I program iPhone games for a small company. Always wanted to work in the games industry.

If you want to go Indie (one or few developers) you can save a lot of money. But it's also tough, you need to be talented and make an original interesting game to make money.

Around 3 months from proposal, testing then conception. Do you have any programming experience by the way?

This post has been edited by Andrew Lim: Jan 10 2011, 09:20 AM

Yeah game programming is hard. It's not easy to create a fun game with good graphics.

It's good to start out with simple games. I started out with Tic-Tac-Toe then progressed to making an AI to play Minesweeper Flags. Although these projects were small, they helped buff up my resume and nail a game programming job.

But now I want to do my own indie game because working for a company has a lot of disadvantages.

I have to agree with Cheesenium - having an idea is not enough. Everybody and his brother has an idea. "Hey, let's make a game like <insert famous game here> but with <revolutionary innovative fun game mechanic>!" I've met many people who have had ideas, not only in the games industry. I was in the banking industry for a while too. And I can say those people who have no development experience tend to over-estimate how much they can accomplish and underestimate the amount of resources they need.

Even if you want to go Indie, most of the Indie game developers are people who know how to code. They know the limitations of what a machine can do, and how hard it is to implement so-and-so feature.

You don't have to just sell games in Malaysia. This is 2011, the era of digital distribution. You can create a website like Minecraft's and sell via paypal. If your game is good enough, you can send a demo or copy to Valve and if they approve you can sell it in Steam.

This post has been edited by Andrew Lim: Jan 10 2011, 06:19 PM

Nowadays it's very rare to find couses that teach GUI programming in C++. Most of the time the teachers in Universities also don't have experience with it. I had to teach myself C++ graphics and Win32 programming by myself many years ago.

Nowadays it's slightly easier to do graphics in C++ thanks to GUI libraries like SDL, wxWidgets and Qt. These libraries have OpenGL bindings so it's possible to do 3D graphics too.

Many Valve games use Lua to some extent. World of Warcraft also used to use Lua files for configuration. Not sure if they still do.