Being a Unicorn: Multiclassing in an Industry That Wants Specialization

[Music] thank you I'm Kate Compton um I have worked in games for a number of years I made the planets on Spore and my GDC history is that my first year at GDC when I came in as a conference associate I left the Expo floor in tears because one of the HR people took my resume that had half art and half programming and crossed out the arts section uh so here we are um so my love for you is to give you all the spite that got me through the games industry and a lot more advice as well so we'll go ahead and get started uh with Alexis hi my name is Alexia oh are we gonna show the things there we go it's me hi my name is Alexis dedrolami I'm a lead game designer at Lively which is a studio under sort of the keywords umbrella um I've been in the industry for about a

decade now mostly in free to play mobile but I've dabbled in other things these are the places that I've worked we'll talk about sort of why I can't talk about most of the projects that I've worked on but um these are some of the companies um my combination of of skill sets is game design programming I do a lot of team leadership and production work especially in r d i do do some writing on the side I write romance novels in my free time um and then I also am really great at karaoke invite me to your karaoke party Sports and that's me Teresa hi I'm Teresa duringer and I'm the CEO owner of templegates games but I do have a history working with Kate Compton at Electronic Arts and Maxis and um the basics are I I started um working at EA I was doing community management and production I found myself on the web team which is a kind of unique place where you can start branching into a few

different disciplines at the same time and I was doing programming of different apps using our API art design and my manager actually told me to get a promotion I needed to pick a lane I needed to pick if I wanted to be a programmer or artist or an engineer a programmer artist or a design and I picked leaving and I started my own company but it's it's sort of unfortunate that sometimes you have to make those choices um so what has happened is I now have a company we make digital board games right now Dominion is in a beta we did Ascension race for the Galaxy um so I've navigated both the Indie space and the AAA space and in wanting to wear multiple hats and you can't do it but sometimes it takes a little bit of creativity and let's see uh Kimberly oh sweet hey folks I'm Kimberly Unger I've been a games industry professional for well over 20 years at this point um I started on the art and animation side and

eventually I sort of crossed over into narrative design I ended up doing a bit of engineering and then I ended up Landing in Biz Dev at the end of it all and I ran my own uh third-party mobile game studio for about 10 years and then uh when we politely closed up shop at the end of all that I moved over and I'm now doing uh content sourcing for meta which is probably the first job I've had where I can put my art and engineering and Biz Dev and Audi and like all those pieces I put together over the years this is the first place I actually get to use almost all of them uh which is kind of honestly a weird place to be all right and finally Virginia hello everyone I'm Virginia Smith I'm currently working as a senior gameplay engineer but I've also done tons of art design game writing basically all the things you need to make a game which I have several of them self-published entire games start to finish I've also worked on several big name games such as wordscapes and currently moonbreaker for

uh unknown worlds I've done tons of game jams I've been mentors of game jams um and tons of you know self-published products um I have also been huge into the modding scene so I've worked in creation club for Bethesda as well and uh oh that's all I'll do three as you are I forgot to put that on the slide yeah I think we all have more skills that could fit reasonably on a slide yeah uh speaking of here's our slide with all of our skills um or at least a subset of them um we also uh instead of doing Q a at the very end uh I have a Dory open so hopefully that QR code and then that bitly link will we do both to an online Dory so that you can uh if you have questions I will just kind of salt them in amongst the questions we've come up with for ourselves um so yeah first question um really what made you get started and we some of you have already covered this in your uh your intros but uh what made you what was the moment that kind of made you get started on this multi-disciplinary path like what made that like the accident of your career yeah I

have a very bizarre entry into games so I did know that I wanted to work in games when I started college um so I started as an art major well first of all I read about extensively online about how to enter the games industry and I wanted to be a game designer and every single article was like don't be a game designer you can't get a job right out of school it's like everything will say that it's so hard you can't get an entry level and I was like well I do want a job so like okay I'll do something else then so I was like I really like art so I started as an art major in college and I hated it um I just like didn't like the curriculum so I was like okay like Engineers like get work so like I'll go and get an engineering degree so that's what I have my undergraduate and is like a variation of Computer Engineering um and turns out I'm bad at it um or rather I don't have like a natural aptitude that I saw like a ceiling for my career of like I thought that I'd be able to do pretty well but not really well and I'm a high achiever so um I then went to graduate school for

