20 years... two damn decades.
The only advice I have for a newbie to the games industry:
- Value your life more than work...
Your life is yours, not the property of whatever company you work for, America is NOT a communist country so don't act like it is one.
Sure when you have a hard set deadline you should put in a bit of extra work toward your goal, but realistically here's what happens in a regular work day versus a crunch time work day has little effect on the aggregate total work -- if you crunch for more than a few weeks. After about three weeks of crunching productivity tends to bottom out, at worst you're losing the actual productivity you'd normally be able to put in.
You're groggy from staying at the office till 2 am. You're getting up later and getting to the office later. This means you're taking lunch later, and leaving later. Basically, all you've succeeded at doing is moving your working day to a different part of the clock.
This means you're missing out on what you used to do when you normally got home. Worst of all, you've lost motivation. The death march is the worst state for a game studio to be in. Everyone is on edge, creativity is gone, and hostility between co-workers rises; stop it.
