If you love to game and you are wondering how you might be able to make some money out of it, the truth is that this is something that a lot of people do actually manage to do fairly easily. No matter what kind of experience you already have with gaming or how you are thinking of trying to make more out of it, there are so many ways in which you should be able to do this, so it’s always possible and certainly something to at least consider.
In this post, we are going to take you through some of the main ways in which you should be able to make a career out of gaming. As long as you have thought about these, you should find that this is much easier than you had thought, and you can start building your own career soon enough.
Designing
First of all, and one of the most popular options out there, you could of course get into the designing part of gaming. The gaming industry is so huge and it’s only ever getting bigger, so it’s a really good time to try and get involved in the designing aspect of gaming. Whether you already have some strong ideas as to what kind of games you would like to make – perhaps you even have one or two specific game ideas in mind already – or whether you just want to feel your way into it as a career option, there are definitely a lot of potential ways that you can get into this.
For the design of games, you might be putting together top AAA games or just throwing together some indie games – in fact, it will probably be the latter at first, and then you might build up to the more hardcore and full-on games. In any case, you have to start somewhere, and the best way to do that is simply to begin making some games by yourself in whatever way you can. You might be surprised at how effectively you can do this once you start putting the work in.
If you take this further, you’ll soon find yourself in an office with other people and designing some new games on all platforms for people to enjoy. That is a great career to have, and definitely something that you are going to want to consider.
Coding
Of course, part of making a game is putting the code together – a very central part, in fact, because without the code you are not going to have a game to play at all at the end of it. If you like to code, or it’s something that you have thought about trying out for yourself at some point, then you might want to consider whether coding in the gaming world might be for you. This requires a particular kind of mind – usually one that is quite mathematical and methodical – as well as some creativity as well.
With coding, there are a lot of different languages to learn, and it will be a case of going for those that you think might be the most useful in your career in gaming. There are definitely a few favorites, and it’s worth learning these first and foremost if you are going to actually be able to make use of them throughout your career. Good coding skills will actually serve you well even if you have other kinds of careers within gaming, so it’s definitely something to look into and pursue in your spare time in any case.
You can start learning to code yourself at home without anyone else’s help, just by taking an online course for free. In fact, one of the joys of coding is that it is very democratic – you can learn everything you need for free and easily too. So that would be your first step here.
Auxiliary Roles
In gaming, you are always going to have organizations that therefore have many of the other roles which are not necessarily gaming related specifically. In other words, the company you work for will always have a need for HR staff, payroll staff, receptionists, and so on. So you can be in the world of gaming without being directly involved in the creation of the games, if you like, and there is certainly something to be said for that.
This is more important than people often give it credit for. After all, if you are, say, in charge of health and safety in a workplace, your work helps ensure that other people can still make the games. You will know what needs to be done to keep people safe, when to call an accident lawyer, and how to ensure that all necessary rules are being followed at all times. All of that is vital.
So this is certainly something to think about if you want to work in the world of gaming but you are not sure exactly how yet.
Writing
A lot of modern games have very in-depth stories, and those stories obviously need writers. If you have a way with words, then writing a game’s story could be a fascinating and diverse career, and one that could see you being paid for exercising your creative imagination in some fascinating ways. Of course, you would very often be working with a whole team of people, but in any case it’s something that you might want to think about pursuing.
To become a writer for a game, you just need to look at the job openings. On any day of the week you should find copious amounts of writing jobs going at various games companies, and it really is big business at the moment. So that is a door that you should consider being very much open, and which you can certainly aim for as best as you can.
Those are just some of the main careers that you might want to consider when you are trying to get into the world of gaming.
