The modern gaming industry is developing at a rapid pace, bringing huge profits to game manufacturers and developers. Every year, the world market is replenished with thousands of interesting and exciting games. Nowadays, many startups try to develop a game development company.
Let’s start with design, one of the most important parts of any game. A game designer (game designer) is a person responsible for the game design of a project. A game designer is one of the main persons of a game project, who not only creates the bare idea of the game, but also sets the vector for its implementation.
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Custom development (outsourcing)
The first type is companies engaged in custom game development services, or outsourcing. Such companies have developers in their staff – sometimes completely different ones – and literally sell their working time to customers who do not have their own developers, but they need some kind of software. Large outsourcers work with representatives of various business areas: industrial enterprises, insurance companies, banks – those who need serious software, in the development of which many developers are involved.
Due to the peculiarities of the custom development business, which is essentially built in one form or another on the sale of the time of its employees, it is stable when there are many developers in it – the more, the better. For this reason, outsourcers try to be very big, they have a lot of young developers, they often integrate with universities, they have a lot of offices around the world. Large companies such as EPAM, Luxoft and DataArt employ thousands of developers.
These companies really make a lot of money and are very stable. In addition to such giants, a lot of small companies work in outsourcing: from 1-2 to 50-100 developers. However, the smaller the company, the more unstable it is: if your order doesn’t go somewhere in one place, people who need to be occupied with something are released, otherwise their salary will not pay off. On the one hand, this business is inherently risky, but on the other hand, it is very easy to start – hence the large number of companies in it. You can simply call your friends and invite them to outsource. After that, you need to find the first customers – and you can work. buy backlinks
And then more and more customers learn about the company through word of mouth, and in a good scenario, you can successfully earn money. Some custom development companies got their start this way.
Product development
Another big area is product development, when companies are developing some kind of product that is interesting to consumers. If you really manage to make some kind of popular product, then the ratio of earnings to costs is usually disproportionate. In outsourcing, everything is quite simple: you take a person, he costs you such and such an amount, you earn such and such an amount with his help, scale and grow linearly. In product development, if your product is in demand, you can have a team of 4 people and still make millions of dollars and serve millions of users.
This model is a little more interesting because it allows you to scale unlimitedly, but creating such a product is much more difficult than starting outsourcing. In addition, some products come to the end of their life cycles from time to time due to changing market conditions, realities or other reasons, and they cease to exist, so it is important to pay attention to their diversification.
Software classification
Now let’s figure out what types of software and development directions exist, where you can go and what to do.
There are many different classifications of software, but when choosing a direction of work, programmers first of all pay attention to the platform, which then changes very rarely. Classification of application software by platform:
- Web programming
- Mobile development
- Desktop
Server software
Mobile and web development are very popular – they have more vacancies, money and opportunities. In development, there are special areas that are not related to one type of platform, such as game development (gamedev). Programmers write game engines, web and desktop games, and more and more games are being ported or developed for mobile devices.
And most likely, the creation of games under the current conditions will be done by those who work in mobile development, and not just people from the field of game development companies, who will simply take and change the platform. This is just an abstract example related to modern trends: everything goes to the web and mobile devices, but in general it perfectly illustrates the relationship between platforms and specialized development industries, showing the importance of the former when choosing the direction of one’s activity.
Server software
Absolutely any language can be used in server software development. Server software eventually intersects with mobile development, and with web development, and in general with any kind of development. Server software is divided into application software, system software and tools.
Application software
In programming, there is almost always a front-end part – one that the user directly interacts with, and a back-end part that is located somewhere on the server. Independent or associated with the front-end part – it is she who represents the application software. It can be any calculations, calculations, analytics, work with large amounts of data, analysis, exchanges – anything.
System software
This is a special type of software with which computers perform useful tasks – these are operating systems, drivers and other programs related directly to hardware.
Tools
This is everything that helps developers: debugging tools, frameworks, and programming languages themselves. This is a separate area that requires a very serious level of developers. Without a basic fundamental education, it is very difficult to engage in this area, but with great desire and diligence it is possible.
Desktop
Losing popularity, but still a very active direction is the desktop. These are the so-called “thick clients”, when the program is launched locally, most often without an Internet connection.
In this direction, such languages as C++, Java and C# have always been popular, but those languages that not so long ago no one planned to use to write thick clients are on the heels of recognized authorities.
But the modern world dictates its own rules, and JavaScript has become a universal language that penetrates deeper and deeper into absolutely all areas of development and on which more and more applications appear. Even Microsoft representatives have said that in future Windows operating systems, all applications will use HTML and JavaScript. And indeed: serious thick clients and applications on the desktop are already writing JavaScript. A prime example of this is VSCode, a very popular editor that will be used in many of our tutorials and which we recommend installing. This editor was released by Microsoft and is based on Electron, which uses JavaScript, which allows you to build cross-platform applications: that is, those that are written once, but work on all platforms.