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[FamousAspect]

I know that this is a forum for independent game developers. However, I also know there are a number of hobbyists who may wish to work in game development full time, or indie devs who wish to use it as stepping stone to a full time position in a game studio. I wanted to share this tutorial because I hope it will be valuable for some members of the forum.

Before I left to work on Enhanced Wars, I was a producer and manager at BioWare's San Francisco office. The majority of my time at BioWare was spent as a producer leading the Dragon Age Legends game team. During my most crunched state I had a team of 25, 19 of whom I managed directly. Hiring truly takes a team to do right (and I was lucky to have a strong team at EA between the fantastic HR department and my colleagues at BioWare) but one of my primary responsibilities during that time was to serve as hiring manager for a number of positions across game design, art and engineering.

Since I left BioWare, I have turned to community participation on Reddit and forums to fill the hole in my life where co-workers used to be. Since my two partners in crime on Enhanced Wars are in different time zones I don't have a lot of water cooler conversation. So, I hang out on threads trying to add value by lending my advice to current and prospective game developers.

I find myself repeating a few pieces of advice over and over again about how to break into the industry as a game designer. I thought it would be valuable to take my perspective as a hiring manager and turn it into a series of articles about how to position yourself best to land that first gig.

A big caveat - I am just one hiring manager with one perspective. Each company you are trying to work for and person you are trying to impress is different. These tactics would definitely work if you were trying to land a job on my team. Personal mileage may vary.

Step 1 - find your mountain
In 2012 one of my favorite authors, Niel Gaiman, gave a commencement speech at The University of Arts in Philadelphia. It was filled with incredible advice for guiding your creative career. The first step in any game designers journey can taken directly from that speech:

"Something that worked for me was imagining that where I wanted to be ... was a mountain. A distant mountain. My goal.

And I knew that as long as I kept walking towards the mountain I would be all right. And when I truly was not sure what to do, I could stop, and think about whether it was taking me towards or away from the mountain."

This is important because game design is a broad profession. In any given day working on Enhanced Wars I might write a design document. I might wireframe some UI or spec out a UX flow. I might tweak tuning values in a spreadsheet all day long or lay out levels. I might do narrative work or write copy for menu screens. I might spend all day fixing bugs in scripting files. I might plan out a monetization strategy.

This list doesn't come close to defining all that goes into the bucket of game design. Even more important than tasks is genre and platform of game you want to work on. For instance, if Enhanced Wars folded and I wanted to get a full time job, I would feel confident applying for monetization design jobs on mobile games tomorrow. But if I decided it was time to build 3D levels for AAA games on the PS4 and Xbone, I would need to spend a minimum of 6 months preparing before I could apply for that job from a space of confidence.

Your mountain will change many times over the course of your career. New opportunities will arise, new platforms will take shape and new genres will be invented. But it is important to pick an early goal. Because applying for a level design job on Tom Clancy's The Division is fundamentally different from applying for a UX design job on Battlefield 4 is fundamentally different from applying as a generalist designer with a small mobile startup company.

Do your research and figure out what sort of job you will want to pursue as a designer. My best advice - look at job postings on Gamasutra and the websites of companies you admire. Read about the actual requirements, roles and responsibilities for real design jobs. Invariably you will find yourself saying "that sounds like a lot of fun" or "I would hate to do that every day for the next 3 years."

And a word of advice, don't set your mountain as Creative Director. Not at first. I know it is everyone's dream to be The Guy or The Gal leading a game's creative vision. But if you find that the only jobs that appeal to you are those with a fancy title and 10+ years of experience required, you are in for a rude awakening. If the years of backbreaking work it will take to climb the mountain are not inherently rewarding, you will never never make it to the top.

Once you have found your mountain, you will be ready to start building your design portfolio, which I will cover in the next article in this series.

[FamousAspect]

Step 2 - build your portfolio
Although I do not review as many resumes now that I'm an indie developer working on Enhanced Wars as I did when I was at BioWare San Francisco, I still review the odd resume here or there as a result of a Reddit or forum post. When I do, my top line feedback is almost always the same: "You need to work on your portfolio website."