interactive entertainment at the Florida Interactive entertainment Academy we got a couple of alumni too um and I was in sort of the design and production segment and I was like I'll be a producer I like people I like organizing stuff and I hated it um and so finally this at long length I finally went and got a design internship out of school they were able to like help um facilitate that and it's been that way ever since um as a result though I have this bizarre set of skills a very particular set of skills um that I have used to apply to my job um it's just happened that a majority of what I do is an r d so I do a lot of early production stuff like we have a general idea at the studio of what we want to be what we want to be making and I do a lot of like solo prototyping or prototyping with like very small teams and then as I've become more senior we sort of build up the team and like make

a larger group and sort of move into a bigger production environment um it's been great because is I can do a bunch of different stuff but it sort of fell into this bizarre niche of you have to do three or four different jobs but also not for the entire duration eventually then it's just management stuff that was a very long and real thing entry thank you so that kind of brings up the question what could you do with your particular skill set that couldn't be done with that same skill set in three bodies what do you need one person in one head to think about well we can all talk to each other without fighting for starters it's a it's an interesting question right because it's less about what you can't do with three bodies versus one and it's more about how efficiently you can do it with one right like if you're

if you're you know if you've got a team of three or four or ten or fifty people there's a a rhythm and if you have to break that Rhythm it screws everything up but if you're one person doing prototyping if you're one person ideating you can go super fast and you can get all the garbage out of the way before you bring it to the group and then they can put their skills to use on it so it really is it's I think a little more about efficient use of time and resources and a little less about well you could only do this yeah with as as one person solving problems quickly yeah like being able to contact shift allows you to identify issues much faster yeah and it allows you to hit issues it allows you to identify issues and and sort of um figure out where the heavy duty resources need to go yeah right you can look at it and say okay I know this is going to be an engineering challenge so I can you know bring in that person right as opposed to I'm going to send it out to the group and let them figure out if it's an engineering challenge and

then you've burned all of that that extra time yeah sometimes as a resource too it's great because you identify a problem so like you see a bug and you're like I'm just gonna like try and fix it myself just like very quick maybe this will be fast and then 10 minutes and you're like no this actually turns out to be a thorny thing but I have more information about how it needs to be solved right so you can add that to the bug and now you've saved someone else a lot of time and like that can be really helpful a great resource on a team it also greatly improves the quality of your work so I'm currently been working professionally as an engineer and I can tell you firsthand that also having the ability to design and make art for the things I do means that I approach my engineering test with an eye towards what the design of the feature is going to be because when you get a design doc there's always holes in it they don't cover every single possible thing that can happen and if you know how design Works you'd be like you know what I need to add this extra screen here to fill in the gap or actually this part of the line really doesn't work now that I'm actually in the code and making the thing happen and also being an artist as

well I do a lot of ux and UI I can say you know this mock-up they did for the screen is great on paper but it doesn't actually work when I'm playing with it testing it so let me just rearrange a few things and the end result is I come out with a feature that's you know shifted a little bit from the user of design but everyone's like actually yeah this is a lot better you know so it um it definitely has that element of uh all in one person all the different elements can talk to each other inside of yourself without having to go consult with a designer back and forth over email so it really does improve the quality of whatever you're working on I think like to your point like when you are able to contain that in a like a small person or couple of people at a company you have unlocked an ability to navigate the possibility space of what your company can possibly do because you know there's limited head count and you know it's going to be really hard to fight to open up head count on something but if you have somebody who's a superpower unicorn who can like navigate into this area and do something with a really small team or maybe self-contained then you can you can open

up and creatively flesh out some of these areas that other people just they couldn't really operate in so you can carve out like a little bit of like where is your value in the company in a different way as long as you don't expect us to do the workload of three people yeah yeah yeah and on that on the both workload and how we can solve multiple problems at a time um I'm interested in uh you know we've all worked on big teams and on Tiny teams uh I was on sport when it's 30 people and even before then there was it was an all unicorn team basically very early on um this is going to sound like a question isn't it interesting that like the smaller the team the more everyone has to be unicorns and the more experimental the team when you don't know if you're going to have to just do art assets or pivot to large language models or learn networking code uh when you're pivoting quickly having a unicorn on team is really interesting it

