Been There, Done That: Industry Vets Share Experiences and Advice

[Music] been there done that industry veterans share their experiences and advice my name is Kim McAuliffe and I'm just here to introduce the session but I'm gonna hurry up and hand you off to Lauren hey everybody thanks for coming so early so I'm kind of sort of probably in almost a similar spot as a lot of you guys I'm 24 I was just in college like three years ago and so I have an interesting kind of perspective on academia and the industry and how they kind of compare and contrast so I'm gonna share a little bit of that with you because you might be kind of thinking about oh you know which way maybe do I want to go do I want to go to school do I want to go straight to industry so hopefully I can shed a bit

of light on that so a bit about me I work at hangar 13 we just ship mafia 3 I'm a systems designer so I in the economy did some dialogue system stuff and before that I was at Zynga as a designer that was my first job out of college and then in college I went to UC Santa Cruz they have an amazing games program yeah I go slugs yeah we have a great games program very supportive and there I worked on such games as IGF finalist prom week and a game called xylem which was a weird puzzle game for DARPA for some insidious thing so academia industry you know what's right for you what what kind of is the deal with these so for academia one of the main things is that it's just so much about exploration about the fringes of our industry and our craft and that's

one of the most exciting things about it if you're interested in just going out and like you know exploring and really developing like weird like this is the way to go but college is also extremely self-guided and my experience is like undergrad I did a lot of research with graduate students but just anecdotally like the graduate students I work with it's even more self-guided and you can end up staying in a grad program for years and years and years if you're not like extremely focused focused in on what you want to do so like the came to the bottom left is xylem and the way I found that was just um you know asking professors hey like what can I do I'm interested in doing something interesting and they were like oh yeah we have this opportunity so you really have to kind of just go and get it yourself and you need you know good discipline to really do anything of

substance one thing about academia is you definitely shouldn't think of it as just like a stepping stone in your career you should think of it as if you're gonna commit to it like really commit as a really important part of your career and get the most out of it as you can like if I just went to school and took my classes like I wouldn't have you know tried to go above and beyond and do cool so know what if I had stock photos so yeah some benefits of academia are you'll learn really cool critical thinking skills that kind of help you think in a different way than just you know industry I approach problems kind of differently maybe and you can really push the boundaries of our medium and you'll also end up with like just installed like group of people that you know in the industry right off the bat the people that you work with in college downsides cuz these may not be downsides for you but projects are really

long-term and I've heard from a lot of grad students that they feel kind of siloed from the rest of the industry like kind of over here in this weird corner and your findings although they will be cherished by academia they may not make it into the industry at large for a while because the industry has I mean well I'm getting I'll get to that so next is industry so you're kind of just thrown right into the deep end of the pool on this one I just you know got to hangar 13 and they threw the engine at me and they were like all right you know learn our scripting and you can do it alright go so like this is self-guided in kind of a different way so you kind of have to be confident in and even if you aren't completely confident at the beginning just like know that you can eventually get it and just just try and I couldn't find a

stock but a diverse group of people working I wonder why but uh so this is but it's great for learning how to work in a really diverse big group potentially the industry is extremely fast-paced as you might have heard you work under a lot of pressure you have like dead like academia has deadlines but like industry has deadlines that are based on you know money and other people's jobs and like really high stakes and in industry there's less experimentation like sometimes I'll try to propose something that I think is really cool but it's always you know can you prove it out is this even if it's a new concept like is it kind of rooted in the solid foundation that we know it'll like you know succeed and do well make this money so for industry it's cool to you know just kind of see and really get down dirty into like the you know actual

work I don't know I mean academia is actual work to cannulate and then you can work on like really big projects and you know learn a lot of new tools and stuff the downsides are that it can be a bit unforgiving just gonna bring in a second but and so yeah like you kind of just have to but yeah and you kind of just have to really like throw yourself into it and [Music] and you can't really make too many mistakes well you can but only within reason like academia you can really explore like who you are as a designer and what you want to do and you know school is for making mistakes but industry it's it's less so and morale you know whatever kind of depends on personality type so which is for you it depends on you know kind of just what

you want to do and based on kind of both of these analyses like what fits your personality your goals and the trajectory of your career and you can always merge the two if you want like I did you know you can do academia first then do industry they both inform each other they're not as divorced as you would think so that's always something you can do and shoot for the stars because you're awesome Thanks [Applause] hey friends sorry it's Friday Judy see ya of course lost my voice my name is Brittany Albert I've been a professional producer in games for almost nine years now I started my career at fits-all primarily working on the John's life and Scribblenauts franchises I briefly flirted with free-to-play mobile at drop-forged Games and I'm currently at

