Building Scripting Experience / Professional Development

nwfan87

I'm not sure this is exactly the right place to be posting, but since I've spent many years using NWN and using the toolset, the NWN community seems a good stepping stone to ask:

What other programming languages are helpful to learn for game design? I think Python get's mentioned almost all the time, are there others?

Having spent time with NWN has given me some basic starters in C and C+ for NWN2, although both can be much more complex. Thinking about what sort of languages are good for today's game development. From other people's experience, what, where are the best resources to learn these?

TarotRedhand

First choose whether you intend this for expanding your hobby or moving into professional programming. If hobby, you can use almost anything to write games including Visual Basic/c#.

For Professional you have to make some choices. Choose the platform you intend to write for mobile or desktop/console. Mobile is probably Java. The rest is probably C++.

However to actually get a job you will probably need to get a degree and have a good dose of luck especially if the gaming industry is still as ageist as it used to be for getting your first job. You could always specialise in some aspect and try going down the be the go-to guy route for your specialisation.

TR

ForSerious

I had some friends that did a hardcore game programming boot-camp. They learned C#.
It's not a steady line of work, from what I hear.

nwfan87

@TarotRedhand @ForSerious Thank you! Yes, I imagine the standard of programming that company's accept is extremely high and no guessing what sort of programmer they are looking for. All very company, employer, game genre, even game specific.

A lot of those postings ask for Computer Science Degree, exclusively. Never understood why as most stuff could be self studied. To verify there is an understanding of how to do programming safely and securely I suppose.

Who knows, the best careers are sometimes those that are a hobby turned professional.

TarotRedhand

Add to that, the probability that, in an effort to save costs, programming companies will increasingly use well trained AI to generate code. That and outsource code production (India currently). Actual coding jobs will become scarcer. In my time making stuff for NwN I can only say with absolute certainty that I know of, there has been one person to have successfully made the tradition to doing paid computer work - Six aka SixThrice aka 666 aka Gavin. I strongly suspect there have been others though.

TR

ForSerious

NWN got me my start. At least it gave me a big advantage for the university C++ classes I took. I did not get a degree in Computer science, but I did minor in it. There are a lot of 'hows' and 'whys' that a degree helps with. I have some coworkers now that were mostly self-taught, and their code lacks some of those 'hows' and 'whys'. It's not the worst thing ever, but I can understand first-hand why any company would require a CS degree. (To be completely honest. The reason I didn't get one and only minored in it was to avoid all the math that you don't need to know for 99% of programming jobs.)

TarotRedhand

@ForSerious "To be completely honest. The reason I didn't get one and only minored in it was to avoid all the math that you don't need to know for 99% of programming jobs."

Ah Z. The program specification language with its dots and backwards E's and upside down A's. Pre and Post Conditions too. Based around Set Theory and the mathematician's expansion to Boolean Algebra. I even have a book on it - An Introduction to Discrete Mathematics and Formal System Specification (Amazon UK link) by D.C. Ince (in the Oxford Applied Mathematics and Computing Science Series). If you are not really mathematically inclined Z will send you insane! Used to be that it's use was mandatory for all UK government contracts at one time.

Anyone use it today?

TR

ForSerious

Maybe, but I have never heard mention of it. The one review in that link says it won't help with, basically my daily work.