Like many young men I felt the call of duty early on in life. I joined the service and did that for 23 years. Now I do similar things that are just as time consuming. While I like the idea of being a game developer, getting to work in door's, decent pay, no one trying to kill you - that all sounds great but it just isn't for me. I need action and adventure, I am absolutely an adrenaline junkie and I feel I would wither and die if I tried to pursue a job/career that kept me stagnant all the time.
If you want a new idea, go read an old book.
In order to be insulted, I must first value your opinion.
Partially availability of educational facilities. My area is (or was, rather) big on the auto industry, and in the late 90's the only colleges offering anything close to game design were out of state, and I had no way to pay for it.
The larger part was that, as my teen years passed and I grew older and more experienced, I realized what a shit job game programming and development really was. People like Richard Garriott, George Broussard, and John Romero had nice houses, fancy cars, and in the case of Romero, lived almost like rock stars, throwing around money like professional athletes or hip-hop performers.
Of course, it's not really like that for the vast majority of people in the games development industry. Hours are extremely long, stress is high, and the pay is generally mediocre at best. There's a lot of temp jobs, and the volatility of the industry as a whole means job security is often a luxury.
It was just a reality check, I guess. I had one when I was 8 or 9 and realized that Indiana Jones wasn't an accurate depiction of an archaeologist's job was like, though in my defense I think a lot of people my age went through that one at some point. Still kind of wish I'd gone into that though, because it is genuinely fascinating even without all the traps, curses, Nazis, and ancient mummies trying to kill you. Ah well.
AN' DERE AIN'T NO SUCH FING AS ENUFF DAKKA, YA GROT! Enuff'z more than ya got an' less than too much an' there ain't no such fing as too much dakka. Say dere is, and me Squiggoff'z eatin' tonight!
We are born of the blood. Made men by the blood. Undone by the blood. Our eyes are yet to open. FEAR THE OLD BLOOD.
I was a game developer for a while. Watched as the studio brought in talent from all over the nation and work tirelessly for years to create and launch a game only to have the company lay most of them off post launch. As I sat there after the meeting watching people I had become friends with shuffle back to their desks to pack their things there was a sort of quiet reservation as most of them that had been in the industry longer than I responded, yeah, this is normal... They had moved their families here. Their children had changed schools, only to get uprooted again.
After that I just really couldn't see myself working in a field where employees are completely and utterly expendable. I was a kid that grew up with dreams of becoming a developer and when I finally realized that dream, like so many adult moments in our lives, the rose glasses were shattered and I saw the game industry for what it can and often truly is. It's cut-throat, it's who you know, it's at the whim of the publisher too often, and it can swallow you and spit you out. It is sitting their having to listen to gamers call you and the company you work for every name in the book for some decision that often isn't even yours. It is thankless, endless nights, and the money in not that great unless you are some high profile dev at the head of one of the few successful firms. Is it fun at times, you bet your butt it is. The people are amazing, and there is really nothing better than seeing something you dreamed up become a reality. It can just be difficult to live with what happens after the prom.
Agree we all wished the same and had false expectation about this career. Fortunately I had a older friend who got into IT field and he changed my mind )))
I can understand C++ but I cannot debug ANYTHING. Thats why.
If you code properly, you shouldn't have to be good at the debugger. I almost never use it. Why? Because I use TDD.
Sorry but I have to throw the B.S. flag here. Anyone who writes code SHOULD know how to use the debugger in whatever IDE they are using. Whether it's Visual Studio, NetBeans, BlueJay,..whatever. As in it behooves them. Not to mention anyone who writes code knows that unless you are reusing code, then you stand a good chance of your code not working the first time you run it. Even if you are reusing modules things very seldom run perfectly "right out of the box". That's just the nature of the beast. If you don't know how to debug, or are not proficient with your IDE's debugger, then you become a liability. Just saying.
It depends tremendously on what you're doing. For a simple test, print statements are likely good enough. If you're trying to hunt down memory leaks, simple print statements aren't going to help you much, but a tool like valgrind might. If you've got a huge number of threads passing data back and forth chaotically, using a debugger to step through one thread isn't going to do you any good. When doing graphics, if the end result looks good, it's arguably correct even if it wasn't what was originally intended.
Money, work live balance, benefits are major reasons.
Edit: If I was to follow a "dream job" where I made less, with fewer benefits and no job security, video game programming wouldn't be it.
Just not my dream. I am happy playing the games from time to time.