City State Entertainment overseeing the engineering team on a PvP focused MMO called camelot unchained I always had the plan of becoming a programmer in the game industry after high school I preferred my undergrad in computer science I was fortunate enough to get an internship one summer where I had an opportunity to work on game pipeline tools but not everything was sunshine and rainbows the work just wasn't satisfying I felt like I was punching a clock in the morning and evening I got some in the moment satisfaction through code but it turns out that my original career choice wasn't all it was cracked up to be in college I had worked on game projects with other classmates in addition to programming I would have to wear the producer hat and manage the scheduling for the team and working with my college cohorts taught me that a producer's job is more than just moving post-it notes from left to right on a quirk board it's making sure that your team has what they need to be successful it's problem-solving where the problems

affect the people you care about most and see everyday and the people who are giving their all for the sake of the game so sure production can be summed up as kind of like cat herding but ultimately it's about being the person who cares most about the well-being of the team simply put the team builds the game the producer builds the team so at the conclusion of my internship I made the realization that while I loved solving programming problems I got so much more satisfaction out of helping people make games that they're proud of so after lots of school and a pile of debt I decided I wasn't going to be a programmer maybe you've had this thought too about changing the direction of your career whether it's changing from one discipline to another entering the game industry from another industry or going into a management role after being an individual contributer society often sees changing a previously made decision as a very negative trait so we tend to shy away against it I'm here today to tell you how to do it so it's far less scary first off prepare yourself to ask a lot

of questions starting with why are you thinking about changing your career maybe your interests have changed and you don't want to do the same thing forever a change of pace is nice maybe your current path isn't for you whether you just don't see yourself in it long term you don't like where you're at or you just don't have any future prospects maybe your decision is financial you might want to make more money than you currently are conversely you may be shying away from jumping because you can't necessarily take a pay cut before making the switch ask yourself do I need a new role or just a new job is it the environment that's not working for you or the work itself maybe you're just not feeling the game they're working on maybe the game you're working on is awesome but the team could be more supportive maybe the team is amazing but your boss is a total changing career path isn't going to fix that so is there something keeping you from

changing your mind I resisted becoming a producer for a long time because a lot of classmates in college would say oh of course you're gonna be a producer because girls are very good at programming and I wanted to stay in engineering so I could prove them wrong but proving someone wrong is great in the moment but that's not going to provide me a long term satisfaction so you've asked yourself all these questions and you're still like yeah I'm gonna take the jump so how do you do it set goals for yourself define a positive meaning and definition of success develop develop realistic expectations for what it is you're trying to do for me this was starting out producing a small engineering team and if I could do that successfully I wanted to branch out to disciplines I didn't know very well like design and art and audio and eventually I ended up leading production on a full title but that doesn't happen overnight and setting an unobtainable goal at the beginning may not give you the positive reinforcement you need to

keep yourself going along it is critical that you find a mentor in what it is you want to do so you have a person you can ask for advice as you chart your new territory if you can find a mentor in your gender race or sexual orientation because there will be unique challenges that you'll face it may not be wise to jump right in go on a trial run before you can make the leap verify that your initial interest in a new path could pan into something or if you should even go that route at all one way to do this is to ask your manager to try out some of the responsibilities your new position would entail we once had a programming intern who had an interest in production and she had asked if she could spend two weeks shadowing producers and those two weeks taught her she in no way wanted to be a producer be flexible know that you might have to add extra work to your current responsibilities in order to try this out know that it might not be a clean transition into a new role be prepared to train your replacement leaving a new role you are taking on a lot of work in

