Hello, I want to introduce myself first. I'm a 14 year old (pretty young) guy who wants to do what I want and earn a living for doing it. I'm unfortunately born in a poor country which is the Philippines.

I started having interest in games when I was 4 years old. No one in our family likes gaming as much as I do. I discovered gaming after getting my first console. My mom didn't bought me something like a PC, XBOX , or a PlayStation. My first console is a NES where I first played Super Mario, Bomberman, and obviously Duck Hunt. As years pass by I can consider myself a casual gamer. I once got too much addiction on gaming and ends up playing 2-3 days straight. After playing that long I felt really bad and got myself a restriction to gaming whereas I'm only allowed to play games for 5 hours in a day. I lose interest in playing MMORPG because of that but I never lost my hate to FPS because I suck init.

When I reached high school I became more aware of my health and felt like doing something productive so I studied taekwondo (martial arts), practiced drawing alot I even got myself a junk Genius Graphic Tablet which is the worst so I end up drawing on papers and now I'm learning html. I feel alot better now I still practice drawing but I quited taekwondo. One day I felt like html is fun and decided that I should just continue more and try to know how C++ works. I started learning html to improve my site which is http://leogamingblogs.blogspot.com. Now I know a little bit about Java and Flash but I want to reach a whole new level and do this to earn my living when I grow up.

So this are my questions:

*Can I work on other country where I can received good salary as a game programmer even If I will go to college in the Philippines?
- I think Philippine Education is nothing if you compare it to other University on more developed countries. I feel like the fact that I came and studied in the Philippines will have an impact on the way companies will think of my skills.

*Should I just give up and find something new?

*What college course do I need to take? ( What if I just try and learn from books and tutorials.)

*Why does games from our country doesn't go well?
-Is it because of our Education, Our ideas are not that great, or We just don't have the skill. I'm aware that most of us doesn't want to pay for our games so games that only us can relate to doesn't go as successful as the other games.

Hi LeoLoon ,

I create this account just the give you an answer, and I was very much in a similar position as you are now.

Before I went to university I dreamed about become a GameDev, and I even make some fun things with RPG Maker, however today I am a "Software Developer" (yep, that's right, not game dev :P)

I'm from Brazil and when i was choosing my course at the university, there was no specific game-related course and I had *no ideia* about the game market over here, but "games" are softwares and i took the closest course i could find .

I don't have the insight about the "global game market" the explain the minimal details of a lot of things, but i'll try to answer your questions.

*Can I work on other country where I can received good salary as a game programmer even If I will go to college in the Philippines?

Don't make your choices based on "how much you will earn". If you do what you enjoy, what makes you happy, what gives you pleasure, you will become good at it and you will eventually find a way to earn money doing it (look the e-sports championship, people earn money *playing* games!)

With that said, yes, you can work for companies that'll pay you a good salary. Or you can take a chance and try to open you own studio, on you own country, and show to the rest of the world the ideas that came from there. Look at Chroma Squad and Toren (games from Brazil \o/ ) and Never Alone (a game from Alaska), those games were made outside huge companies, by people like you and me, and today they are being played from all around the world and people are liking it!

I think Philippine Education is nothing if you compare it to other University on more developed countries. I feel like the fact that I came and studied in the Philippines will have an impact on the way companies will think of my skills.

Maybe yes, maybe no. This will tell more about the company that you are trying to join than about yourself. Brazil also don't have a good education and even tho, today i work for a US company.

It's not the college who creates a good/bad student. It's the person itself that do not let obstacles and excuses getting in the way of what you want to learn.

And let me tell you one thing : Programming is NOT easy, you can be proud of yourself already!

*Should I just give up and find something new?

No, no, no..no..no.. I never see "giving up" as option. It'll certainly be hard and thank God it's hard, otherwise any dumb person could do it and we would not have any fun from "creating our own beast". You may take different paths than a lot of people, but if you keep trying, eventually you will get where you want to be.

Thomas Edison tried more than a thousand times to create the "Lamp" and when asked about "why so many tries?" he answered : "I learned more than one thousand times of how NOT to create it."

you can read this : https://www.reddit.com/r/getdisciplined/comments/1q96b5/i_just_dont_care_about_myself/cdah4af

It's a motivational topic (about life in general) but i read this article almost every month. It's just amazing!

*What college course do I need to take?

Just like me, you may not find a specific game-related course, but you can look for "close enough" courses. Any programming course can lead you to "game programming" and any design course can lead you to "game design". Seriously, in the future you may even find people from Law background programming games/softwares, it's a very rich and funny environment.