“It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money - that's all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot - it can't be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you will have enough to pay for something better.”
I considered it, took electronics engineering for a bit - was hired to work at Origin and then EA bought them. . then laid off a bunch of people before I headed to Austin to start. That turned out for the best - now I teach students with Autism and behaviour disorders instead (love my job!) and run a coding club at my school.
I have piddled around with software development since and always consider making educational apps etc. I'm glad I made the choice I did because it always should have been a hobby. I'm passionate about the tech and gaming but not enough to do it all day every day.
This question could be relevant to surprisingly many people here.
Many people who play games have probably thought about that question.
There are varying reasons a lot of people don't. Many people feel that it's a certain way and when they get a taste of what the schooling is like or what actually goes on and all that it often doesn't appeal to them as much. Then you hear what the jobs are actually like. Long hours, crazy workloads, and all this other stuff. There is a reason so many game studios are lavish in amenities like gyms, arcades, and food areas... Truth is it is a lot of work to be a game developer / design or anything of the sort.
I'm glad I made the choice I did because it always should have been a hobby. I'm passionate about the tech and gaming but not enough to do it all day every day.
I wish I had done that with writing. I got a degree in English with a plan to write novels for a living, and ended up quitting writing entirely instead of keeping it as the fun hobby it was.
I want to help design and develop a PvE-focused, solo-friendly, sandpark MMO which combines crafting, monster hunting, and story. So PM me if you are starting one.
I didn't go into the game industry because I was not sufficiently skillful to be a developer without knowing someone. Now its because I don't want to sign non-compete agreements for an absurdly long period of time. I also hate game producers. Their role is to properly plan out development so it's done within budget and time constraints while properly motivating employees to contribute a sufficient amount to meet those goals. Yet most of the time, the time wasted in development is a result of the poor decisions of game producers. So you are pretty much working double hours to accomplish the same thing because the producer did not plan things out well. On top of this, the higher level producers get paid a percent of net profits.
I dabbled in game development during my late high school / early college days. While it was fun in some ways, the main takeaway I had from it was that it killed much of the mystery of video games, since it gave me a behind a scenes look at how they function. At the end of the day, I also just didn't find game design as interesting as 'pure' computer science - data structures, algorithm analysis, etc.
Game design as a career is generally very overrated. It's not all fun and games, as many people seem to think.
This question could be relevant to surprisingly many people here.
Many people who play games have probably thought about that question.
Awesome question.
I started programming myself at a young age (BASIC on a TRS-80!). I dabbled in C, and more recently, in HTML. Nothing real groundbreaking. I have used "game creators" to make my own games. I'm quite good at art, animating sprites like games of yore.
Do to a combination of factors, I became convinced at an early age that I was terrible at Math. This isn't unusual. My theory about myself was backed up by others. It's a common misconception for people to think, "I'm just not a math person."
Then I read an article by some game programmer in which he said knowledge of math was the most important thing a programmer could have.
Being a naive teenager, I concluded that there was no possible way I could ever be a game programmer.
I went through college as a History major (because... very little math required, right?), became an educator (History/Literature), and now spend my days telling students to never, EVER listen to anybody who says they can't do anything, including themselves. If they want it bad enough, they can make it happen. "Where there's a will, there's a way" so to speak.
Still, I meet with parents who say, "Our family just isn't good at math," or, "I wasn't good at math, so I know my kid isn't going to be good at it."
I'm quite happy. There's no bitterness. I do believe that each of us could become programmers, given time and effort. I am still convinced that I may one day learn more about programming games, but so far, I have not given myself time to do it. Perhaps it'll be a retirement hobby.
_____________________________ "Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit"
Math is actually important to programming. You won't get far in game programing without understanding basic trigonometry. The more advanced Linear Algebra is also helpful. Still you are right. You should not listen to someone who says you are not good at Math. Math isn't subjective, its absolute. Math is also a lot easier to understand when you are taught math properly. Break down problems and only advance when you understand the concepts. This is actually something common core helps with. Eliminate some of the problems and misconceptions in teaching math.
Everyone i've known that did pursue a game development career and many more from observations seemed absolutely miserable.
Personally if i'm going to be working 14-16 hours days it's going to be for myself and on something i love. I don't think i'd fit into the corporate culture that studios have turned into.
This question could be relevant to surprisingly many people here.
Many people who play games have probably thought about that question.
If I could have I would have done this long ago, not to mention the only place to really get hired for such jobs isn't in my living area either and with Real Life wouldn't be possible...