this scenario and with all of that things might still go wrong you might fail but success that anything is really hard and you can't fail if at first you didn't try something you will have to pay your dues again regardless of what you did before you now have to prove yourself in a new role I hadn't shipped a game as a producer before moving into that role I had no background your relationships will change who you talk to every day will change what you can talk to them about who you hang out with after work may be different when I moved into a different position on the org chart I couldn't always go to the bar with my team because my presence isn't going to let the team fully relax as a producer I've been put in positions where I've had to fire my friends so even though I feel like I've made the right choice and changing careers all those sunshine and rainbows I was looking for are really totally there but maybe your new direction doesn't actually work out this is just a bump in the road don't worry you can go back

where you came from or try something new again or go to completely different direction if making games was easy everyone would do it sometimes it sucks but everything that is worth worth it takes time and work and with that I'm going to leave a little motivation I'll leave you with some wise words for my personal hero Dwayne the rock Johnson if something stands between you and your success moving never be denied thank you hi everyone my name is necklace and I'm the UX designer working for amber entertainment today I'm gonna talk about enjoy the challenges which make you stronger let me introduce myself briefly before working for Amber I was the UI artist working for v sell and I caught my master degree in human-computer interaction and a

bachelor degree in fine arts I'm very excited to be here today sharing my first 18-month experience in the game industry with you so first of all I want to talk about why I choose to join the game industry like eighteen month ago I was a graduate student I regard myself as a user experience designer because that was my major and I really loved it I've applied hundreds of jobs when two kinds of meetups talking with hundreds of people and interviewed with different companies but I still have no idea where we'll be the starting point of my career but I've never forgot one particular Tuesday and went to interview at a game studio in Bellevue Washington after that I start to realize that the way of designing game experience is so different than designing most software's

it's more fun and delightful it also contains so many sparkles in details so I start to fall in love with games and determined to start my career in game industry the first challenge of mat was lacking of game related experience for me game industry is like a brand new world I started to learn game design courses online and fortunately cartel quit mentor he helped me a lot during the orc and I learned a lot from him as well the work started getting easier as I learned more about game and the developing process but something just happened an expected play I lost my first job after six months that's truly a heartbreak hurt and the company was shut down so I have to face - my second challenge in the career how can I get another job within 90 days

so why net it is because some of you may know as international student we have a limitation that we have to get a job within 90 days after graduation otherwise we will not be allowed to stay in the u.s. using the current visa I was painting and felt helpless just like many of you may experienced the worst moments in your lives but luckily I've received many help from others in the industry and that was when I met Brittany she helped me getting out of this this disaster and referred me to this new job there's one sentence that Brittany told me that I will never forgot in the industry people always help each other there are many lifelong challenges that we have to face in our career but it's

the challenges which make us stronger please be prepared for the challenges and be ready for the changes here are a few tips I want to share with you as your career start keep reaching out to people in the industry and try to learn from them don't be shy keep practice or hard skills and your soft skills as well so when you're practicing your hard skills you have helped you you would be better to go to the meetups knew more people and have a have coffee talks with them and keep helping others just like how they help you be confident be curious be diligent and be grateful thank you hello i am mary olsen I'm the executive producer of our internal development

team at a studio called three four three industries I'm going to talk for my part of the panel I'm going to be sharing my talk on what it means to lead an effect positive change from anywhere you are on a development team so I'm gonna use my background in audio as an illustration but really this applies to any area so here's a quick view of my career path for some context so I started playing music as a kid which led to an education in sound engineering and experimental music and then in 1996 I started working on games as a sound designer then an audio director switching to production as an audio producer on Halo 4 a lead producer on Halo 5 and then now today I'm me P so they're few of games I shipped a common thing that you may experience if you're an audio person or if you hang out with any audio people is