forces you to be Scrappy right like because you don't have those resources everyone kind of needs to fill in the gaps so the boat doesn't sink um but as a result you wind up gaining a lot of skills that you otherwise wouldn't have like I've always said that like prototyping and like early game teams it's a very particular personality that like that works really thrives in that environment and curiosity is such a big part of that of like not being afraid to learn something new being willing to explore that stuff and like it's such a valuable thing especially on a small team yeah I think like the point about unicorns having a really important role in early game development is because a lot of times if you work at a big company eventually they may invest in certain tools certain you know pipelines and systems for you to like pull in config files so that someone can design a designer can design a tutorial in like text files or something like that but you know that takes time that takes decision making on where you're

going to be investing those tools engineer resources and if you have the skill to just be hooking up like everybody on this panel that to be like hooking up things directly in code you don't have to rely on those things and then you can you can start pushing the project forward defining what the project is going to be at an early stage and it's you know it's it's often the inverse at larger Studios like when when I teach I teach the intersection of Art and Engineering um one of the things I tell my students is look the the bigger the studio the more focused Your Role is going to be so if you really love being able to do all these things pretty good then you want to look at the Indie level you want to look at the small Studio level but if you are the kind of person who wants to laser focus who wants to deeply understand the engineering behind lens flares and nothing else that's where you go for a larger Studio or you go to Hollywood so about team size I was an interesting situation when I was at People final where we scaled up from like 10 people

to almost 100 and I was along for the ride and what I definitely found is as the team sizes got bigger which production did that thinking we'll just throw more bodies at the problem will get done faster is that things tended to slow down overall because everyone tend to be specialized and they're like oh no Virginia you can't do the engineering design and the PM now you're just the engineer which made everything take longer um so if you do run a big company or if you're watching this later on GDC Vault and you do run a big company I would advise even in a very large studio try making smaller teams you'd be surprised at the people on the team have skills that maybe they didn't even know about like just give them the challenge and they'll often rise to the occasion and be like hey actually I can do a little bit of design or hey I actually am kind of good at UI you know and you'll find that the teams overall can can iterate much faster of course if you have the person who only wants to do shaders then okay put them in a corner and let them do shaders but you know if they if they want to try doing more things or you know want to be on that more Dynamic

Scrappy team try the smaller team format if there's anything that you should take from this talk Shader developers belong in a corner that's the one shame on them that's the takeaway sound clip that interesting we've talked about like kind of as teams develop into larger teams you start to get this kind of like more rigid structure things start to sound like have larger boundaries uh I know Teresa can certainly talk to this but when I was at Electronic Arts uh I actually came in as a as an art uh intern just because that was the internship that they had available um and that locked my career for the next eight years and I tried unsuccessful to unsuccessfully to switch so I guess the question now is all right we know how effectively we can work in small porously defined teams how as a unicorn do you negotiate large and with with some with some success negotiate larger more

structured kind of uh institutions it's a really interesting problem and ultimately it does come down to like building trust with your team and with your organization um I have done this successfully I have done this unsuccessfully like this is definitely like not happened at certain companies where basically teams decided no designers don't get to touch code stay away beating me away with a stick um of like no check-ins um but the places where it's worked really well a lot of it comes down to collaborating with the discipline that you want to work with so sensing opportunities to work with uh tools Dev to develop something together that could be really beneficial for both of you and like taking it as an opportunity to learn a lot of times like people in other disciplines might not want you to encroach on their space because they're afraid that they're going to have to clean up after your mess which is like a valid concern like that does happen sometimes but I think coming to it from

a position of I do have some knowledge of this subject I'm interested in learning and getting better here is how I feel like we can work together that generally is a great approach to like building that trust and allowing you to like collaborate on small things that then allow for bigger things yeah I think oh sorry oh no I was gonna say it's it's very relationship Centric right you have you have to build a rapport with with the team that you want to interact with and they have to understand that you're not going to just come in and make a big old mess because in in part of it depending you know when you get up to the larger and larger companies people are gold and judged by management versus specific things and there's a chance there that if you come in from the side you're going to sort of skew their results and and run them into trouble down the line so you do find people who are very uh tightly focused on the end goal that is going to define whether or not they get paid more next year right and so there is some some sense and that's why I call it relationship building right you have to be sensitive to the whole picture when