But I can tell you if I actually had taken this path, and have actually had the funds to actually make a MMO from scratch or a serious company, Not Sony, Not Korean Companies, there would have been MMO's or MMO's designed that were a lot better than all the failures today...
Although speaking of such games such as "Legend OF Cryptids" which are just APPS can net you thousands of dollars a month if you do it like their games there are actually "Whales" who will pay for a simple card game $200 +a month and considering it really costs nothing to run GG.
I did start out pursuing a game development career.
1) School
I'm one of the lucky ones in that I was good at everything when I was at school, be it maths, science, sports or art. The only time I'd do badly is if I just stopped caring (for example, French) but even then, my worst grade at school was a B. Sadly, I didn't enjoy anything at school so I just wanted to do something fun with my life - computer games.
2) University
I did my research before choosing a course. There are multiple routes into games development, either concept art, modeling, world building, programming, testing etc. There are tons of artists out there, loads of modellers but programmers were and still are in demand. As I didn't enjoy anything at school it didn't really seem to matter what I chose, so I chose programming. I studied Computer Science with Artificial Intelligence (BSc Hons) at a top UK University (was 3rd in country for comp sci when I went).
However, my degree opened my eyes to the reality of developers life. You're sat in front of a PC all day staring at text files. If you're lucky, you get to work on something that compiles into something visual, but mostly, you're staring at text files and solving logic problems all day. As a result, my motivation dropped.
I tried to make it fun, so I did a year long industrial placement with a defence firm. I worked on software for Black Hawks and Nimrods. The reality was still utter boredom.
Finished out my degree, but due to lack of motivation only got a 2:2, my lowest grade ever.
3) Post Uni
With only a 2:2, I couldn't get a job as a developer straight out of uni in a gaming company. They all wanted 2:1 or higher for junior / apprentice roles OR a portfolio of games work. So, I worked as a developer in web services / broadcast media / CRMs for years, hating every minute of it. However, extremely hard to change careers - having a highly technical degree makes me overqualified for most "normal" jobs (I couldn't even get a bar job without dumbing down my cv!) but underqualified for other decent jobs (because my degree was so specific).
4) Portfolio
Best way into the games industry is through a personal portfolio - i.e. develop games on your own time. This would have meant spending months of my personal time building my own crappy games - programming engines, tweaking mechanics, learning how to model and build, learning how to animate etc on top of the creative vision. By this point, I'd learnt to hate programming so the thought of writing code on my own time was unbearable. I also had no motivation to make tacky games. I dabbled with content editors / workshops like Oblivion / Skyrim but far outside my existing skillset.
5) Starting from the bottom
2 Years ago I just said "fuck it" and decided to give up on money and start again from the bottom. I got a job working in the QA department of a AAA studio in the UK. Not sure if everyone knows, but QA are the worst paid and its hard to get permanent contracts. I was on a 3 month rolling contract. Out of 90 or so in the QA department, 65 of us were on short term contracts. Hiring started xmas but all of us got let go the following September, 2 months after release of game we'd been working on. This happened every year - QA would be hired for 9 months, then let go, then rehired 3 months later. QA is quicker than development so this is just a reality of the industry.
I tried to get permanent job while I was there. QA was impossible - there were guys who'd been on these short term contracts on and off for 3+ years so I stood no chance. I applied to be a product analyst (essentially, writing database queries to analyse player habits in game, then reporting to management). I actually got the job due to programming background! However, the guy who approved my job got fired the week after he'd approved my job so the company put all new hires on hold until they hired a new guy. Sadly, my QA contract ran out before they could re-approve my job role and I couldn't afford to stay in the area, so I was forced to move cities.
6) Next Steps
I haven't given up! I went back into web development and I now manage a small development team, earning double what I did in QA. My plan is to work on my management skills for a few years and then try to transition back into the games industry. It is rare to find programmers who are also good managers, so what usually happens is you either get bad managers of dev teams, or good managers who simply don't understand what their developers are telling them. I'm different - I understand both and can translate tech speak into "normal" sentences and I've already made a very positive impact on my development team in just 6 months. Give me another 2 years of this and I'll feel confident managing a large development team within the games industry, so I'll start applying.
By that point, I'll be 32 / 33, so still young enough to keep up to date with latest gaming tech and trends, but old enough to have enough experience to be a decent manager and command respect. I think the specific job role I'd go for would be something like "producer" - I'd be in charge of processes, people, management etc, but I wouldn't be the one making technical or creative decisions (because, not being in the industry now, I wouldn't have the authority to).