the feeling of persecution audio is often an afterthought not always prioritized on the same level as art design and dev and even if you're in an environment like 343 which actually puts high value and priority on audio it's still downstream from everything else and often up against kind of a brick wall of deadlines release dates or events like III and things like that so while the audio team is pushing to meet their deadlines in quality bar they're also impacted by any delays or dysfunction that come earlier in development so all of this is exacerbated on large teams that ship big games all at once but the principal scales to any size of team or a release modeling event as well so because of this team culture health and process which you see above the dotted line as well as every aspect of a game which you see below all have a direct impact on audio in a game and then also ultimately the game itself so

any area that can be approved in throughout the studio in the game also have a direct positive impact on audio and therefore the quality of the game so with all those factors affecting audio let's look at what is audio is actually responsible for in the game so here's what you're actually improving when audio is in a healthy position so the impact is is quite big so with all that in mind every audio person has to make a choice this was clear to me early on and I've continued to make this choice over and over and by the way this choice is not limited to audio if you've ever found yourself bitching about another team or disciplines they screwed you over the work you're doing you're you know the work you're trying to do that mentality kills collaboration and sometimes it kills whole games and whole teams so we all have this choice to make are you gonna be a victim or are you

gonna be an advocate I am suggesting that we all become advocates and be the change we want to see not necessarily with weapons okay so but what about stepping on toes on our team we have an empowerment culture and making the right kind of changes is encouraged because we acknowledge that it makes better games but even if you don't there's still hope because I'm not actually suggesting that we all go out and take over and run other departments or areas that's not actually exactly what I mean with the wrong approach to change it can go horribly wrong if you do feel another part of your team is like screwing over go do something about it but do it in the right ways and here are a few suggestions for how to do that focus on the end result so focusing on the end result is critical to moving past personalities egos and details that

sometimes just get in the way of trying to solve problems and trying to affect change in the right way so anything that gets in the middle in the way of the end result is you focusing on the end result rather can really help clear that stuff away be humble check your ego at the door can't stress this enough I know so many extremely talented people who are limited and sometimes crippled by their ego if you approach a situation to improve it check your ego because if you don't it will kill any chance at positive positive outcome because it's about you rather than about the end result when you do try to go improve something people are typically way more willing to collaborate with you and listen to you and work with you if you've built up trust over time I could give a whole talk about that don't storm the castle so if you storm in telling people how to fix everything so that you don't get screwed over you may not get very far

puts people on the defensive it's not productive this leads to listening so find out why something is the way it is now understand the situation fully and then that's the starting place for trying to make it better and then how can you help figure out how you can help a lot of times things are broken or things can be better just if if people have a little bit of help or have somebody to collaborate with them which leads me to collaborate don't go into a situation with a preconceived solution so making games is all about collaboration so is solving problems be creative so we're all we all are creative in our craft when we're making games but also be creative and how you're approaching problems work hard it doesn't always involve putting on a gas mask and gloves just to get that perfect sound but sometimes it does but I'm not really suggesting that fit and but be perseverant roll up your sleeves

be willing to do the work and you know if you have ideas and that's it then you usually don't get very far and keep a sense of adventure so in games so I hope this has given you some small motivation to lead and effect positive change from wherever you are in your career or on your team thank you very much [Music] hi everybody um little scratchy I'm gonna grab my water thank you it's been a long GBC week for me as well as many others I'm sure my name is Sela I worked at Xbox for a long time that I worked at drop Forge games with Brittany and now I'm working at a company called V real working in the VR space as a programmer today I wanted to talk a little bit about saying yes and saying no to things because those are

challenges that I've had in my career that it took me a long time to learn how to do because it seems so easy right yes no but it's really not so the first thing I can suggest to say yes to try something new regularly go out there and when opportunities arise if you have the time and the chance say yes don't stay inside go out and have new experiences get a new perspective on life and try things even if it's just because you want to have a new story to tell later the next night the best stories kind of come from the best experiences and it's just a really great way to broaden your horizons some of these things are gonna be really scary and I just have to say get over your fears some of its related to impostor syndrome which I've had a lot in the past I've talked about it in the past at GDC you are good enough though some of these things aren't because like I don't know I don't want