At BioWare San Francisco, we had a strong affinity for interns and co-op students (who would work a full semester at the studio for credit). In a very real sense, we would not have launched Dragon Age Legends on time without the contributions from our co-op team members. As such, one of my favorite times of the year was when the fantastic university relations team at EA would deliver the resumes of potential interns they were bringing to campus for interviews.

It was not unusual for me to review 50 resumes in one marathon session to pick out the prospects that I thought would fit a need on my team. Whether I was reviewing a stack of resumes for intern candidates or a single resume from a recruiter for a full time position, my process was almost always the same. Open a resume and scan it for about a minute to look for highlights. Open the portfolio website link and spend a significant amount of time reviewing (if possible). If a portfolio was great, I would request a phone interview. On more than one occasion, I called someone instantly because the portfolio was so good I didn't want to waste any time lest the candidate be snatched up by another studio. Sometimes the candidate already had. A high quality portfolio was the single biggest factor in landing a phone interview.

Tangible proof
If your professional experience is minimal or non-existant, the challenge you face is that you have no credibility that you will be capable of fulfilling the job requirements. When I'm looking to fill a job, I don't care about your mission statement, your extra curricular activities or your summer job in a completely unrelated industry. I only care about proof of your design abilities.

It can be difficult to know what to put in a design portfolio, as there are no standards for what a good design document is or how a game economy should be laid out. The best possible thing to have in your portfolio is shipped games. With tools like Unity and Game Maker Studio and the ease of self publishing, it is my opinion that a prospective game designer should exit college with one game on the app store for each year in school. There is no stronger proof that you are a capable designer than being able to show that:

1) You know how to finish a game and release it to the world
2) You took the time to listen to your players, either through metrics, comments, reviews or other feedback
3) You can tell a meaningful story about how you improved your game based on player feedback

Being able to tell me that story in the initial phone interview is an instant ticket to a full team interview.

Building a proper portfolio will take months, if not years. In college, I tried on multiple occasions to assemble a team to make a game. I got plenty of interest from programmers or artists who wished to talk about a game and collaborate, but when it came time to start working on the game they did not deliver. Unless you have a team you truly trust, my advice is to start out by making small but completed and polished games that you can build on your own. If you don't know how to code, it's time to learn!

Feature portfolio material
What you build for your portfolio is highly dependent on your mountain. No matter what type of design job you have, the tools exist to prove you are capable of doing high quality design work. If your mountain is to work on open world RPGs, then dive into the Dragon Age or Skyrim mod tools and make quests. If you want to work on multiplayer FPS, then dig into Unreal Engine 3 or Hammer and release levels to the world. If you want to work on a MOBA, then get cozy with the WarCraft III or Starcraft II editor and prototype a new MOBA style gameplay mode.

No matter what your mountain is, you cannot wait till you "land that gig" before you start learning how to design content. Only by proving you can finish content, release it to players, listen to their feedback and improve your content based on feedback will you be able to land that first professional gig. And if your goal is as targeted as working on a specific game or at a specific company, if they have publicly available tools you better invest time in mastering them.

Other portfolio material
A designer's job is much more dynamic than simply creating levels or quests. There are a number of other documents or types of content you can create and share as part of a portfolio. Here are some suggestions based off the varied types of work I do on Enhanced Wars and other projects:

Game Treatment - no one is going to read a 75+ page game design document when evaluating you for a position. But they will scan a 5-7 page game treatment that outlines a game, its market and its core features at a high level.

Feature Brief - a detailed document that explains the full implementation of a single feature for a game, including UI wireframes and flow, goes a long way to impress. Design a new feature for an existing and well known game in the genre you wish to get hired in. Make sure that in the early part of the brief, you have a section explaining why this feature needs to be added to this game.

Game balance evaluation - much of a designer's job is tuning and balancing game variables. Pick a game and write a report evaluating balance of a particular system or economy. Take detailed notes on multiple play sessions, compile and summarize fan and review feedback and come up with a series of recommendations on how this system's balance can be improved.

