I’m working my way to a CS degree and am currently slogging my way through an 8-week Trig course. I barely passed College Algebra and have another Algebra and two Calculus classes ahead of me.

How much of this will I need in a programming job? And, more importantly, if I suck at Math, should I just find another career path?

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5 points
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Depends entirely on your definition of “gamedev”, IMO. If you’re trying to write a platformer in basic C with no external libraries, you will absolutely need to use algebra/geometry/etc. and maybe even some more advanced things like physics/calculus depending on what features/effects you want to put in your game.

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-1 points

That’s a really ridiculous example though. No one is doing that.

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2 points

I’m doing that. I know several others who have as well.

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0 points

But when you are talking about professional games development that is a very specific thing they almost no one is doing.

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3 points

I would uh consider that pretty in deep gamedev, even lower than some shader code lmao - so yes you would need to know some math.

Cracking open Godot and using a bunch of premade assets hardly even requires programming, much less mathematical knowledge

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5 points
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Be that as it may, I personally wouldn’t consider someone to be a very knowledgeable (on how games actually work) game developer if they didn’t at least know how to use things like linear algebra to make a character run and jump naturally and such, even if they’re not coding like that day to day and just using a higher level framework.

You don’t have to agree with me, and I still respect your opinion either way.

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1 point

I agree with you. Even if you never touch it, it’s nice to know what the libraries you’re calling are doing under the hood.

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