Well I did have a plan to become a programmer with thoughts of doing so in the gaming industry, but sophomore year of undergrad I got an internship at a company that wrote some AI for Sony. I changed majors before the internship was over as I hated programming so much.
It's one thing when you're in school and you have a large project that you build by yourself and get to see things come to life, it's another when you're part of a big team and each of you is working on a portion of a whole and you're jumping around working on various section while you wait for others to do theirs bleh. it's not satisfying at all. Not to mention starting at code all day is mind numbing. When I asked myself, "Could I do this for the next 10, 20 , 30 years?" The answer was a flat out NOPE, I'd rather kill myself.
So I went with what I had originally wanted to do which was fine arts painting and photography and after that and grad school, I now work in digital marketing and communications and do lots of design work. It may not pay as much as being a programmer, but at least I can enjoy my work most of the time.
I find even making normal programs in C++ is tedious work. Especially Windows programs. Things get convoluted and unorganized quickly if you don't have really good organizational and categorization skills. It's also difficult to go back and change code you wrote for this reason.
It requires a lot of time to learn to use other peoples functions and classes they wrote. I've spent many days just looking up Windows API functions to send text to a textbox or retrieve a value from windowproc wParam/lParam and how it is implemented for that specific windows message that occurs.
Learning 2D and 3D directx is even more time consuming as it involves a lot of different factions and an ugly looking syntax. I guess the bonus is that it's object oriented. It's too bad that they haven't been able to implement an easier to use managed version in .NET. XNA generally isn't used by professionals and is now maintained by a community of people. A managed version of directx should be the mainstream way to code games IMO. It must not be very good if it has that much overhead that people still have to write games in C++ and use pointers to load things into memory and remove them from memory.
You need an understanding of networking if you want to write an MMO or a networked games. This can be fairly complex to send messages back and forth on a network even if you have prewritten classes to do so.
Learning to draw 2D or 3D images in very time consuming and requires at least a bit of talent.
Learning to make music for the game is time consuming.
Learning to implement physics is time consuming.
Learning to put it all together in a loop is time consuming.
Basically it is a lot of work and much of it is tedious (not fun). That's probably why so many people work together on these games. One person trying to do it all is a daunting task.
I can understand C++ but I cannot debug ANYTHING. Thats why.
If you code properly, you shouldn't have to be good at the debugger. I almost never use it. Why? Because I use TDD.
Here is a good video to explain this: (skip the first 5 minutes, he just talks off topic to get nerds attention)
at 14:30 - 16:00 he specifies the benefits of TDD and why you don't need to be good at the debugger.
This works fine, when you're program is isolated.
Taking on cloud dependencies, API's or any instance where you are working with remote systems you do not directly control requires interfaces and mocks. Suddenly your 100% test coverage begins to dip and you're debugging once again.
Comments
If you want a new idea, go read an old book.
In order to be insulted, I must first value your opinion.
The larger part was that, as my teen years passed and I grew older and more experienced, I realized what a shit job game programming and development really was. People like Richard Garriott, George Broussard, and John Romero had nice houses, fancy cars, and in the case of Romero, lived almost like rock stars, throwing around money like professional athletes or hip-hop performers.
Of course, it's not really like that for the vast majority of people in the games development industry. Hours are extremely long, stress is high, and the pay is generally mediocre at best. There's a lot of temp jobs, and the volatility of the industry as a whole means job security is often a luxury.
It was just a reality check, I guess. I had one when I was 8 or 9 and realized that Indiana Jones wasn't an accurate depiction of an archaeologist's job was like, though in my defense I think a lot of people my age went through that one at some point. Still kind of wish I'd gone into that though, because it is genuinely fascinating even without all the traps, curses, Nazis, and ancient mummies trying to kill you. Ah well.
AN' DERE AIN'T NO SUCH FING AS ENUFF DAKKA, YA GROT! Enuff'z more than ya got an' less than too much an' there ain't no such fing as too much dakka. Say dere is, and me Squiggoff'z eatin' tonight!
We are born of the blood. Made men by the blood. Undone by the blood. Our eyes are yet to open. FEAR THE OLD BLOOD.
#IStandWithVic
"Oh behave!"
Edit: If I was to follow a "dream job" where I made less, with fewer benefits and no job security, video game programming wouldn't be it.