UI/UX redesign - most of my work in mobile/tablet games involves designing or evaluating UI. Designing UI is a difficult task, especially if you've never done it before, but it is critical to a modern game's success. Pick a screen or flow from a popular game that you think is broken or unintuitive, and propose a detailed redesign.

System balance spreadsheet - most of my time as a designer is spent in spreadsheets or JSON files tweaking values. If you have followed the earlier advice and built some games, you will likely have a system values spreadsheet to share. Clean it up and add annotations so that another human can read it.

Pen & Paper prototype - many games start as simple ideas prototyped on pen & paper. Although you cannot easily share the results, you can share your process. Fully document with text and pictures the process of building a pen & paper prototype complete with your final rule set. Explain the design problem you are trying to solve and show the steps you took to solve it, pointing out what does and does not work.

These are just a few examples based off my experience. If you've done your homework and spent time identifying job postings you would like to apply to, you may have other design deliverables you would want to build to prove one requirement or another.

People are busy
The hiring managers who will be evaluating your portfolio are likely to be some of the busiest people on the game team. They will not have a lot of time to review all the materials that you have spent months or years preparing. They will probably not install your game. They will probably not read your full document. They will probably not open your spreadsheet.

If you really want to shine, then for each piece in your portfolio you should create a 90 second or less video on youTube. In this video, show the piece of work, whether it is a level, design document or UI flow. Talk about the process of designing the work. What were your design goals? How did you achieve them? What feedback have you gotten from players or peers and how have you reacted to that feedback?

So, why go through all the effort to make materials that will likely only be glanced at? This will all be explained in the next part of the series about how to sell yourself.

[FamousAspect]

Step 3 - Learn to sell yourself

Now that you’ve built a strong portfolio filled with tangible design works, you may think it is time to write your resume and start applying for jobs. But the same way that when designing features on Enhanced Wars I always set a design goal before writing the actual spec, there is groundwork you need to do to figure out what you want to achieve with your resume before you start writing it.

When I was deeply involved in the hiring process at BioWare San Francisco, I spent a lot of time working with our HR partners on identifying candidates. Although I would spend time on LinkedIn searching for candidates, this may be one hour or less a day because I had responsibilities on my game team. The majority of the searching was done by HR.

It is hard to explain to someone who does not have hands on experience developing a game the difference between a content designer and a systems designer. Or to explain that you need a systems engineer who may have previous jobs listed as a system administrator, but you don’t want anyone with traditional sysadmin experience you only need someone who works with cloud services like AWS. These are very complex, specialized requirements and there are no standards or guidelines around job titles and seniority levels in our industry.

So you end up telling the HR partner about the types of experiences you are looking for. You may write a list of studios to look at, job titles to search for or explain a number of tasks you want to see on a resume. “I need a designer with experience creating quests and scripting levels on an RPG. But he or she has to be well rounded. Ideally the candidate has experience creating user experience flows and designing new features on a live game.”

I explain all this to help you understand what is happening on the other side of the hiring process. HR partners will forward the hiring manager resumes that come in through online postings, but will also spend time crawling the internet looking for candidates (mostly on LinkedIn). If they find someone that they think fits the requirements, they will send that person on to the hiring manager to ask if this is a candidate worth reaching out to. In general people on the hiring side are looking for key experiences on your resume that will convince them you are worth reaching out to for a phone screening. In order to prepare yourself to pass through this first hurdle, you must figure out how to sell yourself.

Hero stories
Part of the reason to build an extensive portfolio is to gain a number of design experiences to talk about. You need to think through those experiences and figure out what your unique selling points are as a designer. Everyone applying for a game design job is passionate, so don’t try and sell yourself on passion. Don’t sell yourself with unrelated skills or activities. You need to figure out what are the things you want to talk about when you get that hiring manager on the phone. You need to find your hero stories.

Hero stories are the stories of a real world experience you had that highlights why you are uniquely qualified for this job. The conversations you will have with people looking to hire you will be driven by the content of your resume, so you need to seed that resume with lead ins to your most heroic deeds as a designer.