you come in like this and if you are a lot of times you can build that Rapport and you can you know you can drive that understanding whereas if you just sort of come in from the side and say hey look I did this thing here that that never goes well that's egocentric right it's about like showing off not about making some like great exactly I actually want to come at that from the other direction and it sometimes that does work because um not in terms of framing it as an ego trip framing it as people often won't believe you until they see it fair enough so sometimes it's easier going from a direction of engineering to something else than trying to go into engineering because there's often blockers on like check-ins and stuff but if you're going from art to design or designed art or engineering to any of those sometimes if no one if the trust building isn't working they're just like no you know we love you but no um sometimes it helps to just go do it and then come back and say hey I made this thing can you review it for me just framing it as an exercise and sometimes they'll be like oh this is actually

pretty good let's talk about this or it'll be like actually no this sucks go go hide in a corner with the shaders and you should feel bad but sometimes if the trust building isn't actually opening the door sometimes just going and doing it on a small scale will actually show them that you have the ability to do the thing you're talking about and and crack that door open for you so I think you know there's a lot of big advantages to working at a big company um you know there's like payroll and health care and stuff and there's reasons you might want to do it um it is it is harder to be a unicorn at a big company I think because you run into these relationship issues where like stay off my lawn like you know don't don't get don't touch the system I'm in I think there's a couple of things you can do to to deal with that and one of them is find ancillary projects you know that could be r d that could be prototyping find something that's not necessarily the thrust of what the company is doing and you're going to be able to like occupy like a larger space

within that you know but there's risks to doing that too there's risks to like now the corporate flow chart does not like align for someone like working on your type of project so you have to deal with that but I think about a lot of your work that's part of it too yeah I think that like you know but when you when you're when you're worried about stepping on somebody's toes something that you can do is if if you can avoid um working on when you're spreading into a like a broad space with your skill sets if you can find something you can be a little bit more autonomous on you know like it's kind of fallen out of favor but there used to be like 20 type time at companies like Google where you can do the thing like where you carve off a little time spread your skills into something and then if you can prove to the company that that thing is valuable then that can like open up you know to larger teams in the future so I think you just have to be strategic and understand are you trying to climb the corporate corporate ladder or the corporate flowchart does that align with the quest that you're trying to solve in your life yeah I really like that I like

the um how do you demonstrate to somebody else that your work is valuable uh it is when there's not a template for it and we've actually got a couple of questions from the Dory um things like what can I do in interviews when they're when the recruiter dismisses me because Jack of all trades master of none um or uh knowing what they look knowing what AAA looks for in specialization how do you manage or present your portfolio as a unicorn while applying for specialized roles well first of all remind them the end of that quote is Jack valtrade's mastered gun is better than the master of one [Laughter] yeah and it's you know this is where we get into the art of resume building right like there is a a misconception out there that everything you've ever done needs to go on your resume it doesn't right your resume needs to be fine-tuned to what you're applying for um and that means you're going to leave skills off you're going to leave experience off jobs you had like you worked at Dairy Queen that one time for six months in the summer you don't put that on your resume unless it's you know

unless you have no other no other position that you've worked at right like over time and if you look at the the resumes of anybody who's been in this industry especially given the the speed at which people come into and go out of Studios five six seven eight pages long nobody wants to read an eight page resume you'd please don't trim that sucker down to one page of the coolest stuff that is pointed exactly at the job you want and the rest of it can reveal later like in interviews so yeah then it's like a pleasant surprise of like yes I'm applying for this one job job in art however I do have technical art experience and I I'm like I this is some other stuff that I've done that has been really helpful and then at the interview stage when you can actually speak to it directly to a human being and not necessarily to a computer like that can be uh like a pleasant thing that the interviewer discovers and this also gives the recruiter or the interviewer the opportunity to steer you into a

different role if the if if you're applying for a role like if you work at a at a really big org like EA meta wherever those recruiters have multiple jobs in their pocket that they're hiring for and they may interview you for job a but they're like dude they can do these other things too let's steer them to job B I've already got plenty of people for job a but I have you know only two people for job B right they'll it gives them the opportunity to discover your extra skill sets and then steer you towards something else they may have that is either a little bit earlier hasn't been you know open to the market and have as many resumes yet like it gives them a chance to find a fit for you rather than okay here's the resume here's the job boom you're done yeah something I've also noticed when either I'm mentoring people and trying to get them jobs unicorns almost never going through the front door because it's completely unreasonable for somebody to post a job and say like I need somebody with node expertise knitting practice and like 3D modeling skills if that's if that's a job like