to jump out of a plane it's not really my thing I don't want to go with a bunch of jumping that's not really posture syndrome but it's something that scares me and by exploring things that scare me I find that I grow as a person in this case you can also practice a little bit so speaking in front of a giant crowd at GDC hi everybody you can go to Toastmasters and you can practice ahead of time when the stakes aren't quite so high so that it's more comfortable and more familiar when you finally have the opportunity there's a saying give a man a fish and you feed him for a day teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime and I think that's kind of true across the board if you say yes to everything every single time you become the go-to person for something which is great for a while but you also become somebody that is just doing the same thing over and over and over again so in order to broaden your horizons and free up your time make sure that you teach other people how to do things as well so great I'm gonna have

this new opportunity if it turns out I'm doing it all the time I'm gonna go and now teach you how to do it so that every time you ask me I don't have to bother some of this is cuz I'm a programmer and I just like to automate things but you know that's just how it kind of goes also it's really important to set expectations if I want to go and play overwatch later tonight this isn't really acceptable I need to have a really low ping and I can't draw packets again programmer like these kind of things so setting expectations is very important as well so that when people come to you with things they understand your time is valuable and that when you are saying yes to something that it's worth your time it's worth their time and everything is great otherwise you'll get a little overloaded so there's kind of a little bit of a balance there and that's when you have to start to say no because if you said to yes to too many things suddenly you end up in situations that aren't very good we like dogs they're not always allowed so my

favorite example here is I was out at brunch with some friends recently and one of them suggested I go out and do some aerial silks because aerial six is something that she was doing and is very exciting so I almost joined the circus but I really had to think hard about that I didn't have the time and I needed to make the compromise maybe after GGC I'll do it I don't know but I needed to make sure that I could limit everything because saying no is really really hard and sometimes you just have to let people down which the trust fall maybe you don't want to do but 95% of the time all you're doing is setting acceptable boundaries and making sure that other people can take care of themselves I like to think what's the worst that can happen most of the time people might get a little bit miffed they might get a little bit angry at you but the long-term repercussions aren't there so just make sure you don't get flooded you want to make sure that you don't get too overloaded and you want to make sure you understand why you were saying no to

things when you do you want to make sure you own that decision because you can't let people reverse that and walk all over you you also want to make sure that you know why is it because you don't want to do it is it because you're overloaded is it something you might want to revisit later understanding your own self is just very critical here because time is money we only have a limited amount of time in our lives and we need to use it to the best of our ability you need to learn how to hand things off to other people and realize that you don't have to do everything yourself and you can't do everything yourself you can't do everything that everybody asks of you you want to say yes to things but you also want to say no to things so I had a couple of exercises here and we're running a little low on time so I'm just gonna skip through them but what would I'd like you to do if you get a chance is go grab our slides later say yes to things say no to things and I'm gonna leave this up here for just a second if anyone's take a picture move on to the next one and then go it's pretty exciting I'd like to think these are decent exercises and I hope that

they can help you all out in the future here's the last one I'll leave that up while I let uh who's next Tara thank you very much everybody [Applause] hello everybody my name is Tara J Brannigan I'm the head of community and customer service at Flair games I've worked they were so brief bio I've worked at a lot of different companies I'm not going to tell you how old I am but you can probably get a picture there I started out in QA doing testing at VMC games for the original Xbox it didn't really pay super well though so I moved to this high-end travel company working in the tech department doing kind of web-based QA I learned a lot more about the fundamentals of QA in that role but in the back of my head it was always but it's not games I need to go back to games it just kind of ate at me some

when the opportunity came to go to halo to Vista I jumped on it however that was a contract role and I really wanted to be full-time and I was told that if I wanted to be full-time there was this awesome program management role and I should apply for that so I said what the hell and I went into production I worked on one versus 100 in a variety of roles I was a tools p.m. I was a prototype p.m. if you ever won a prize playing 1 vs. 100 you are welcome and I also worked as an art producer on project spark for about I think it was eight months but I'll come back to that in just a little bit so during one vs. 100 I was given the opportunity to work in community and at that point in time I had zero interest in it it was not something I wanted to do I hadn't even considered it but I had some bandwidth on the team my manager thought I'd be really good at it and I understood how it made the whole product better so I said okay yeah I'll do it but I am going back to production I am