For instance, let us imagine that I am applying for a lead design position on a mobile team. I would want to prove that I am capable of taking an idea from initial idea all the way through the process to execution and launch. I think that pen and paper prototyping is one of my core skills as a designer so I want to make sure I highlight it with a hero story:

"We started prototyping Enhanced Wars by first laying out our design goals. These were a list of bullet points that started with ‘We will know we are done prototyping Enhanced Wars when…’ then listed out things like ‘we have a game with no stalemating’ and ‘we have played at least 3 full games with the final rule set’. My colleague and I did 22 iterations of Enhanced Wars within 24 hours. Quite late at night, around iteration 16 we thought we had the magic build and called it a night. In the morning, we started the day by reading our design goals. When we tried to verify our magic build, we discovered gaping holes in the design and kept prototyping until we finally had a version that fit all our requirements with iteration 22."

Now, I don’t expect you to actually fully write out all your stories like this; I certainly never have. But what I do expect is that you think about the many design experiences you have had and put together a list of bullet points for your hero stories. Figure out how you want to sell yourself to fit the position.

Write your failure resume
Another important aspect of interviewing for a job will be showing how you have learned and grown from past experiences. In order to sell yourself with a level of introspection and acknowledgement of past mistakes, I suggest you write a failure resume. This is an idea I learned listening to a lecture from Tina Seelig, the Executive Director of the Stanford Technologies Venture Program.

The failure resume is a summary of all your biggest screw ups and the lesson you learned from those mistakes. These stories will be just as powerful as your hero stories, if not more so, when you are selling yourself as a candidate for a job. For example:

“At PlayFirst, I was given the role of Lead Designer on my second game at the company, Mystery of Shark Island. Although I may have had the raw design skill to do the job, I did not realize till many years later that I simply did not have the maturity level to lead the design of the game when I was so fresh out of college. One of the biggest areas of difficulty I had was in listening to feedback from the senior people in the company – I would often shut down their ideas (with poor body language and tone of voice) and make them feel like I thought their ideas where stupid. This negative cycle meant people did not like to work with me. From my perspective, I felt like the game was failing because other people did not understand my vision and I had to compromise it past the point of fun.

Years later, I learned to ‘find the why behind the what.’ This realization came to me when working on Dragon Age Legends and getting feedback from literally the top people in the company. What I learned then that I wish I had known at PlayFirst is that other people are not as close to your project as you are. You know every intimate detail so it is easy for you to instantly see why other people’s ideas will not work within the framework of the game. But when the CEO has taken time out to sit at your desk because he enjoys playing your game, you can’t tell him he’s wrong. And in fact he’s not wrong, he just doesn’t know the project as intimately as you do. So what I did was to listen to feedback then try and identify the reason why the game was failing to deliver that led to a specific feature request. So, if someone would say ‘I want feature X’ I would reply ‘I think you are suggesting this feature because you are having problem Y, is that correct?’ Now we’re having a discussion about root cause and motivation that the game team can solve, instead of talking about the merits of a specific feature.”

By writing your failure resume, you will be able to sell yourself at a much deeper level. When you get difficult questions or are asked about past failures, you will know how to take a story about a negative experience and turn it into a positive experience.

Now that you’ve identified all the stories you wish to use to sell yourself, you are prepared to write your resume, which I will cover in the next article in the series.

[FamousAspect]

Step 4 - Write your resume
Now that I’m devoting my energies to Enhanced Wars, I do not see nearly the quantity of resumes as when I was part of the hiring process at BioWare’s San Francisco office. But I still review the occasional resume for someone who has reached out on Reddit or forums, or for a former colleague asking me to pass it on to someone in my network. If you have read my earlier post about how to build your portfolio, you should have plenty of meaningful material to put on your resume even if you are trying to land your first full time job (or internship) in game design. But learning how to write that resume is a skill unto itself.