don't apply for it guys but if it was like you know small amounts of that uh so a lot of these things tend to be back Channel networks uh so was this how you found your job or did you get to go in the front door and then just cause trouble so I went on the front door and then caused a lot of trouble um so yeah my advice is actually coming at it from the other end um pick your core skill that you can mark yourself best at I mean for even for unicorns we typically have one thing that we're like the best at of all of them maybe not by a lot but at least a little bit and then come in from that angle and sort of you know tacking on the side oh I can also help you with these things and um but something to keep in mind while you're doing that is I actually almost bombed a job interview because the interviewer stopped the interview and said are you sure you don't actually want to be applying to an artist job instead I was applying for an engineering job um which was a huge warning siren in my head when that happened because it's like oh my God I gotta quickly course correct this so I had to reassure them oh no the art is going to help the

engineering you know not not be like I'm gonna do art and you know poo poo in engineering that's often the way to get yourself in the door is a lot of companies don't understand the idea of someone who is equally good at both like they think that oh they're going to want to do one or the other and what if I hire them as an engineer but now they want to be an artist you know I need an engineer um so like I said good get a way to get your foot in the door is to accentuate how those other skills help the big main one and then once you're in the door you can like break out all the things like a multi-armed Hydra and you know yeah I I agree with the panelists I think it is important to strategically conceal and I wish that wasn't the case I mean in the in a perfect world everyone would have the capacity to remember everything about everyone all the nuances and complexities of all of us special unicorns out there but in the real world you are competing with Specialists for those jobs I think if you have a lot of skills and you're coming into a job interview use the skill understanding the assignment have empathy for the fact that it took a

gargantuan effort probably to open up this jog wreck in the first place it's take multiple levels of sign off in the organization and people pulling political favors to get this open wreck in the first place and if you come along and you try to wiggle that role in the interview into something that you want it to be you're showing a little bit of disrespect for the fact that like so much work has already happened to even get this in front of you and then relax because the reality is like the shape of the role once you're past the door can can be driven a little bit in the direction that you want it to go into so when I when I credit myself on the games that I work on I credit myself as a designer but my real actual role is amoeba I am an amoeba and I have these tentacles and they fill into the skill gaps in my team where it needs to happen to move the project forward and a lot of unicorns are going to be doing that you're going to be like understanding and seeing other people's quests and seeing people what people are good at and you're going to be helping and filling in like I think a lot of

unicorns are really good at improv work improv where you're yes anding and you're seeing what happens on the inside and how you can make it better and you're using that Curiosity that you're bringing to the table but you don't need to say all of that at the interview yeah I did like that uh one of the questions was how do you introduce yourself at parties uh what do you do and I like that that kind of wrapped up in that is this uh storytelling of about what we do so I am also a big amoeba of complexities but I often describe myself as you know bringing AI to people that wouldn't otherwise reach AI or the Ms Frizzle of AI and all that like nicely wraps up in very brief uh a few words like okay there's creativity there's teaching there's AI there's technical skills uh and it allows me to like have a nice little box that I can present to somebody that they can unpack at their Leisure so do you have any sort of glib descriptions of what you do and lets you unpack a lot of times I say I professionally make stuff up like that's like the like the the cute answer yeah

um but usually I'm just like I'm a game designer and then everyone's like what's that stand but those are people outside of games yeah mine's similar my my cute one-liners I make [ __ ] go that's the at the end of the day every single job I've ever had has involved me making things happen when the Starbucks breeds asks I just say either I'm a game developer or like you I say I make the trains run on time yeah I think probably most of my friend if I see some familiar faces in the audience you probably have no idea what I do I feel like it's it's really hard to communicate and I need to go to like some kind of Workshop to communicate it but fortunately like you know I'm I don't I don't really have to communicate it all the time like I'm just you know yeah the company is going so yeah I know we've mentioned okay like you know you come in as an artist and or you come as an engineer and they might route you to artists uh one of the spiciest questions we had in our our pre-game talk was how do you get paid as the highest paid uh feel that you're in again I came in as an artist who did

coding for seven years and got paid as an artist yeah if anyone has the answer to this I am listening like um because if I were smart I would have come in as an engineer but I did not absolutely I think that like there are a lot of roles now especially um that that that do accommodate unicorns and a lot of these roles have technical at the beginning of the title are you a technical game designer are you a technical narrative designer are you a technical artist all of these things are probably going to be doing a little bit of programming and a little bit of some other skill but the problem and the reality is anytime you take a job that has technical at the beginning you're also taking a pay cut like if you just go into a job that says programmer you're going to be making more money so you have to make a decision like are you going to go into the job and then do the sort of like fighting work like bottom-up management to wiggle that role or are you going to just go into the technical role and understand that that