Just not my dream. I am happy playing the games from time to time.
--John Ruskin
I quit that job and went to school full time.
Slowly learned that I would be working long hours, including weekends due to deadlines because of poor management. I changed my major.
My life is more important than a little extra money. Except that I fucked up and started my own business last year. lol
I have piddled around with software development since and always consider making educational apps etc. I'm glad I made the choice I did because it always should have been a hobby. I'm passionate about the tech and gaming but not enough to do it all day every day.
Wa min God! Se æx on min heafod is!
I also hate game producers. Their role is to properly plan out development so it's done within budget and time constraints while properly motivating employees to contribute a sufficient amount to meet those goals. Yet most of the time, the time wasted in development is a result of the poor decisions of game producers. So you are pretty much working double hours to accomplish the same thing because the producer did not plan things out well. On top of this, the higher level producers get paid a percent of net profits.
Game design as a career is generally very overrated. It's not all fun and games, as many people seem to think.
I started programming myself at a young age (BASIC on a TRS-80!). I dabbled in C, and more recently, in HTML. Nothing real groundbreaking. I have used "game creators" to make my own games. I'm quite good at art, animating sprites like games of yore.
Do to a combination of factors, I became convinced at an early age that I was terrible at Math. This isn't unusual. My theory about myself was backed up by others. It's a common misconception for people to think, "I'm just not a math person."
Then I read an article by some game programmer in which he said knowledge of math was the most important thing a programmer could have.
Being a naive teenager, I concluded that there was no possible way I could ever be a game programmer.
I went through college as a History major (because... very little math required, right?), became an educator (History/Literature), and now spend my days telling students to never, EVER listen to anybody who says they can't do anything, including themselves. If they want it bad enough, they can make it happen. "Where there's a will, there's a way" so to speak.
Still, I meet with parents who say, "Our family just isn't good at math," or, "I wasn't good at math, so I know my kid isn't going to be good at it."
I'm quite happy. There's no bitterness. I do believe that each of us could become programmers, given time and effort. I am still convinced that I may one day learn more about programming games, but so far, I have not given myself time to do it. Perhaps it'll be a retirement hobby.
_____________________________
"Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit"
Personally if i'm going to be working 14-16 hours days it's going to be for myself and on something i love. I don't think i'd fit into the corporate culture that studios have turned into.
However with either, you never have a consistent job. I would rather make a guaranteed check ... then not know where my next check is...
But I can tell you if I actually had taken this path, and have actually had the funds to actually make a MMO from scratch or a serious company, Not Sony, Not Korean Companies, there would have been MMO's or MMO's designed that were a lot better than all the failures today...
Although speaking of such games such as "Legend OF Cryptids" which are just APPS can net you thousands of dollars a month if you do it like their games there are actually "Whales" who will pay for a simple card game $200 +a month and considering it really costs nothing to run GG.
1) School
I'm one of the lucky ones in that I was good at everything when I was at school, be it maths, science, sports or art. The only time I'd do badly is if I just stopped caring (for example, French) but even then, my worst grade at school was a B. Sadly, I didn't enjoy anything at school so I just wanted to do something fun with my life - computer games.
2) University
I did my research before choosing a course. There are multiple routes into games development, either concept art, modeling, world building, programming, testing etc. There are tons of artists out there, loads of modellers but programmers were and still are in demand. As I didn't enjoy anything at school it didn't really seem to matter what I chose, so I chose programming. I studied Computer Science with Artificial Intelligence (BSc Hons) at a top UK University (was 3rd in country for comp sci when I went).
However, my degree opened my eyes to the reality of developers life. You're sat in front of a PC all day staring at text files. If you're lucky, you get to work on something that compiles into something visual, but mostly, you're staring at text files and solving logic problems all day. As a result, my motivation dropped.
I tried to make it fun, so I did a year long industrial placement with a defence firm. I worked on software for Black Hawks and Nimrods. The reality was still utter boredom.
Finished out my degree, but due to lack of motivation only got a 2:2, my lowest grade ever.
3) Post Uni
With only a 2:2, I couldn't get a job as a developer straight out of uni in a gaming company. They all wanted 2:1 or higher for junior / apprentice roles OR a portfolio of games work. So, I worked as a developer in web services / broadcast media / CRMs for years, hating every minute of it. However, extremely hard to change careers - having a highly technical degree makes me overqualified for most "normal" jobs (I couldn't even get a bar job without dumbing down my cv!) but underqualified for other decent jobs (because my degree was so specific).