The 4 hurdles
Before writing a resume, it is important to understand the purpose of the document beyond the high level goal of getting hired. A resume passes through many hands and must be targeted at a number of different audiences within a single team or organization. For the purposes of this post, imagine that you are applying for a job at a larger company like EA or Ubisoft that will have a dedicated HR department. Although each studio’s processes are different, the general principles outlined below will be a rough guide regardless of if you are trying to join the Battlefield 4 team or a 3 man start up like Quarter Spiral making its first hire.

When you apply for a job your resume will be screened by someone on the HR side. This person has probably had a conversation with the hiring manager or members of the team about what they are looking for in the position and in team members in general. This screener probably does not have hands on game development experience and will be reviewing you at a “keyword” level. If you look like a good prospect, the screener may call you up to verify your potential, or may pass you directly on to the hiring manager to ask “would you like to phone screen this person?” This is your first hurdle.

The next step will be convincing the hiring manager (who is probably your prospective boss) that you are worth talking to. She will review your resume and portfolio to determine if your skills match the position. She will almost definitely look at your LinkedIn profile, and if you have any common contacts may do preliminary checkups on you. Assuming you seem like a good prospect, she will set up a phone interview. This is your second hurdle.

Once you get on the phone, your resume will frame the conversation with the person on the other end. She will likely ask a mixture of questions about your experiences, as well as hypothetical questions about various job scenarios, to get a feel for your working style and thought processes. You may have one phone interview or several, depending on geography, seniority of position and dev team process.

All steps up till now have been fairly low cost for the company, but from here on out it will get more expensive. In the phone interview your resume must help guide a conversation that convinces the interviewer you are worth bringing in for a half to full day worth of interviews. This may or may not involve flying you in and putting you up in hotel depending on geography. In-person interviews will definitely involve diverting the attention of a number of team members which is very expensive from a development perspective. Convincing the interviewer she should bring you in to the studio for a full interview is the third hurdle.

Once you get to the studio, you will interview a range people on the team. This will probably include the hiring manager who was the first to phone screen you, peers of hers in leadership roles in other departments, people on the team who report to her and potentially the people she reports to. In most instances these interviewers will have spent 5 minutes or less looking at your resume and portfolio before stepping in to the room. It is safe to assume that they have not read the job description you are applying for. It is likely that these interviewers will simply pick a bullet point or position on your resume and ask you to tell them about it.

This series of interviews are to determine if you are the right candidate for the job. The team is trying to determine not only if you have the skills and experience to fulfill the role, but also if your personality and temperament will be a good fit for the team. If you have the skills to do the job but no one wants to work with you because of the attitude you give off in the interview, you will not get the job. This is the fourth hurdle.

In all these instances, your resume guides a conversation with an interviewer who has varying degrees of knowledge about you, the position you are trying to fill, the team and the project. The resume is a conversation starter.

The razor
Your goal with a resume is to have a single page which frames a conversation around why you are the best candidate for the job. There is no need to clutter it with details of summer jobs in unrelated industries, leadership positions in social clubs from college or lists of obscure programming languages you kind of used for one semester. With each element you put on the resume you should consider if you can talk about it in a meaningful way. If not, cut it.

For instance, in college I wrote electronic music. I had a DJ show on the college radio. I was the co-president of the swing dance club. One time I (technically) opened for the Black Eyed Peas. If I was applying for a job as a designer at Harmonix, all of these are valid points that help me explain my lifelong love of music and why I am the right mixture of designer and musician for their studio. If I am applying as a multiplayer systems designer on the Enhanced Wars team, these points are meaningless.

In my opinion, you need your name and contact information, a link to your portfolio site and possibly social presence like twitter, a section on education and a section on work. Everything else is optional.

Hero stories
If you read my last post on selling yourself, you should already have a good idea of the content of your resume. Assuming you are trying to get your first full time game job, you may not have “job titles” or company roles to list. But you should have a number of pieces of tangible design work you can list and explain your role on.

Instead of grouping bullet points by job, group them by project or course. Each “job” should have two to three bullet points that highlight a different hero story about your experience. For instance, in college I made a game called Refuse of Space that won a game design competition. If I was applying for my first job, I would list Refuse of Space and dates worked on it as though it were a job on my resume, then include one bullet point highlighting its award and one highlighting that I did all the design, programming and art myself. If I were to rewrite my resume today, I do not think this project would be included in my one pager.

