Over the course of our first semester, we had a number of guest talks from Games Design & Art alumni spanning a wide range of roles within the games industry, from art, design, programming and producing. Hearing directly from alumni allowed me to envision my first steps after graduation and helped me understand how the skills University has given me transfer into the world of work. My main hope was to gain insight into the day-to-day work of professionals in these fields, as I was currently leaning towards a more generalist role and wanted to explore what space within the industry would best suit my skills and interests.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On Week 3 the guest speaker was Jamie Blacknell, an alumnus now working as a senior game developer. After making the game Portage, a short experience based on mindfulness and canoeing, for his final major project and subsequently graduating in 2021, Jamie was hired the next year as a junior Unity developer where he helped code a modular building system designed for player homes in a metaverse platform. After unfortunately being made redundant the next year, he was later hired for a more specialized role at GameCity in 2025, leading development of family party games in Unity and more specifically for web platforms. This surprised me as I had only considered mobile and desktop\/console releases, but research shows that deploying for browsers and web platforms e.g. for smart TVs is undergoing a resurgence in game development.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jamie’s experience with redundancy left me with some trepidation regarding the job market, especially in current times where we hear of even larger layoffs affecting swathes of the developer community. However, we were reminded that a strength of being a junior developer and designer is being adaptable and able to change one’s specialisation for any opportunities that may come up. Specialisation is important as we would be advised in later talks but junior developers should try not to aim too narrowly in a very uncertain market.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jamie found his university experience invaluable, as for most students myself included it is the first time where one is forced to learn self-motivation and the ability to start and finish work independently. This has also let me work in a way that let me become extremely enthusiastic about what I learn, positively affecting my creative output as a result. As well as learning various programs like Unity, Blender, Photoshop etc the skills picked up on the course that Jamie found most valuable were communication, social skills, teamwork and problem solving, as well as facing and overcoming various challenges, something often needed to be shown off in a job interview.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
However, he described the main hurdle of the transfer from university to working in a studio was learning the ability to specialise. This course has been generalist in nature which fits the way I work, as I enjoy all parts of the game making process from art and asset generation to design and programming. However, many senior industry roles ask for a more specifically attuned portfolio and set of skills, so while I don’t want to give up any of my interests, I should target one specific area I particularly enjoy and try to enter the industry from that angle. Another important change in the world of work that Jamie outlined was the increase in team sizes compared to our extremely small groups of 3 or 4 in university. This increases complexity in task organisation and splitting up work between the team and requires more knowledge of everyone’s disciplines and preferred ways of working to know how to best communicate what you need or know what is required of you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One example Jamie gave is discussing the project as a developer to the team lead vs. management. The former you may find easiest to communicate with as you can speak directly about the specific in-engine issues you are facing, using technical language, whereas with the latter one must avoid diving into unnecessary technical detail and focus more on giving reasonable time scales needed for certain milestones, with some explanation of why some tasks may require more time. In my own studies I had grappled with this as I have had to work with other students with a range of skillsets often very different to my own, which required me to be able to concisely explain what I am working on and convey the vital information my team members need to know for their role.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jamie also talked about networking at a larger scale and mentioned how that in the face of AI taking jobs within the industry, speaking face to face with real people in the same field was more important than ever. He recommended game jams and coding challenges as great ways to team up and work with people, citing games such as Hollow Knight starting as game jam titles. I have had some experience with this, having collaborated with my classmate Sam on a game jam along with another developer online, as well as people in my own class on the Global Game Jam, but I do realise this is something I could definitely do more of to meet entirely new people and also gain more development experience. The main takeaway for me was being more of an active member in the larger community of games, something which I have been greatly neglecting and need to work on more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As a developer, Jamie’s first set of portfolio advice was mainly tailored towards programming skills, for example the importance of having a Github account as an easily accessible and updateable resource to showcase one’s code and projects. However, the code must be high quality, and one must be ready to explain it. Uploading AI-generated code does not clearly reflect your skills and at worse can make you look amateur if you pass it off as your own and are unable to describe how it works. He also gave the more general advice of always keeping one’s LinkedIn page up to date and ensuring it includes a link to one’s own personal portfolio such as on a website for example.