Where to find work experience for TY for my son

guitarwrist

Hi folks,

A shot in the dark but here goes!
My son is doing transition year next year and is looking for work experience from next september for 1 day a week or in a block, whatever he can get! He has emailed some companies etc. I was wondering would anyone here be in a position to give him unpaid work experience or point him in the right direction. Hes passionate about gaming / technology across various platforms and would love to get a taste of the development side of the industry. He is midlands based but i've no problem driving him anywhere. Many thanks in advance. If this thread is in the wrong place, apologies mods and feel free to move / delete.

RedXIV

if hes looking for gaming specifically, tell him to start emailing some of the indie studios and see if they have capacity to take him on. bigger companies like Activision or EA won't take them on for a variety of reasons but he'd learn more from a small studio anyway.

its really gonna help his case if he has some relevant skill set, then he can contribute rather than sit at the sidelines just asking "whats that?"

Kilgore__Trout

Hi Guitarwrist,

It might be tricky to get experience in the area, as the supply is likely to be limited, whereas the demand is going to be high. In case your son doesn't manage to secure anything, here are a couple of alternatives to consider.

There are a number of areas in game development: coding, engines, 3d modelling, illustration, sound design, but the info below is mainly about coding & engines.

There's an enormous amount of information on the internet about game development & programming. Youtube, in particular has a lot. There are a lot of routes to take, but a good way to get started would be to use a game engine. Some of the more popular engines are (in rough order of complexity):

Scratch: https://scratch.mit.edu/

RPG Maker: http://www.rpgmakerweb.com/

GameMaker: http://www.yoyogames.com/studio

Unity: https://unity3d.com/

Unreal: https://www.unrealengine.com/what-is-unreal-engine-4


If your son's interest is more along the lines of learning a language, I understand python is a good one to get started with. Being familiar with a programming language is pretty much necessary to make a game of any complexity.

C# is more difficult, but quite a good one, as it is used in a number of engines (Unity & Gamemaker), and heavily in industry, and also, is very similar to Java, so you're effectively learning 2 popular languages at once. TheNewBoston (on youtube) has tutorials for both Java & C#.

C++ (which I've no experience of) appears to be the dominant language used by bigger companies, and is considered more difficult again. It's used in Unreal.

The most difficult thing is often getting started, so you could look at coder dojo: https://coderdojo.com/. There's a fairly good chance there's one fairly close to you.

Also, it might be an option to hire a college student to teach your son some of the basics of programming.

Failing getting experience with a game development studio, getting experience in regular programming would be nearly as good.

Good luck!