Avoid title inflation
A common effect I have seen on resumes for those early in a career (and one I have been guilty of in the past) is title inflation. On one hand, there is nothing to say that you cannot list yourself as Executive Producer of your semester long game project that resulted in an unpolished demo. On the other hand, when a hiring manager works somewhere like Electronic Arts – with Executive Producers like Casey Hudson who is responsible for all things Mass Effect – it is hard to take this title seriously and may count against you.

Instead of giving yourself lofty titles (or multiple titles per project) go with a more humble approach. Instead of Executive Producer just say Team Lead. Instead of Lead Designer just say Designer. Being aware of the size of your team and the scope of your role within it will go much further than a flashy but ultimately overblown title. 

Miscellaneous sections
Depending on the online template you started with, you may feel the need to include a mission statement, skills section, hobbies & interests, coursework or some other type of section on your resume. In my opinion, more is not always better and you should take a minimalist approach when it comes to your resume. Go back to your razor: is this something you want to be asked about? Does it allow for you to discuss a unique aspect of your past and why you are an ideal candidate? If not, cut it.

When it comes to a mission statement, I generally advise against them. Unless your mission statement is tailored for the specific job you are applying for, it is probably meaningless. The fact that you want to use your wide range of skills to create compelling experiences for players was implied when you sent in your resume.

For skills, do not list them unless you can intelligently answer a question about them. I know I used to list Fortran and Lua on my resume because of some college coursework. If anyone had asked me a meaningful question about either language while I was interviewing, it would have tanked me as a candidate. Remember that the goal of your resume is to frame a positive conversation about yourself, so avoid anything that will detract from the overall impression that you are the best possible candidate for a specific role.

The cover letter
I am a bit torn on cover letters. Speaking from my experience on hiring teams, I can comfortably say that a cover letter has never meaningfully impacted my decision on a candidate. But even if I expect that no one on the other end is reading your cover letter, I still believe it is worth writing.

Part of applying for a job is applying for that specific job, and not just any job with the word designer in the title. So writing a cover letter (or intro email) will force you to take your abstract resume and weave a compelling story about why you are the right candidate for a specific job with a specific company.

With that in mind, I believe it is a worthwhile exercise to write a two to three paragraph “cover letter” style email tailored specifically for each job you apply for.

Exotic portfolios
Since you are a game designer you are likely compelled to create an exotic portfolio or resume. You might think it is a good idea to create a 3d level in Unity that is itself the resume. This is not a good or bad idea, it is an interesting one. If you can build an exotic portfolio that actually goes above and beyond a piece of paper to show why you deserve a job, then by all means go ahead. But too often these exotic portfolios detract from your application. Only invest in an exotic presentation of your resume if it is truly impressive to a professional game designer.

If you take all this into account when crafting your resume, you will likely jump over the first few hurdles and land several interviews. I will cover preparation for these interviews in my next article in the series.

[sublinimal]

Or you could just make a damn game. Tada.

Heh, but really. While it's solid advice, you're not getting responses because people here generally don't aim to work in a big game company. This is more Gamasutra material.

[FamousAspect]

If you've followed the series of articles up till now, then you've sent your resume and portfolio out to the world and are landing some interviews. The previous article on writing your resume covered the general process of phone and in person interviews that you can expect, so I will not reiterate. Suffice to say that if you've made it this far you will likely have to pass through a gauntlet of interviews to land that job.

An interview is about three things. The team is assessing if you have the skills to complete the job requirements, so you must sell your skills and experience. Beyond just skills, the team will also try to determine if you are a good fit in terms of personality and culture, so you must sell yourself as a colleague. Finally, if you are a candidate the team would want to hire you probably have some options, so the team will be selling themselves to you as the ideal place invest the next few years of your life.