is a reality so once you're actually in the role even if you you know screwed up and applied it's just a little artist or QA person but you would do all this other [ __ ] so my advice for new people who are not in Industry yet or maybe you're just starting out write down everything you do every single day and if you work on a big project or accomplish something big write down all the details about and who is involved so then when you know annual review time comes out you whoop out your scroll and here is your big list of reasons why you deserve a big raise because you made all this [ __ ] happen do it yeah yeah great advice yeah it's it's one of the things that I've noticed is you know looking at piles of resumes there's always a lot more people applying for art positions and I think this feeds back to what you said when they when they looked at your resume and said are you sure you don't want to be an artist right there's a little bit of danger in floating art skills because there's recruiters are like okay this person's gonna apply for one thing then they want to join the art team because art is sort

of the love art and game design are sort of the love piece of this that's the passion yeah those are the shiny roles like when when I was uh first coming out of out of art school um we were talking to Disney recruiters at the time and everybody wanted to be an animator right but animation paid like 25k it was a wretched wretched pay scale and the reason it was is because they would have 250 resumes for animator and then you would have like one resume for the guy who wanted to learn how to animate water photo realistically right using their software and that was the higher paying role right they the the and that's where we get into the problem with or the benefit with specialization right is those specialist roles tend to pay more because a lot of people come in targeting the generalist role and they come in targeting sort of the passion clay as opposed to to the sort of the bits that maybe require more technical expertise or require a level of specialization that maybe not everybody think is really cool like not everybody

wants to spend their entire day designing particles yeah but a Shader programmer is in a corner but they are making money okay really well for it yeah there are jobs that many people just don't know exist so like pipeline engineer technical artist audio engineer all these things that are like little cross-platformy uh kind of jobs and you know I just do art and Technical I have no idea what what they are on the biz Dev side of all the kind of difficult to discover jobs that you didn't know were the perfect fit for you yeah yeah so as part of that this is going to be uh a little actually have have any of us been in a hiring position before yes yes yes so yeah how do you uh when you are looking to hire unicorns what are your strategies where do you look uh how do you tailor your job proposals who do you who do you back Channel ask how are you seeking people out to get the right impossible unicorn that you're looking for

you know so so crafting a job wreck when you're looking for a unicorn is a little bit tricky right because as as we mentioned earlier you know if it says I need a unicorn that's a red flag right for anybody who's applying for the role um but there's a what you even if you're a unicorn there's a core skill set that you need to employer that you're expected to employ and then the other skill sets that might be needed are additive right so you always lead with that with that first core skill set um but you you know when you when you craft the wreck you you know illustrate that there's opportunities to go broader right you illustrate that okay we you know you're going to be intersecting with the following teams right and then that gives people who are applying an opportunity to showcase those other opportunities so it might be you know I need a prototyping engineer who's uh conversion in C sharp uh has a lot of experience with unity but they will be expected to intersect with our uh you know 2D pixel art team and they will be expected to intersect with you know this

other team over here and that helps set the breadth of knowledge expectation and then you uncover the rest in the interview right and you figure out sort of where they're where their real real skill sets happen to life having the like requirements are nice to haves also helps of like here's definitely what the role is and then these are sort of this is the vibe of the team and like you're working with a team of people who have cross-disciplinary experience so like yeah like setting the scene in that way I think can be really helpful I think the key is keeping it broad enough that it's not like we're expecting a unicorn who can and will do everything yeah because it's definitely like a big red flag in a job wreck if it they're saying that they want you to do three jobs like creating boundaries of like what you are and are not willing to do like you should not be doing three people's work um that has been my entire career has been setting learning to set these boundaries and like it's really hard to

do when people expect you to help that much yeah one of the questions was about like what words do you use other than unicorn in a job posting and I like this intersecting yeah and especially like mentioning which teams you're collaborating or embedding closely with but are not expected to do their jobs yeah so like you know must must be able to speak engineer does not have to do engineer totally yeah as when you mentioned uh holding boundaries so that you don't do everything's job there have been a couple of questions on the Dory of you know we can't we can grow in so many directions at any point uh especially people who are doing their own Indie startups but even people on any team and especially as things get weirder and new skill sets uh you know llms and other weird stuff coming down the pipeline suddenly like it comes onto our field how do you maintain boundaries of saying all right this is a time when I need to add yet another socket onto my

