I think there is a misconception, game development is such a great job, all the fun, all the excitement, all the joy of Christmas every day.  I’m sorry, that is not true.  Let me explain what game development is like for me, and remember I love it.

You get up early, look at your task list, if you are lucky there is a task on there that sounds fun.  You begin working on that task, it expands to a large programming mess.  You stop programming and design a better system to fix or create whatever you were doing.  If you are lucky once the task is complete the game still compiles and nothing different is displayed.

I know there are some days where you create that awesome effect that changes the look and feel of everything, but most days are debugging, tweaking, or designing.  If you throw in marketing you got a real nice day.  See, game development is one of the hardest programming jobs you can have.  It is not like business software, you actually care about memory usage and display rate.

The next time you are sitting at home playing some game, and think how great it would be to be a game developer, stop and think of the massive effort, stubborn commitment, and tears it took to put that game together.  Then smile and keep playing.