For instance, if you were applying to join me in designing Enhanced Wars, as an interviewer I would prepare a series of questions (and probably some written tests) to get a feel for your skills in not only multiplayer balancing and feature design, but also UI/UX work and using metrics and player feedback to iterate on a live game. Personality wise, I would need to make sure you are self-directed and motivated enough to work on a virtual team and I would not constantly question if you will complete your tasks or are too busy watching Hulu in your pajamas. If I liked you, I would prepare to talk about the virtues and autonomy of working on a small, virtual team as well as the incredible growth potential of joining a new studio at such an early stage.

But Quarter Spiral is just one team. Each studio or game team you will be applying to will have unique requirements and culture, so they will be looking for different qualities in prospective candidates. If you have made it this far, have built your portfolio, written a killer resume and landed that all day interview session for your dream job, then you need to make sure to go that extra mile and prepare properly for your interview.

Play the games

This should be obvious, I know. But I was surprised by the number of times I would get on the phone with a candidate about a design position on Dragon Age Legends (which was live at the time) only to discover that they had not played the game, or in fact many free to play games. Or to talk with someone applying for jobs in different departments in our studio who had not played any of our live web games. In most instances, this would instantly disqualify someone in my mind. If they did not make an effort to play the games we had poured our blood, sweat and tears into, how could we trust that they would devote themselves to our games?

If you are interviewing with a studio, play any games they have made for at least 20 minutes (hopefully more). Do some research on the team and find out what games people you are interviewing with have worked on in the past. The importance of being knowledgeable about the work of the people you are trying to impress cannot be overstated.

Do your homework

In all likelihood, you will know the names of the people who will be interviewing you. If you have not been given a list, it does not hurt to ask your HR contact for one. Research anyone on the list. Read any interviews by members of the team (even if they were related to past games or studios). Check LinkedIn profiles and look for any blogs or social presences. You may not always find material, but in most instances you will be able to find something that will give you insight into the team and potential colleagues you are interviewing with. This preparation work may or may not come into play during the interview, but it can give you a reasonable first impression of the studio and its culture to determine if this a place you will truly fit in professionally.

Prepare questions

Most interviewers will end by asking if you have questions for them. Sometimes this is just to fill time in the schedule (as I said previously, interviewers do not always do a lot of preparation work before getting in the room with you). But your questions can also help a team get a feel for your personality, preparedness and overall ambitions.

Prepare a decent list of questions based on the job description, anything you know about the studio and anything that is extremely important to you. But also be cognizant of what the questions you ask say about you. For instance, let us imagine you are applying to a junior design position on Enhanced Wars but all your questions are, at their core, about how quickly you can become a lead designer. I would intuit you have unrealistic expectations about the work you will be doing, that you are more interested in title and control than the actual work, and you will generally be resentful of being asked to do the many unglamorous parts of game design. Unless your portfolio and resume where at a true rock star level, this line of questions would be a major red flag.

Also, during the course of a day of interviews you may feel like you have run through your full list and have nothing left to ask. There is no harm in asking the same questions to different people. You may get different answers that reveal new things about the game team and its culture.

Persevere

If you've made it this far into the article series, then you should be fully prepared to start applying for a job in game design. I know it all sounds so easy on paper, but the realities of applying and interviewing for jobs are brutal. You will face rejection in all its forms. You will feel like you are throwing your resume down an endless series of bottomless pits. You will nail a phone interview only to never hear from a recruiter or studio again. You will flub questions. You will make it through the gauntlet of in person interviews feeling like the team loves you only to get turned down. You will be told verbally you have the job only to wake up the next day to an email stating it has been given to an internal candidate. These are the unfortunate realities of the job market.

All the preparation I have outlined in these five articles will only get you so far. Landing a job is equal parts luck, skill, experience and random circumstance. Don't take the rejections personally, learn from any application mistakes you make and persevere in the face of the many setbacks you will undoubtedly face. Before long you'll be emailing me with a link to a launched game asking for feedback.

[paulmcgg]

Or you could just make a damn game. Tada.

Heh, but really. While it's solid advice, you're not getting responses because people here generally don't aim to work in a big game company. This is more Gamasutra material.

Haha, completely ignored.

