linkgannon

Not OP but I am a professional software developer and I feel that I have some useful information to share :) Fortunately, the market is in high demand in today's day and age for programmers. Unfortunately, game design programming is the trickiest type of program to create as it often involves many different levels of complexity. Though a degree can definately help your chances at a job, plenty of people are able to make it without a degree in software engineering. The important thing that you need is experience and a large portfolio of projects you've done that you can show off. A good way to do this is via freelancing. It is in no way a source of steady income or reliable, but it will help you create an epic portfolio of projects. Also obtaining good references from freelance clients can be a big plus! Getting certifications can help you majorly as well. I know that in terms of game development, Unity has a certification test that you can take, and there are MANY other certification types you can get.

Hey Rob! I've got a question for you :) About a year and a half ago, I embarked on the long task of creating my own card game. One thing that I had some severe issues with was in figuring out actually designing nice looking cards. Now I didn't own adobe (I didn't have the money for it), and even if I had, I didn't have any clue how to use illustrator / photoshop. Creating card templates and the like just wasn't going to happen for me, so I ended up building a piece of software (Computer Science Engineer here!) that allows me to create card templates, then generate the individual cards, whether it be high-res images for promo material, or official PDFs supported by manufacturers (namely TGC and Panda). This works wonderfully now that it's done for creating new games, but it took me nearly that entire year and a half to program. I can't imagine that every game designer goes through something like this; so here is my question: in your design process (whether it be the cards, promo material, etc.) do you guys solely use adobe to create each card individually, or do you guys have other, easier ways of generating and creating all of your cards?