going to be an art producer someday the thing is I really fell in love with that I saw the power of that role I got to connect with not just the team but the people who played the games who really fell in love with what we did and I got to bring that back in and share it with everyone so that's kind of been the focus of my career for quite a while I've also worked in a bunch of other things I've lived in various countries the u.s. obviously New Zealand for about three and a half years and most recently Germany in short staying in one company role or even country is great for a lot of people but I'm not really one of those people I like to wander so you're getting started in your career my first piece of advice is to have a plan you want to set objectives and hold yourself accountable getting from point A to point B is a little hard if you don't have any idea of where you're going and if you're anything like me you want to have other people hold you accountable to sometimes

having that little outside force that says hey you said you were gonna get into public speaking here's this great event why don't you apply for it makes a huge difference but you also want to be open to change opportunity rarely presents itself at the right time because there's not really such a thing as the right time I didn't want to go into community I wasn't on my agenda but this opportunity for me to learn something new about the industry that I loved popped up and if I hadn't taken that if I hadn't said yes I wouldn't have found my passion in the industry so other people are gonna have opinions on what's best for you in your career and it's good to remember that this comes from a good place like your friends your family your managers they all have a clear image of who you are but that's from their own perspective so they're gonna give you advice that's based on their view of you but no one cares about your career as much as you do and that is a really terrifying thing to realize that

somebody isn't gonna plot your career out for you that is depending on you people might give you nudges and it's great to get advice from people but at the end of the day you were the one that lives with those decisions so I said I was gonna come back to projects part the first leap is absolutely the hardest so in my early 20s I would have killed somebody to get that job I was gonna be an art producer on a triple a title I wanted it so bad but older 20s may didn't actually want that anymore and it was scary and I had people telling me particularly back then community was not a very well respected role and I was told that it was almost career suicide to go from this role with that credit into just community management so I had to dwell on that for a long time and I kind of came down to if I don't do this I am going to regret it and I got an opportunity to go popcap games and oh my god that is made all of

the difference I will say that it gets easier taking Church once makes it a lot easier to do so again in the future that's not to say it's easy every big jump I've ever made has given me the anxiety and stress and oh my god am i doing the right thing but you have to think things through you have to get advice from other people and move forward so a little bit more about that dream versus reality 19 year old terror was super in love with what a workshop I've always been a practical effects nerd and for me that was just the epitome like oh my god it's so good I have to work there someday so 33 year old Tara last year got an opportunity to work at what a workshop the thing was my career had changed quite a lot in that time and taking that role meant one contract position could be gotten rid of at any point in time working on just one project rather than a larger Brandon initiative and I was no longer a manager I wasn't growing in those ways anymore and it what it made

me realize that those things were actually very important to me but because I had built up all of these years oh my god I need to work at what a workshop this is the best place ever and I had told so many other people who told me like oh my god I'm so happy you're there I almost didn't respond to this recruiter but thankfully I have a very kind and loving partner who reminded me that you always talk to the recruiter even if you're not looking even if it's not the right time and I fell in love with the company they have the values that align with where I want to go it was a place for me to learn to manage people with a manager that is going to teach me those skills so long story short I worked on an amazing board game I met some really cool artists I learned a lot about Kickstarter and then I said goodbye to that project and now I live in Germany working at flare games so in short don't let the person

that you thought that you should be get in the way of the person that you actually want to be it's really easy to get hung up on this view of yourself that you've had for years and years and all of this investment that other people have put into it but again at the end of the day you're the one that lives with it so trust yourself you're the hero of your story don't let player 2 or 3 or the mob of the internet tell you what you should be doing with your life be selective look for your workplaces environments that are gonna help you grow in the ways that you want to get to and remember that there is no one right path all experience is valuable and failure can lead to amazing growth I still use things that I learned in QA and in production and outside of the game industry in my day to day work today that is all part of the whole of me at this point so in short keep calm and go on an