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jamie then passed on some great advice for portfolios tailored towards 3D artists courtesy of the artist Adam Mould. In it he encouraged using ArtStation as a page for highlighting projects and ensuring they get seen primarily by other artists. However, the selection of work showcased there must be high quality as there is a large amount of very skilled competition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Recruiters in visual art especially want to see proof of creative ability, for example showing the ideation process through sketches and moodboarding. This acts as proof that one can produce an initial concept or idea and follow through with the entire artistic pipeline from that. Working from reference such as an initial concept sketch is of particular importance as this mirrors the process one would go through in a real-world professional scenario as a games artist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Another piece of advice which resonated with me was the importance of showing experience and mastery of the tools and software which one uses. As someone who has used a plethora of digital creative software my whole life, starting with free tools to make games and music along with Microsoft Paint on my old PC as a child, this is a lesson I have internalised and cherished more than the need to throw myself at whatever flashy new tech lauded as the next big thing in the creative industry. I aim to create most of my final major project in Godot, which is a free and open-source game engine I want to gain confidence in using to put on my portfolio.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Overall, we were advised to keep work presented in our portfolio to just projects we are interested in and passionate about or are otherwise in theme with the roles we are aiming for, rather than throwing in unprofessional work simply to fill up space. My current portfolio greatly suffered from this, as I still include some old 3D work as well as some pixel art which does not meet my current standards of work. I plan to specialise this more towards game design and development by creating pages for projects I have led the design and coding of, as these will be the best showcase of both my technical knowledge of my tools as well as my problem-solving skills.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On the topic of learning hard skills Jamie also outlined the usefulness of courses, as they are usually professionally made with high quality information compared to a platform like YouTube. As a result, I have been looking through LinkedIn learning and already found Blender 4 tutorials to reinforce my existing skills with the program.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We were also told of the importance of soft skills along with technical ability, with it being sometimes even more important in a professional environment. Key skills Jamie brought up included:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To conclude, Jamie again stressed how competitive the current games industry is and the resulting need to stand out against other candidates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Our guest speaker for Week 6 was Rhys Sheppard, a graduate currently working as a technical artist at Epic Games. After some entry level QA work, Rhys got offered a position as a junior programmer at Peter Molyneux’s company 22cans. He was offered this job after messaging the CEO of Two Point Games, highlighting the importance of advertising oneself and not being afraid to reach out for opportunities. After not fitting into a pure programming role with extremely high expectations, Rhys moved on to work for a smaller company, Erase All Kittens, working as an artist and designer mainly working in Javascript for an educational game title.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
However, he then switched specialisations and landed a role as a junior Tech Artist at Mediatonic, working on their flagship title Fall Guys. As well as creating shaders like the iconic “pink slime” that rises to eliminate players he also worked on making the game’s UI work and creating internal tools for level designers. Tooling, as it is known in the industry, makes up a large part of work for tech artists. As part of my continued development on my second-year project Oh, Rats! I have severely neglected creating and using custom tools or even creating debug commands for testing, so Rhys’s examples opened my eyes to how helpful they could be and how they cut down development time especially when scaling to a larger team size, something especially common within the industry where rapid prototyping is a must. As a result, this will be something I will investigate when working on my final major project as time management and constant testing and iteration will be vital.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rhys also went into some descriptions of potential interview questions one might encounter for game design or technical roles, a few being:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
