Given that I am also pretty young, I’m not exactly qualified to give career advice. That said my sort of Gladwellian position on the matter is that you don’t get to be someone like Hideo Kojima or Steve Jobs, or a more local example Yudkowsky by working your way up and taking what people give you. You need to
1) Have some level of natural ability.
2) Choose the right thing to focus on that has a good chance of success.
3) Be willing to fight for your dream. This is the hardest part, because anyone who enjoys self-made success has had to overcome numerous failures, false starts, and periods of time where it just seemed too difficult or hopeless. You have to be persistent, have endurance and never be willing to settle for “just good enough”.
More specifically to you, you don’t seem to want to be a programmer—the guy who contributes to the behind the scenes work of a video game and perhaps creates the AI. You want to be someone whose creative vision for the game turns it into something that lots of people will enjoy. And it doesn’t even have to be video games specifically. Is that about right?
In that case, start now. Don’t focus on making a super fun video game. Just figure out how to make anything. Maybe start with a pong variant. Get in lots of practice. Start getting publicity for your work through maybe newgrounds. Aggressively publicize your work once you feel confident in your abilities. Develop connections with other people in the industry if you can. All of this generalizes to art in general not just video games.
Truth be told though, there are many people who share your dream. It’s not easy, you can do everything right and still not succeed. Having a job as a programmer or graphics designer is a reasonable “safe” fallback. But if you are serious about desiring greatness it will take a lot of effort and initiative.
Given that I am also pretty young, I’m not exactly qualified to give career advice. That said my sort of Gladwellian position on the matter is that you don’t get to be someone like Hideo Kojima or Steve Jobs, or a more local example Yudkowsky by working your way up and taking what people give you. You need to
1) Have some level of natural ability. 2) Choose the right thing to focus on that has a good chance of success. 3) Be willing to fight for your dream. This is the hardest part, because anyone who enjoys self-made success has had to overcome numerous failures, false starts, and periods of time where it just seemed too difficult or hopeless. You have to be persistent, have endurance and never be willing to settle for “just good enough”.
More specifically to you, you don’t seem to want to be a programmer—the guy who contributes to the behind the scenes work of a video game and perhaps creates the AI. You want to be someone whose creative vision for the game turns it into something that lots of people will enjoy. And it doesn’t even have to be video games specifically. Is that about right?
In that case, start now. Don’t focus on making a super fun video game. Just figure out how to make anything. Maybe start with a pong variant. Get in lots of practice. Start getting publicity for your work through maybe newgrounds. Aggressively publicize your work once you feel confident in your abilities. Develop connections with other people in the industry if you can. All of this generalizes to art in general not just video games.
Truth be told though, there are many people who share your dream. It’s not easy, you can do everything right and still not succeed. Having a job as a programmer or graphics designer is a reasonable “safe” fallback. But if you are serious about desiring greatness it will take a lot of effort and initiative.