You may also not take a course at all , but it will be a harder path . The courses will never make you an expert in anything, they will only show you the "not so hard" path and, mainly, allow you to meet other people with the same goals as you.

What if I just try and learn from books and tutorials

THIS. This is so HUGE that i let it to the end. It doesn't matter what course you do, what background you have, which country did you came from.

The desire to learn, to do, to understand it's what is really needed. No course in the world can teach you this. i'm in the 6-to-7 years of programming and I still learn from books and tutorials and they teach better then college. Putting what I learn in practice, trying it, is how I can evolve from where the book left me and how i can came up with better solutions for my specific challenges (ones that weren't in any books).

You said that you know Html, Java, Flash and drawing. You, sir, already have the desire to learn! Keep feeding it and you will move mountains.

Best wishes on your journey.

4. *What college course do I need to take?

4. You should get a Computer Science degree.

Hi LeoLoon ,

I create this account just the give you an answer, and I was very much in a similar position as you are now.

Before I went to university I dreamed about become a GameDev, and I even make some fun things with RPG Maker, however today I am a "Software Developer" (yep, that's right, not game dev )

I'm from Brazil and when i was choosing my course at the university, there was no specific game-related course and I had *no ideia* about the game market over here, but "games" are softwares and i took the closest course i could find .

I don't have the insight about the "global game market" the explain the minimal details of a lot of things, but i'll try to answer your questions.

*What college course do I need to take?

Just like me, you may not find a specific game-related course, but you can look for "close enough" courses. Any programming course can lead you to "game programming" and any design course can lead you to "game design". Seriously, in the future you may even find people from Law background programming games/softwares, it's a very rich and funny environment.

You may also not take a course at all , but it will be a harder path . The courses will never make you an expert in anything, they will only show you the "not so hard" path and, mainly, allow you to meet other people with the same goals as you.

What if I just try and learn from books and tutorials

THIS. This is so HUGE that i let it to the end. It doesn't matter what course you do, what background you have, which country did you came from.

The desire to learn, to do, to understand it's what is really needed. No course in the world can teach you this. i'm in the 6-to-7 years of programming and I still learn from books and tutorials and they teach better then college. Putting what I learn in practice, trying it, is how I can evolve from where the book left me and how i can came up with better solutions for my specific challenges (ones that weren't in any books).

You said that you know Html, Java, Flash and drawing. You, sir, already have the desire to learn! Keep feeding it and you will move mountains.

Best wishes on your journey.

With those said does that mean that there are no courses that will teach you about game developing?
While I'm still in high school can you recommend books for me to learn other programming language that I will need to know?
If I study programming language early will it lessen my struggle when I go to college?

Thanks for all of the advice.

Game development is not a single thing.

It is hundreds of little things all put together in custom ways.

Study math, all the math you can get. Linear algebra (usually taught in a second or third year college math) is absolutely essential to 3D games. Trigonometry is essential for world manipulation. Statistics is essential since much of games involve probabilities, distributions, and "random chance". Iterative methods are nice, but can be simplified greatly with calculus. Get all the math you are able to.

Study whatever you can about algorithms and data structures. There are a small number of fundamentals that you need to understand. The biggest and most common tasks, sorting and searching, need to be second nature. Graph problems are extremely common in games as things move from node to node, from place to place, and you want that done as efficiently as you can. Lots of transformations are important and take place continually, transforming data from this into that through as many different processes as can be imagined. Theory of state machines and regular expressions, theory of PDAs, complexity theory, computing theory, lots of it to study.

Then you can study hardware and real world situations. Study how hardware works, how caching works, how processors work, how data moves between physical hardware, how the location of data on physical hardware is critically important.

And of course you will need to study programming languages. Good programmers know many languages. They can hop around between C++, Java, C#, HTML, Python, SQL, JavaScript, Lua, and many others. Once you are professional you should dabble with at least one new programming language every year, but fortunately that is pretty easy. There is much to study about the patterns and practices that are common in each language, and learning many languages will give you an ever-expanding toolkit of various ways to solve problems.

Additional Questions:

I learned HTML already but I still need references to make it work, I know the basics of Java and Flash but I found out that Python is much more simple and these articles says that you should learn Python before C, C# or C++. If I want to tackle C badly so should I continue with Java and Flash or Focus more on Python?

Can you recommend any books to help me work with learning programming languages? Internet Tutorials are not really working good enough for me because they don't explain stuffs well and I always go and use google to know what they really mean.

What is the best way or best method to memorize tags and stuffs? (Should I like make something while learning or just learn all of them first and try using them later?)

Do they teach math and stuffs in Computer Science course?