These seemed reasonable, as many could be answered using the experience I have gained on my time at WSA on various projects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Week 8’s guest speaker was Megan Matthews, a game designer at Ustwo games, creators of the popular Monument Valley series. Megan’s game design journey started with simple flash games she made in the early 2010s, which I played a lot of around that time, so I was already fully on board. Her final major project at WSA was Gardener’s Grove, a game about combining and crafting trees with a cozy aesthetic around the same time that genre was exploding in popularity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After working at entry level positions and some freelance work doing environment design, Megan was given a recommendation to apply for a game design job at Ustwo. She landed the position owing to her strong portfolio which included work on a puzzle game similar to Monument Valley as well as a deep understanding and passion about the games the studio was working on, an aspect she described as vital in the interview process. Specifically design roles also require the applicant to answer design-based questions in detail during the interview, typically asking them to describe why they feel certain mechanics or designs work or not in detail and how they would improve them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Regarding portfolio design, Megan advised using level design principles to guide the eyes of the viewer and predict where they should look next. Overall, the main priority is a potential hirer being able to absorb information quickly and being able to travel to pages showing your experience extremely easily. This led to some clear takeaways:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We were also encouraged to tailor our portfolios to who we are as game designers. Unique passions, motivations and skills should be highlighted, for example whether we lean more towards visual art, graphic design or worldbuilding in our creative process, or whether we have any unique methods when prototyping. Hearing this was inspiring as while I did remove some older, more low-quality work from my portfolio as a result of Jamie’s advice in Week 3, I still have a broad range of creative inspirations and outlets I want to show off. I am still debating how much of my drawings and visual art to display on my site as I want the focus to be on game design, but from now I will attempt to display the full breadth of my passions and skill sets through the lens of my design workflow. I already have a design in mind for a new website portfolio I want to create, but this talk reinforced that my focus should be on simplicity, in favour of making sure my important work takes the spotlight. As mentioned before, I want to tailor my portfolio towards a game designer role, so having a clear projects page where I can show my work clearly is the next step I will take for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Moving onto the subject of networking, Megan again stressed its importance but made sure to reframe it as something more than polite conversation purely for the sake of one’s career. Rather, networking should be about finding peers and friends in the same field as yourself, much as we have within our own class and beyond at WSA. I have already tried my best to connect socially with other students in the years above and below me, so this was something I was familiar with, but when I realised the usually stigmatised notion of “networking” was one and the same it made a lot more sense. As well as providing career opportunities, having a support network allows you to reach out for help when dealing with problems in your career, and dissuades the feeling of impostor syndrome which is very prevalent in the games industry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Overall, I found Megan’s talk especially invaluable, as while my sights are mostly set on a design role, her advice to stay open-minded and take opportunities when I can felt like good advice to take in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On Week 10 our guest speaker was Jade Carter, a games producer currently working at Snap Finger Click in Brighton. Her first experience in the industry was working on QA at FuturLab, a company best known for the game Powerwash Simulator. After around a year she moved to QA at Studio Gobo, and from there was offered a position in production where she helped work on Hogwarts Legacy and Lego Horizon Adventures, the former of which she oversaw the full production of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As a producer, Jade oversees the entire development cycle and plans tasks for a sub-section of the team. Daily work includes tracking work on Jira; a tool made for the agile development process. Agile development revolves around work being done in “sprints”, usually only around a week in length, with regular meetings in between to plan ahead and make sure teams reach goals. In my own work for the second-year project we used Trello and GitHub which employ somewhat similar workflows, but Jira is a tool I need to learn as I have seen it mentioned multiple times by professionals to both track tasks as well as plan larger roadmaps when creating games. Scheduling will be vital for my final major project, so holding myself to a platform that splits it into achievable milestones will suit my way of working while holding me to attain goals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jade also again mentioned the importance of communication skills over all else, something I have already picked up in WSA due to the studio-like atmosphere of the classes. However, we were also reminded that an important factor of this is to ask questions of our peers and be open about our work, something I often forget to do when I am unsure of how to tackle a problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To conclude, all the speakers as part of this module gave a great deal of help for me as an initially uncertain aspiring designer. As a result, I have tailored my portfolio more towards design and development while still highlighting my passion for creating visually rich and compelling worlds, designs and experiences. I will also continue to work on my communication and networking skills by reaching out to my peers despite working solo for my final major project and keep my development goals attainable with an Agile development plan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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