skill set and how do you when do you decide no this time I'm not going to Amoeba out into that tasty looking Direction I Would love to say that I've like mastered This and like it's better I like still really struggle with this very much because like I want to help and so it's like yeah I like have like five minutes here to like do this big task um I do think that working with production if you have a producer on your team or someone whose job it is to manage resources working in tandem with them to ensure that your bound like the boundary that you set before someone asks you is actually held I think has been a godsend for me like it's really helped a lot to like have really good relationships with your producer who can help like basically whack people away when they're trying to ask favors so that you can stay focused on the things that you're doing I love that if you if saying no is not one of your many skills you can Outsource that yeah like there are people who are great at saying no for you and it's yeah I mean clear

communication I think is key like I mean I've straight up told my current boss okay yes this is my skill set no this is not something I'm going to do like and that's you know it it you don't have to be a dick about it right but but because it is when you're a unicorn it is very easy if you have like for example I can do data entry for days like this was one of my original core skill sets I'm very fast I'm very good I will not do it for my day job these days but when it pops up that I know how to do it almost invariably somebody comes to me and says hey I need to have 2 000 values entered into this spreadsheet can you you know can you maybe can you can you take a look at this Emma like you know I'm sorry you know because because it it'll get you bucketed into that role and it's a role maybe nobody else wants to do or they can't hire somebody else to fill and then you're stuck with it yeah right and you can't escape it because it's valuable it's the kind of valuable role that they need filled

but they can't bring in you know uh you know an outside contractor they can't bring in somebody else to handle it so that so so as a unicorn boundary setting I think is key um and it all comes down to communication style right like I've I've developed a very very clear and upfront communication style over the years because it works um you know sometimes it doesn't work sometimes I get the boot but most of the time uh the people I work with are once they figure out that I'm I'm just being clear as opposed to being a dick um it works very well because there's no more miscommunication they know that if I say this okay boom that's over let's let's move on to the next thing so I've been in exactly that situation before where I was basically put on a pro type team by myself um and expect it to like churn out these different games um so I was kind of promised Health but it didn't materialize because they knew I could do it by myself um and so what I ended up saying because you don't often want to say no like

especially if you're a new person or a low little person you feel like saying the word no means oh you're gonna get fired because you're not supposed to say no to your boss right so what I framed it as is um I have you know x amount of time just assuming that we're not that over timing is not on the table just don't even bring that up in the conversation you know I only have eight hours a day to do all these things would you rather me do the engineering work or would you rather me to do the artwork or designing work you know and put it back on them let them pay pick what it is that they actually want you to do and when you frame it like that it forces them to actually think oh I'm trying to make this person do three jobs in one okay maybe they need a little bit of help or you know maybe we need to expand the timeline but yeah put it put it back on them is what I would say don't don't use the word no lay out your time here's what I can do here's what I'm not able to do what do you want me to focus on and then they have to describe what they actually want yeah all right so many questions in the Dory

there's a lot of people who are really interested in like yeah how do you get into this um can I just comment on that really quick yeah when I when I was telling my friends I was doing this talk people came out of the woodwork like yeah everybody I think is like a closeted unicorn because one of my friends said that the comment that I think is kind of like wraps up why this is an important talk which is it is way more problematic than you would think to have multiple skill sets in this industry like we've all faced like weird barriers and boundaries and issues and friction because we have multiple skill sets which is so unintuitive you would think that's just going to help you yeah yeah like let's talk a little bit about difficulties like when when I know we've all alluded to a couple of them but like when is something what is something that has caused you friction or roadblock being a unicorn and then either how did you get over it or how did you wish that somebody would have helped you get over it I've struggled in

interviews a lot that tends to be where I like I once I'm like in the door and like working on stuff I don't think that it's been a problem I tend to get a lot of especially from like technical directors or technical interviews um testing me to try and get a very formalized knowledge and like the way that I talk about my programming style it's like the difference between being like a good home cook and a chef like I make stuff and it tastes really good um but it's not necessarily the prettiest thing in the world like it's I am not necessarily using the techniques that would be expected from like a taught chef um so as a result when people are like describe the difference between a dictionary and a like I I could like look it up on the internet because that's what I would do if someone were to ask me that in my actual work but like I'm not going to like regurgitate a bunch of like coded knowledge about

