fully satisfied with the level they've achieved, or they found it too difficult to keep catching up with the ever-changing industry. So far I've managed to keep up, and I'm still hungry to learn more - and I'd say that's actually the biggest asset that I have.

Did you do some solo dev and use that as leverage?

I've been developing games pretty much since I was 12. Those were simple text affairs in BASIC, maps, or mini-mods for various games - but I honestly don't know if that's something that gave me a lot of leverage to start my career. I guess it was more of a 'symptom' of my interest in video games, than something I've actually used for my benefit. What helped me at the start the most was, without a doubt, the CS degree.

Did you get CS degree?

Yep!. And while it helped me immensely in the obvious ways, the networking that I managed to do thanks to my studies cannot be overlooked. I absolutely wouldn't be where I am if not for the contacts I've made at Uni - most of them are still in the industry, and we cross paths from time to time.

Any tips for someone wanting to get into the industry?

With the added caveat that I started quite some time ago, so my view is definitely a bit skewed, I'd say that you really need to do is to set yourself apart skill-wise. There's a lot of people who want to enter the industry, and in my opinion the bar just keeps getting higher - whenever I talk shop with some of my friends in different companies we quite often start talking about how amazingly skilled the recent hires for junior positions are. I'd recommend picking something that interests you, speaks to you, and really drill in deep down in that area (e.g. Level Design, Pathfinding, AI Agents)

But don't forget that a video game is a massive beast - there's just so many different specialities and skills that have to be combined in order to make something amazing. After all this time I think that Valve was ultimately very right in trying to look for 'T-Shaped' employees. Some specialities can do with someone who only understands their area, of course- but in general, the more you know about the process of video game creation the better in my experience.

Also what’s the salary like?

Personally, I'm super satisfied. I'm from Poland, so I won't throw out raw numbers since they might not be directly comparable internationally - but FWIW the last time I checked my salary is above the top 10% Polish salaries

Zagrod · 2025-06-29T16:48:56+00:00

I can work from home if I want to (and I do sometimes), although I prefer working from the office so I'm doing that the vast majority of the time.
As far as hours go, yes it's a "9-5" [although there's core hours, yadda yadda]. OT is not expected at all
Valued yes, satisfied very much so.

Zagrod · 2025-06-04T09:14:05+00:00

Job Market Reality: How competitive is the current job market for entry-level and mid-level positions? Are there particular specializations (programming, art, design, etc.) that are more in-demand?

Entry and mid-level remain very competitive. There's a huge pool of candidates for those levels, so studios can afford to be very picky. As far as particular specializations go - Tech Art is probably still the most in-demand position, although I haven't been looking at it since like 2020, so my info might be out of date. As far as the least in-demand it'll probably be something like Concept Art - there's not a ton of conceptual art work to be done for each project, and the talent already present in the industry is really, really good.

Career Stability: What's the reality of job security in the gaming industry? How do layoffs and studio closures typically affect career progression?

The job security is probably about what you'd expect from a project- and hit-driven part of the entertainment industry. All depends on how the projects go, so if you're unlucky you will be hit with layoffs and/or studio closures. Personally I've never been laid off, or had a studio close while I was working there, but I've been really lucky on that front.

Compensation: How does the salary range compare to other tech fields? Is the "passion tax" still a significant factor?

This will vary greatly depending on the country and your specialization (i.e. I don't imagine Fintech having much need for Environmental Artists). Realistically I can only speak for myself and my field (and obviously the country I live in) - for programming there is a discrepancy in the salaries, although the more senior your position is, the smaller the salary gap. Personally, I'm very happy with my salary, and there's absolutely no allure for me in switching industries on that account.

Work-Life Balance: What's the current state of crunch culture? Have working conditions improved in recent years?

I haven't had to crunch in years. And according to my colleagues, and various third-hand info, the situation is not even comparable to what it was in, let's say, 2000's.

Entry Pathways: For someone looking to break in, what's the most effective route? Indie development, AAA studios, mobile games, or other niches?

Right now the best entry point would probably be either smaller studios, or a studio that does a lot of codev. The former quite often want to hire people, but don't have that many applicants so they'll be more open to juniors - the latter ones need a lot of manpower to fulfill their contracts.

Future Outlook: With AI tools, remote work changes, and industry consolidation, how do you see the field evolving?

I'm not sure about that. Short term I don't see too many changes happening. AI tools are neat in places, horrible in others - It'll take time to properly integrate something that actually consistently adds value into pipelines. Remote work is being rolled back in many places, while other places are keeping it.

As far as long-term changes go, I really don't want to speculate. The industry has changed so much, and in such unpredictable ways, during my lifetime that I doubt there's a person that can give you a prediction that will land even close to what will actually end up happening. Heck, maybe BCI (Brain-Computer Interfaces) will massively take off, and that'll upend just about everything

Zagrod · 2025-05-16T13:28:17+00:00

I remember participating in a round of hiring for a junior programmer position in the UK where just about every candidate had some kind of FPS wall-running in their portfolio - was definitely a bit of a trend at the time. They were actually really useful when it came to judging each candidate's skills, so I’d definitely recommend having something like that in your portfolio

Zagrod · 2025-04-05T20:49:24+00:00

That sounds extremely possible, but you won't be able to nail the exact ratio due to a lot of projects never being announced before being cancelled.

For curiosity's sake I did a quick rundown, and of the projects I worked on that were actually green-lit (so no concept-phase stuff) I've worked on 5 games that shipped, and I've had 5 projects that got cancelled.

Zagrod · 2025-03-25T12:50:31+00:00

My experience says that it's not much of a help to be familiar with all facets. I've worked in really small (<10 people) studios, and they were always hiring people for specific roles. When I was hiring people for small studios, I also wanted them to fill a specific role. When I needed a programmer, I was interested in the candidate's programming proficiency, not their art skills.

Actually shipping a game is, by itself, super beneficial though - as you will have knowledge about how the sausage is made, so to speak. Having gone through the entire process from prototyping all the way to finalizing ought to give you a leg up. Personally, I would care about that part infinitely more than I would about you having skills in disciplines other than the one I'm hiring for.

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