Almost everyone who is in the game development industry came from the student game development or indie world. Creating virtual worlds in their spare time, they dream of what it would be like to finally do for a living what they do in free time. And after months or years of networking, resume submissions, and job interviews, they finally land themselves a job with a game company and are welcomed to the world of electronic entertainment.
While working in the games industry certainly is a dream come true, many talented students and hobbyists become professional game developers only to be surprised that the job wasn't exactly what they thought it was. They are used so working solo or at most with teams of two or three; now their teams consist of an entire office building floor.
They are used to understanding every single line of the code in a game; now they specialize in a certain area or module, while no single person knows the entire code base in complete detail. They are used to doing what they think is fun or right for the game; now they are learning to work as a team and sell other team members on their ideas, or back off as superiors drive the vision.
The differences I've listed so far are small, but they are examples of the kind of culture shock that new entrants to the games industry can experience. Beyond these, there are four more major differences between working on your own project at home and working on someone else's project at a company. And if working in the games industry is your ambition, then you should be ready and prepared for the changes that will one day come.
You can't "quit" the project.
While working on independent projects with other students, you can quit with no major disaster. You get busy with other things, your exam schedule doesn't allow you any programming time, or you lose interest in the idea (or the group). The project is essentially a hobby, meaning that your primary motivation for doing it is your own enjoyment, and so if things start to not work out in your favor for one reason or another, you can stop working on it and move on with other parts of your life. Other indie developers have a bad habit of not completing games. Before one indie title is even half way finished, they are already so excited about the next idea in their head that they scrap it.
Some independent game development organizations have fantastic group cohesion to prevent this, but more often than not, an independent project is abandoned without much fanfare. But when game development is your full time occupation, your nine-to-five, then quitting is not an option (unless you actually want to quit your job and lose your livelihood).
This is true all the way through the project: it is true in the beginning when the design of the game is new and exciting, and it is equally as true eighty percent of the way through the project when you are bored to tears of implementation. When things get slow, you can't quit. When your teammates are being unprofessional or downright unbearable, you can't quit. When the tools or the tech isn't working, you can't quit. When management steps in and obliterates your vision for the game's last chance at artistic integrity, you can't quit.
I've described a lot of unhappy scenarios here that might cause you to want to quit, but realize that not quitting is also encouraging. Knowing that your team is going to get it done on time, no matter what, can help you through those dark times, help you grow as a person, and give you a sense of determination that will help you on future projects as well as other areas of your life. And during those late night long hauls, when everyone has banded together under the mission of creating a fantastic game, those are the times when heroes are made, another experience that rarely appears in indie game development.
