Hi all! I need to ask you a question.

The question is - how do i get to game development industry?

But don't try answer it just yet - I need to give you a little of background about myself, about what I want to achieve, and about what thorns I have in my side. It will be a lot of text, and it can be a bit emotional, but I need to explain to you all of it for you to have complete understanding of my situation. TL;DR..

I'm 26, and I lived all my life with that idea in my mind that I will become a game developer one day. I was excited by PS1 games, than i've got PC, and my excitement only grew up. My target goal is to do something special, something big enough, in team of people with same sparks in the eyes as it is in mine. It can be indie team, or AA, AAA team - I don't know it yet, but I think that this is not so important right now.

Who I am and what about my skills right now? Well, I have a degree in CS, specifically in discipline, that called Program Engineering in my university. My main language is C#, second is C++ (I know it not so bad, but fact that I've never wrote any middle-to-big project with that language tells a lot about my expertise in that field).

In course of my learning, we've created 3 game projects with a group of 3 people. This games was never released, was written on XNA/C#, and each consisted of one level with some amount of gameplay. I've learned a lot through this projects - a bit of physics (collision detection algorithms, such as GJK, EPA, Edge Clipping, SAT), a bit of networking (our game was multiplayer on sockets), a bit of math (ocean floor simulation with help of Tessendorf's paper), a bit of graph algorithms etc.

After my grade, I came to work in a local bank, in which I still work by today. In bank, I program in C#, most of the time, and learnt a couple of enterprise C# technologies - WCF, EF, Windows COM+; a bit of .NET Framework internals; worked with Oracle and PostgreSQL, wrote native (Xamarin) Android applications, practiced MVC, MVP, DDD, etc.

At my work I found a friend, who wants to do games too. We plan to dig together in this direction. Now we're learning Unity development in our free time - overall architectural principles, some cool features like VFX Graph, Shader Graph, NavMesh, Audio System, etc. Also we learn some other programs, like Blender, Photoshop, etc. We try our best to get deep understanding of things that we learn, but our knowledge is overall a little bit fragmented in my opinion.

We can't go university and get a grade in game development, because there is no one here where we live. We can't become junior game developers here either, because gamedev in our country is not existent. And I assume that we really need to relocate somewhere, because of many reasons. But, unfortunately, we have little to no financial backup from our families (in my case, I AM financial backup for my family), and we simply can't blindly jump in nowhere in hope of landing somewhere.

I know what you can say - gamedev industry isn't a place of stability, and you probably need to find another industry for financial stability, and remain gamedev as a hobby. But I can't.. this is my life's dream, and I refuse to give up.

So.. we need a solid plan, of how do we quit our job, reallocate and start a new career without big time lag. There is my thoughts on subject:

1. We will need financial backup for first time - ok, I think we can deal with that with our current job
2. We need to know if our skillsets is enough to be a competitive candidate - I don't know how to validate this, and I need your advices, preferably from real experience in interviews, and junior/middle requirements.
3. We need some “portfolio”- some published games? some technical demos? some innovational ideas? this is the point, where we need to remember about our fragmented knowledge - I feel that we lack “systematic” approach in game design, and currently we struggle with finishing something from start to end, because there is so many ways to do things, and the project overall, that we're missing ourselves in details every time. I think we need someone to teach us, how to do a game from scratch - not in a technical sense, but in game design and project management sense. Maybe, some comprehensive course in that field, or… something? I don't really know.
4. We probably need at least some courses completed - we're working on it, but here I need to ask you - if you knew ANY good and fundamental courses or other resources, that can help us with building core skillset in game design, game project management, and game development in general.

I know, that there is a LOT of text.. and I know that there is no concrete question - in fact, there is a couple of questions. But I really don't know how to distill it even more..

I will appreciate ANY help - usefull advices, resources, requirements, or validations.

Big thank you, in advance.

Hi!

You're right that I'm stuck in my comfort zone and think that something can be achieved from this position. Now I realize that.

Two days ago I've found an article from Reddit that talks about the same damn things that you did (https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/wiki/getting_started/​ in case you are interested). What I've learned from this article is pretty simple. A mantra that I knew long ago, but more importantly, some reasoning behind that. "Just Do It".

I've started to work on a small project (type of Asteroids/Aero Fighters), two days ago, and in process I realized, how much work needed to be done even for this kinda small game. And, in fact, I'm not scared by that - instead, I feel, that this realization gives me the strength to focus on the project and throw all procrastination stuff out of the window.

Thank you all for the support!

P.S.: My friend has CS degree too, he just got it in another university. As for now, he shows interest in 3D modeling, but overall he is interested in all kinds of stuff in game dev.