[FTLRalph]

Wow, no comments?  Just wanted to thank you for this novel of yours.  As a recent computer science undergraduate with a half-dozen sponsored Flash games under my belt, this is just the type of thing I needed to read.

[FamousAspect]

Wow, no comments?  Just wanted to thank you for this novel of yours.  As a recent computer science undergraduate with a half-dozen sponsored Flash games under my belt, this is just the type of thing I needed to read.

I'm glad you enjoyed the tutorial. Positive feedback like this lets me know it was worth the effort.

[gimymblert]

It was worth the effort but the audience here is not exactly the target as most of them dream of making their game not breaking in the industry.

[Belimoth]

"Something that worked for me was imagining that where I wanted to be ... was a mountain. A distant mountain. My goal.

And I knew that as long as I kept walking towards the mountain I would be all right. And when I truly was not sure what to do, I could stop, and think about whether it was taking me towards or away from the mountain."

Good info, it's interesting to see how things work on the other side of the fence.

[FamousAspect]

Heh, but really. While it's solid advice, you're not getting responses because people here generally don't aim to work in a big game company. This is more Gamasutra material.

It was worth the effort but the audience here is not exactly the target as most of them dream of making their game not breaking in the industry.

This isn't the only place this content has been published. 4 of these 5 articles where featured on Gamasutra. All of them where well received on the reddit r/gamedev thread. I've had a PM or two from people who read these and had follow up questions and on this forum, the articles have had a much longer life than in the other places. I understand that this is a forum for independent game developers, that this post would not appeal to everyone on the forum and I say as much in the intro.

[gimymblert]

Okay fine then

[sublinimal]

Well, it's great if you've managed to find an audience. I didn't mean to be dismissive when you've clearly put effort into these posts, your thread just looked so lonely before I posted. ()

[Maikel_Ortega]

It's clearly too soon for me to be part of this post's audience, but I think i've learned plenty of this. Probably won't notice WHAT I've learned until I make some related mistakes (thats me), but I'll probably remember this post then.

Thank you very much for taking the time to share this stuff, it's really appreciated.

[RyanHuggins]

In college, I tried on multiple occasions to assemble a team to make a game. I got plenty of interest from programmers or artists who wished to talk about a game and collaborate, but when it came time to start working on the game they did not deliver. Unless you have a team you truly trust, my advice is to start out by making small but completed and polished games that you can build on your own. If you don't know how to code, it's time to learn!

This part resonated with me. I'm going into my sophomore year of college for game design and a lot of people LOVE to talk about making games, but when it comes down to it, they disappear or don't do the work that needs to get done.

Regardless, this was a great series of articles for a college student (even if I'm not super interested in breaking into the industry, it's great information in case I do down the line). I run part of the game developers' "club" at Champlain College, so I might use some of this information for one of my talks! It's really great stuff for people who want industry jobs!

[Impmaster]

Yeah, great read! BTW, did you feel like being a game developer at a large company, or being indie was better?

[FamousAspect]

Re: corporate vs indie life

Truthfully, neither is necessarily better, they both have positives and negatives.

Working at BioWare Social was great. I learned an incredible amount, was given leadership opportunities, picked up new skills, was surrounded by people and had a steady paycheck. All positives. But I also had a lot of management responsibilities, got to a point where my job was to go to meetings most of the day, felt disassociated from my own game at times, and had to please a lot of very powerful stakeholders to get anything substantial approved.

Working on Enhanced Wars is lots of fun, but being indie has drawbacks also. I spend the majority of my time focusing on the game, I have a small but great team, I have very few interruptions, I've had to learn a new set of skills, I can set my own direction each day and am currently enjoying a direct connection to the players. But I have to pick up consulting work to pay the bills which is both fun and distracting, my pay is inconsistent, I spend the majority of the day alone (both positive and negative) and I have to worry about our team going out of business before finishing the game.

I think my average day as an indie is happier than my average day at a corporation, but the instability is tough. It's a trade off. Right now, my situation allows me to lead the indie life, but as I approach marriage and starting a family, it may be unrealistic unless our game is a hit.