<story><title>Ask HN: How to move from traditional tech into game dev?</title><text>Hey all,&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m keen to learn how you can move from &amp;#x27;traditional&amp;#x27; tech roles into game development. I &lt;i&gt;love&lt;/i&gt; games and, while I know there are some issues re: salary &amp;amp; hours worked, still think I&amp;#x27;d regret not trying it myself.&lt;p&gt;What are the usual sideways paths one can take to go that way? My tech stack is almost definitely irrelevant; Python, JS, Rust, Haskell, etc...&lt;p&gt;Any tips from the game devs out there?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>theshrike79</author><text>Backend. Do the game backend stuff for online&amp;#x2F;mobile games.&lt;p&gt;Everyone and their sister wants to be the one that does the pretty graphics and UI with Unity or whatever. Nobody wants to be the one who does the backend code that actually makes the game work.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s actually challenging when you work with games that might have a million daily users or even more. If it&amp;#x27;s a competitive game, people &lt;i&gt;will&lt;/i&gt; try to cheat and you can&amp;#x27;t trust anything the client sends you. The code also needs to be cost-effective to run, if your game makes $10k a day, but the backend costs $5k a day to run - that&amp;#x27;s kinda bad.&lt;p&gt;Also especially mobile games need a custom frontend for customer service so they can do refunds, check player purchase history etc. Those are done with JS and Python etc.&lt;p&gt;Source: Moved from traditional tech to making CS tools and backend for games. My salary went up hilarious amounts, as did bonuses and options.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fckgnad</author><text>&amp;gt;Nobody wants to be the one who does the backend code that actually makes the game work.&lt;p&gt;This is only true for a certain class of games that rely on multiplayer. Many games are singleplayer where the meat exists on the game engine. There&amp;#x27;s two sub sections of this as well. Real time and non-real time.&lt;p&gt;Realtime means streaming updates from all users. Games like fortnight or pubg are like this. Non-realtime means like checkers or multiplayer chess. If you are doing the later rather then the former I would say you&amp;#x27;re still in traditional web development where shit is still relatively easy because an HTTP server is good enough.&lt;p&gt;The former is what is really hard, and that kind of thing is what I would refer to as backend game development. If you are doing that, then likely you&amp;#x27;re not a traditional web developer anymore.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: How to move from traditional tech into game dev?</title><text>Hey all,&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m keen to learn how you can move from &amp;#x27;traditional&amp;#x27; tech roles into game development. I &lt;i&gt;love&lt;/i&gt; games and, while I know there are some issues re: salary &amp;amp; hours worked, still think I&amp;#x27;d regret not trying it myself.&lt;p&gt;What are the usual sideways paths one can take to go that way? My tech stack is almost definitely irrelevant; Python, JS, Rust, Haskell, etc...&lt;p&gt;Any tips from the game devs out there?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>theshrike79</author><text>Backend. Do the game backend stuff for online&amp;#x2F;mobile games.&lt;p&gt;Everyone and their sister wants to be the one that does the pretty graphics and UI with Unity or whatever. Nobody wants to be the one who does the backend code that actually makes the game work.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s actually challenging when you work with games that might have a million daily users or even more. If it&amp;#x27;s a competitive game, people &lt;i&gt;will&lt;/i&gt; try to cheat and you can&amp;#x27;t trust anything the client sends you. The code also needs to be cost-effective to run, if your game makes $10k a day, but the backend costs $5k a day to run - that&amp;#x27;s kinda bad.&lt;p&gt;Also especially mobile games need a custom frontend for customer service so they can do refunds, check player purchase history etc. Those are done with JS and Python etc.&lt;p&gt;Source: Moved from traditional tech to making CS tools and backend for games. My salary went up hilarious amounts, as did bonuses and options.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jayd16</author><text>Actually game graphics people are hard to find but no one is going to hire into that role with no experience.&lt;p&gt;That said, you can leverage your normal tech chops to get a foot in the door.  Games do need backend and database people, etc.</text></comment>