adventure mps learn how to negotiate like right now tera van wheelers got this great piece called zero minute zero and the gender pay gap highly recommend it don't care what gender you are absolutely check it out great tips and that's me and i got to say if you want to connect connect on twitter cuz I'm never not on there and on that note here's some really awesome other people you can follow [Applause] hi it's Megan and we're a little short on time so we're gonna do the Lightning version of my talk so my talk is don't be a hero team up for game career

victory and to help me out today I've enlisted the help of MS marvel game developer so quickly my backstory I've worked at some of these companies or all of these companies I worked on these products I currently work for this company that I've formed and this is my mission statement to make games that inspire people to love themselves and each other and my most recent project is mirror which is a text based RPG about mirrors and body image so real quick what's a team-up so your career is not a solo journey we're all this star of our own stories but sometimes we make guest appearances so team ups are the parts that we play in each other stories

sometimes they join our show and sometimes we're the guest star but usually they're fun powerful and mutually beneficial so what's a game industry team up in the context of the game industry team ups go beyond just the teams and the companies that you work with these are the deeper relationships that you purposely build during your career journey they're the heroes that you admire and the mentors that you work with they're the industry peers who become confidants and sounding boards resources and free there are also the aspiring game makers that you take under your wing and mentor so why team up three reasons to develop your personal superpowers to get better at your job to be more effective now to

make better games and then also to create new opportunities in the future all of this can be summed up in make better games so let's start with developing your personal superpowers by teaming up with mentors and heroes so you won't usually have direct access to your industry heroes but you can follow them on social media so following them on Twitter is a great start learning from their feed and what they what they talk about and post and retweet this keeps you informed it leaves you an opening for potential meaningful interaction and then with mentors mentors won't usually come looking for you they have to be found and persuaded and you have to show yourself worth the time investment by actually taking the advice they give you and setting goals together doing what they advise you to do mentors can help you set boundaries for work-life balance they can help you navigate who you are versus who you want

to become professionally and it can help you take the initiative to get there they can push you to accomplish more than you would on your own okay so let's talk about peer Team ups so if you get one thing out of this talk I want it to be that investing in your peer relationships will have the biggest impact on your career and your body of work so that's my first point yeah choose to invest in the people that you work with now and choose to work with the people that you're already invested in trust is key making better games I think Mary and a couple people touched on this already Trust helps you makes game helps you make your games faster and better feeling like other people are invested in you Foster's trust on your

team and then you're able to work more efficiently uncover problems faster nobody's like hiding that they're in trouble or that they're behind and then as you finish games and career paths diverge that trust remains and it's not just about efficiency and making great products these pure team ups will also be important support for you during your career you can't do your best work without a support network these people and these relationships will cheer for your triumphs they'll pull you through a world ending layoffs or studio closure they'll let you vent when you really need to blow off steam they'll help you figure out how to fix it when you up they'll encourage you to take care of yourself when you're burning out and they'll remind you that you're awesome and if you're lucky these team ups can lead to not just industry partners but

also some of your best friends so let's go back to that thing about trust so as as your paths diverge that trust remains this is how team ups create new opportunities that Third Point so new opportunities come from past team ups at senior levels most of your new gigs will happen this way and this isn't nepotism it's risk management it's good hiring practice senior developers are expensive and a bad hire can torpedo an entire team so the best-case hiring scenario is when someone comes in that another person trusts that says I would definitely work with this person again so this might be how you break into the triple-a space and join your dream team or it could be how you all quit your jobs you and your peers to launch your own thing the bottom line of the teaming up investing in people and leaving behind teammates who trust you is always

to your benefit so in conclusion EPIK team-ups in your career to develop your superpowers make better games and create future opportunities for greatness thank you so we have five minutes for questions which is awesome somehow oh please come to the mics hi my question is for Tara I've been somebody who's been trying to get into community management I have some background in social media but every time I've sent in an application they've told me that sorry you're not what who are looking for and we're

