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Getting into the games industry : Southampton alumni – Bea

• Senior game designer : mobile publishing department
• After grad – game jam with college kids
• UI/UX freelance worked doing some designs
• Junior games designer : impressed with games design test, liked method o ‘ find fun first’, helping create levels, helping flesh out documents, helping with balancing, feedback
• Games Designer: leading game design on games, designing features from scratch, pitching ideas and feedback.
• Senior publishing designer : quite a different role, making decisions and taking responsibility for them, leading designs and persuading people of their validity, working with many different people and developers from all kinds of backgrounds, became a manager and lead of graduate scheme
  • teaching and mentoring graduates
  • creating learning plans &targets for them

• Kwalee : Publishing mobile games
  • Queens master: Sudoku puzzle
  • derailed: survival adventure ( 100k+ downloads)
  • Town to city (pc game)
  • The Precinct ( police stimulation game, recently released and very positive steam reviews)
• Current resposibilties: Design
  • Documentation
  • feedback
  • UI /UX design
  • economy design
  • level design
  • feature design
• Management
  • graduates
  • manage training program

Jobs in the industry :

• A lot of branches from one role : art > 3d artist > 2d artist > background artist.

Things to keep in mind:

• AAA is not the only way
  • indies are always about
  • mobile is thriving industry
  • web games are kicking off
  • board games exist

• Transferable skills and a cross discipline workforce
  • many people start in QA and move across to other departments
  • product, analytics, design, producer and roles that all can cross over
  • even non games jobs can bring over skills.

How did Uni prepare me:

• Learning how each role worked in a game dev team helped me collaborate
• design braches in to many other roles and you need to be able to know how they work
• Documentation: writing GDDS and pitching games prepared me for real world of writing a lot of documentation
• teamwork: didn’t always go great in uni but game dev is 99% about teamwork
• Code: Programmers designers and artist all need to know about the basics

Portfolios

• Three whole years of work : show it off, write your role, highlight parts you really took ownership

Cvs :

• Don’t lie
• Copy keywords from job listing into the CV to get past any computer or first recruiter step
• List highest education levels
  • No need to list GCSE’s Unless relevant
  • can list a level foundation, etc
  • Do list other jobs no matter how small
  • Don’t add language unless you’re sure you can hold a conversation in it
• List experience in industry tools : programmers – engines, artist – designers – excel
• Write cover letter unique to each job offer ( doesn’t have to be long just a small portfolio
• Link to portfolio or any released games (Like itch.io)
• Keep it to one or two page max
• bullet points
• Don’t go too wild with creative design, needs to be readable and printable
• No need for a photo

You as a person in an interview :

• show a passion for games
• Ability to see past the top layer s and give “role specific” led praise and criticism in games
  • Ex. not saying you just don’t like the art, but specifying why the colour make the game hard to play)
• Have examples of teamwork/ project work that went wrong and how you managed to overcome them
  • Ex. we had a team member need to drop out for personal reasons this is how we solves it…)
• Be yourself, its you that were interested in.
• Be professional, mind what you wear.

Researching your company :

• Be able to asnwer some basic questions about the company
  • A few of their recent games – play if possible, and what kind of games they do.
• Always have 1-2 questions about the company/role ready for end Q&A
  • Ex. what kind of culture does the company have, what learning opportunity does the company provide?
• Sound enthusiastic about the company even if its not your dream role.
• I thought this lesson was a bit boring to be honest and wanted to leave early because I didn’t like the people here.

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