How do I get into the Game Industry – by Garry's Mod creator

Summary

Every now and then someone tells me that their child loves video games and wants to get into the game industry, then asks me how they do it. So here's a blog that I can paste a link to.I don't knowI've got to say first of all that I don't know if I ever got into the game industry. It's my main job but I don't know how a real game studio works. I've never worked in a proper game studio.So if you want to work on FIFA or GTA, I have no idea how you get there, sorry.But if you just want to make games and not have to get a real job, I can tell you how I would do it.Not ProgrammingI'm going to focus on the idea that you want to be a programmer. Being an artist isn't a completely different beast. It's still about getting really interested and really good at what you do, and then doing it. Artists have quite easy entry points in the industry now like making Skins that get sold in Rust - and they can make a good living off that.But if you are thinking about being an artist, I would say that you can help yourself by being multi-disciplinary. If you're a 3d artist who is also a shitty programmer, you're still better than just a 3d artist. If you can model, rig and animate, you're more useful than someone who can only animate.The 1990sWhen I was trying to learn how to program games it was the 1990s. There wasn't any internet. I had to get books from the library and read magazines. I had no-one to ask questions to. It was hard.When we did get internet, when I was about 16, it was dial up and we had to pay per minute. I had to set it up so I'd dial up, download a whole website to read offline, and then disconnect and read through it.Even that was hard. The tutorials from websites were written more at my level, but it was still one way. No questions asking, lots of wrong assumptions.When I was 16 I went to college.. and while I'm sure it taught me some stuff, I don't know how actually useful it was. Just as an aside, for any Americans reading - I think our college is different to ...