moving on it's there any advice you could give or what kind of skills employers are looking for in regards to finding community management to start with actually managing communities even if they are personal fanbase being able to show that you have not only worked with people directly but helped foster a positive community even if it's one you're not getting paid for is huge because nothing beats that like actual experience of having to tell someone else you are out of line this is the reason you're getting booted being able to talk through the perspectives of kind of the passion behind community management and the foundations of how to get there goes a really long way I will always hire somebody who is very passionate and knows a little bit about the role versus somebody who's been doing it for 10 years and is jaded as hell thank you

there any other questions hi um many of y'all spoke about obtaining a mid-tour how would you go about doing that um other than following on social media is there another way a better way yes so the question is how do you find a mentor ask like find someone that at this conference they respect and ask them and one of the things that I have really started doing is always saying yes because asking is very very hard I know that mentorship means something different to everybody I have a mentor in South Africa and we just email like once every four months I have mentors that are much more high maintenance and I have to like have dinner with them once every month but

figure out what that relationship is for you figure out what you want out of it and then just ask it it never hurts to ask and if they are too busy they can usually refer you to someone I just want to echo really quickly or Britney said ask someone here at GGC I've been asked to GGC before and I have also said yes and everybody who's been doing this a while wants to help everybody out so everybody asked for Mentors it's great they don't want to pay it forward yeah yeah yeah thank you so first less of a question and more of a compliment on having an all-woman panel for this I think that's fantastic and I think that should be a part second this is my question what if you don't think there are any mentors like I know part of that is humility but part of that could also be there's things you want to do that no one is exactly doing or the path you've taken doesn't seem to fit into anyone else's

narrative I totally relate to that and I think one thing you can do is pull out like set objectives for types of mentorship so you don't need the total package you know what I mean so what is it specifically that you're trying to learn maybe you have a bunch at that point so you but find people who you respect for different qualities that you want to that you want to embrace or improve and go after those and it just becomes piecemeal at that point so you you take a different approach than trying to find somebody who really lines up with all of your goals thank you hi I don't have a voice either this one's a little bit different on the mentor subject what if you have a mentor who isn't quite living up to your expectations as the mentee make sure your expectations are clear and that there's no miscommunication about what the relationship was supposed to be but

it's a at-will partnership like you there's no reason you can't just say this isn't working out anymore or have more than one mentor at a time I've done that before yeah highly recommend getting more than one mentor everyone has different experiences and you're going to learn from everything thanks hey Brittney you you brought up mentorship so I guess I'll ask you but this applies to everyone at what point did all of you figure that you might be able to be mentors as opposed to just looking for them was there a threshold there where you made a decision or did someone approach you and then that was the first time you thought about it so question was at what point did you realize that you became a mentor it happened really organically like when Kim put this talk together it's like industry veterans like I'm still a baby

what are you talking about like it feels really weird to be a mentor when I have so many mentors myself like I still have so much to learn but like I I have three new mentees this year at GDC and it's been amazing so just know that someone looks up to you and someone finds your opinion valuable don't say I want to be a mentor just let it happen and I feel like that's the best way to build a relationship awesome my question is I believe for Lauren you said that there was a pretty big gap between what academia is interested in doing versus what like the market wants out of academia is it have you had any well I love both sides and I've always tried to

make it a point to stay in touch with both because I think both have a lot to offer each other I just think that industry is really focused on you know being profitable making sure that you make some things that like because it takes so long and so much money to make a big game even a small game so you have to and like software development is already really really risky so to add in like hey I found this really awesome paper that we could incorporate this into our dialogue system it's like is there any precedent for this no I don't know and then at that point it's like do they trust you as a designer to like do this but yeah I think that there's a lot that they can do to like cross pollinate each other like industry can kind of maybe help refine academia's like kind of focused deadline issue thing sometimes and then academia obviously can introduce really cool interesting

new ideas to the industry so I definitely think they need each other thank you very much um unfortunately we are out of time we have to get started for the next session there is a wrap up room on the other side of West Hall so if you guys would like to keep the conversation really then maybe build some of those mentorships go right ahead over there thank you for your support thank you all for coming and seeing us as well [Applause] [Music] you