Game Development Position w/o Unity Thread

Hello!

I am curious on a few things when it comes to the game development field. Everywhere I look they seem to be hiring people to do programming for their indie game company and some are actually paying competitive wages. My issue is that it seems most indie game companies want people that are experienced in Unity! Is that something that is industry wide?

Currently I have my own engine that has been expanded as I made my own games using C++ / SFML / OpenGL and I was curious if I should just scrap the c++ and move to something like unity to get a industry job?

Thanks!

Hi

C++ knowledge is really valuable so i would say keep on with it but at the same time working in C# is the largest thing for desktop based projects in Unity.

But if you know C++ its even better than C# in terms of efficiency if the project is a large scale but for getting a job i would really say focus on both C# and C++? All i can really say is C# always ends up being the way we go in any project because the skill and system required for C++ is higher and different.

So yea... my 2 cents if its worth any more than a pinch of salt.

I'm surprised making a game engine can be done by a single person alone. I thought those were obscure and took a groups of extremely talented programmers.

theSheepdog wrote: I'm surprised making a game engine can be done by a single person alone. I thought those were obscure and took a groups of extremely talented programmers.

You get a few that i think mainly tinker and build the bare bones to understand how others work. Although i could be wrong.

Well it isn't a full fledged game engine like Unity or Unreal. It has been more or less a game engine that I have been building on as I built games and etc. As I build different games and etc. I just add the template modules to the system for easy use in different games.

You're right about Unity being an Industry Darling right now, but it's certainly not the only option out there. Lots of AAA studios--but not all of them--are still knee (or waist, or neck) deep in C++, which is still pretty much the industry standard (if there can be an industry standard). Unity will probably get left behind someday, abandoned by whatever the next new hotness will be.

That said, if you can write your own engine/framework in C++, you can definitely pick up Unity and learn how to use it. They're both valuable tools. To get an industry job, you want a lot of tools in your toolbox, not just the C++-shaped hammer or the Unity-shaped screwdriver (crappy metaphor is crappy). More important than being able to say, "Yeah, I can use Unity," is being able to say, "Here's a bunch of stuff I did that will convince you I can learn whatever specific software you're using."

When I started my current job, I came in with C++ as my primary language of choice and knew enough C# to get by; the organization I was interviewing for was almost strictly C#. They made an offer not because of what I knew, but because of what they could tell I could learn.
The last two projects I was on were written in C++ but with dev and test tools (which is where my work was done) were written in C#. The current projects I'm helping with are done in C#. The apps themselves are in Unity. The additional tools aren't.

Of course, your mileage will certainly vary. The one likely constant is that you'll need to constantly learn new things, so make sure you don't tie yourself to a single technology; it's all fleeting.

Learning Unity is pretty easy if you are already knowledgeable in other tools. I wrote my book Unity in Action to teach Unity to people who already know how to program!