[johnl87]

I'm a computer science major and I've interned at an animation company as a technical director. We were outsourced for a certain AAA game that is coming out in 2011 (can't say what companies cause it would probably breach the NDA.) I spent a few days at the actual game company, and it sort of put me off game programming completely. Even though people had cool offices with posters and toys everywhere it was a very dull and depressing place to work. People came in at 10 and sometimes stayed till midnight. The highlight of the day was ordering dinner at 6pm. It was basically permanent crunch time. Also people don't realize that most of game creating is assets. Animations, mocap, recording dialog, scripting. There is very little actual programming unless you're working on an assets/tools team which makes engines (in my case they licensed the Unreal engine so most of the work in terms of programming was done.) Making a game nowadays is more like making a 10 hour movie...there are writers and directors that are hired. They film the action in a mocap studio and eventually animators clean up the data and level designers import it into the engine.