So your teenager tells you they want to 'make video games' for a living

Pretty much every teenage boy told me his ambition was to make games. To them I said "study as much maths as your school will teach", which led to crestfallen faces.

To their parents I said "the games industry is terrible, but ours is a general computer science degree. Your boy will be able to get an entry-level job at any software firm".

The girls who came through seemed to be more interested in software as a professional career. It was an interesting contrast.

Have you written anything on it?

* If you actually writing an engine, maybe some linear algebra, calculus. OpenGL/DirectX provides quite a bit of this out of the box. Yes you need to develop some special skills but nothing amazing.

* AI in games is generally heavily scripted. There is some use of common AI ideas in RTS games, for example Monte-Carlo Markov Chains was used in Dark Reign (I think Unreal tournament 2k4 did this as well). It's nothing fancy, most AI in games could be written by someone that took an undergraduate AI class. Writing AI is more about understanding the players expectation of the game.

* Pathfinding is also heavily scripted. In many cases they will just define tracks for NPCs to move on, the NPCs will move to the nearest track and then follow it to their destination.

>There are much fewer programmers working on game logic and many more resources devoted to graphics, physics, pathfinding, AI, tools, and so on.

Many game companies are using an out of the box engine, the jobs are in scripting the game which is primarily game logic and backend stuff, just really boring game logic.

If they want to be "idea guys" who just go around saying, "dragons should be blue", then they need to be told that the world doesn't really work that way, and that "idea guys" who refuse to do real work are not seen as adults and generally loathed and pitied, not taken seriously. Real designers work, and hard, and most of the great designers are programmers or artists in addition.

It's after college that they will realize that there are plenty of things more interesting than most video games: machine learning, scientific computing, compilers. But if video game design is the gateway drug, then that works.

What a lot of young people need to consider is that "follow your passion" is the worst advice in the world. You shouldn't do something you hate, but if your work is what you've wanted to do since you were 5, you'll hate being a subordinate. Absolutely no one says, "a subordinate" when asked (at 5) what he wants to be when he grows up. If your passion causes you get into conflict with bikeshedding executives who have terrible ideas but can fire you, then avoid. That advice should be, "find work you enjoy, and transition to your passion when you're no longer a subordinate".