4) Portfolio
Best way into the games industry is through a personal portfolio - i.e. develop games on your own time. This would have meant spending months of my personal time building my own crappy games - programming engines, tweaking mechanics, learning how to model and build, learning how to animate etc on top of the creative vision. By this point, I'd learnt to hate programming so the thought of writing code on my own time was unbearable. I also had no motivation to make tacky games. I dabbled with content editors / workshops like Oblivion / Skyrim but far outside my existing skillset.
5) Starting from the bottom
2 Years ago I just said "fuck it" and decided to give up on money and start again from the bottom. I got a job working in the QA department of a AAA studio in the UK. Not sure if everyone knows, but QA are the worst paid and its hard to get permanent contracts. I was on a 3 month rolling contract. Out of 90 or so in the QA department, 65 of us were on short term contracts. Hiring started xmas but all of us got let go the following September, 2 months after release of game we'd been working on. This happened every year - QA would be hired for 9 months, then let go, then rehired 3 months later. QA is quicker than development so this is just a reality of the industry.
I tried to get permanent job while I was there. QA was impossible - there were guys who'd been on these short term contracts on and off for 3+ years so I stood no chance. I applied to be a product analyst (essentially, writing database queries to analyse player habits in game, then reporting to management). I actually got the job due to programming background! However, the guy who approved my job got fired the week after he'd approved my job so the company put all new hires on hold until they hired a new guy. Sadly, my QA contract ran out before they could re-approve my job role and I couldn't afford to stay in the area, so I was forced to move cities.
6) Next Steps
I haven't given up! I went back into web development and I now manage a small development team, earning double what I did in QA. My plan is to work on my management skills for a few years and then try to transition back into the games industry. It is rare to find programmers who are also good managers, so what usually happens is you either get bad managers of dev teams, or good managers who simply don't understand what their developers are telling them. I'm different - I understand both and can translate tech speak into "normal" sentences and I've already made a very positive impact on my development team in just 6 months. Give me another 2 years of this and I'll feel confident managing a large development team within the games industry, so I'll start applying.
By that point, I'll be 32 / 33, so still young enough to keep up to date with latest gaming tech and trends, but old enough to have enough experience to be a decent manager and command respect. I think the specific job role I'd go for would be something like "producer" - I'd be in charge of processes, people, management etc, but I wouldn't be the one making technical or creative decisions (because, not being in the industry now, I wouldn't have the authority to).
It's one thing when you're in school and you have a large project that you build by yourself and get to see things come to life, it's another when you're part of a big team and each of you is working on a portion of a whole and you're jumping around working on various section while you wait for others to do theirs bleh. it's not satisfying at all. Not to mention starting at code all day is mind numbing. When I asked myself, "Could I do this for the next 10, 20 , 30 years?" The answer was a flat out NOPE, I'd rather kill myself.
So I went with what I had originally wanted to do which was fine arts painting and photography and after that and grad school, I now work in digital marketing and communications and do lots of design work. It may not pay as much as being a programmer, but at least I can enjoy my work most of the time.
It requires a lot of time to learn to use other peoples functions and classes they wrote. I've spent many days just looking up Windows API functions to send text to a textbox or retrieve a value from windowproc wParam/lParam and how it is implemented for that specific windows message that occurs.
Learning 2D and 3D directx is even more time consuming as it involves a lot of different factions and an ugly looking syntax. I guess the bonus is that it's object oriented. It's too bad that they haven't been able to implement an easier to use managed version in .NET. XNA generally isn't used by professionals and is now maintained by a community of people. A managed version of directx should be the mainstream way to code games IMO. It must not be very good if it has that much overhead that people still have to write games in C++ and use pointers to load things into memory and remove them from memory.
You need an understanding of networking if you want to write an MMO or a networked games. This can be fairly complex to send messages back and forth on a network even if you have prewritten classes to do so.
Learning to draw 2D or 3D images in very time consuming and requires at least a bit of talent.
Learning to make music for the game is time consuming.
Learning to implement physics is time consuming.
Learning to put it all together in a loop is time consuming.
Basically it is a lot of work and much of it is tedious (not fun). That's probably why so many people work together on these games. One person trying to do it all is a daunting task.
Taking on cloud dependencies, API's or any instance where you are working with remote systems you do not directly control requires interfaces and mocks. Suddenly your 100% test coverage begins to dip and you're debugging once again.