something and as a result I have multiple times been told that I'm not technical enough for a role which is really frustrating because it's like well you never gave me like a tech test like you just asked me some random questions um and that's very frustrating where it's like you feel like you're just being yeah like these arbitrary like we know that our field is incredibly fractal yeah and I teach computer science and I there's probably almost no information income like in that I share with the other like high level computer science professors and so I would fail any of their intro tests yeah and I have in fact failed the Google interview process yeah does anybody else have things that they've gotten over or like that it you've never gotten over I have a similar thing like I feel like I don't Market myself really as a programmer even though I do programming in my job you know I know how to match braces and write for loops and while loops and I know ifs and ants and ORS and I can read structs and functions and I can check in

code that doesn't break the build and I can merge my code but I'm still not like the top programmer out there and so for me what really works is working on extendable games and I found that this is like so for for me I coming in I'm coming in to board games and I'm making apps for board games and and board games have good board games have lots of expansions so a place that I can like sort of fit my tech tech expertise in that might not get me like a regular programming job is I can come in and say okay this board game we've already you know the Rockstar programmer on my team has already established how we're gonna hook up the gameplay programming and I come along and do the gameplay programming for expansions and that's great because I can kind of like follow along a template and figure out like here's the tables that we use um you know I I make our our tutorials using C tables and um I'm I'm able to hook up my stuff and that you know the the technical part of my job enables me to not have to play a

politics game when I want to iterate on my creative work if I want to iterate on my audio or my art or my UI I can do that myself without having to like pull favors or bother someone and so that really helps me a lot but at the same time I feel like if I'm going to go out there and try to get a programming job I'm not sure I'm going to pass the programming test and it it is a little bit stressful I feel like you know it it ends up I don't know if I'm speaking for all of us up here but I feel like what ends up happening is I feel really comfortable with people I've already worked with who know my skills versus like necessarily like marketing my skills for a first time to someone who who hasn't worked with I've followed the same boss to three jobs now because she knows I'm good and it's great the solution here is obviously for everyone in the audience to pair up and start an indie Studio together yeah he'll be unstoppable yes but in all seriousness in my career I seem to have swung between two extremes where on the one hand I am put in a box

and told don't touch the other boxes or on the other hand I'm told go do all the things you can do all the things um I'm not sure if there's an actual Silver Bullet solution to this my reproach has been to really only apply to smaller companies because I'd much rather be expected to do more than told not to do other things but there is going to be a balancing act there and really it's talking to people communicating well take take a course on communication it'll help you a lot and managing expectations and also just proving that you can do these other things to open up those doors um like I said I don't think there's a silver bullet answer here well and that that's where we get back into the relationships of this industry right like I mean if everybody goes and looks around this room the people around you you know all of you who are just starting out the people around you are going to be the people you make connections with and are going to because once you've been doing this for four or five or six years you you stop applying for jobs quite so much and the

people you know in the industry say I need this skill set and I know this person over here who can deliver this skill set and it's a much lower risk jump for them to make to bring in somebody that they've worked with they may not even know you very well but they were on a team and they heard in a review that you did this one thing really well and then they decided to reach out so a certain amount of that happens after you've been here for a while and for all of you who are brand new and just starting out the all the people you hear at GDC with this is the group right make friends shake hands exchange business cards you never know where everybody's going to end up right and and you know by working together and by elevating each other you can help sort of of you know make sure your resumes are closer to the top of the pile because you know you know this guy and the two of you have worked together and that's actually one of the things that that they do sometimes ask is who else in this industry you have have you worked with right I mean once upon a time it was who are your references right

and nowadays it's you know if you go go to apply for a company and you know somebody who works there you reach out to that person and say hey I'm applying for a job does your boss suck uh will the job pay what they say it will and you know hey can you go tap the recruiter for me and say that that you know me right that there is a that you can say thumbs up or thumbs down on whether or not I can do the job uh the other side of that is that when you do that and you reach out you know that you have to let them do their own thing right so if you reach out to somebody and say hey I used to work with you and I want to come work with you again if they didn't like you you kind of got to roll with that right and if they kind of think you sucked you got to roll with that too right you can't like like get bitter about these kinds of things because it is a little bit of of sort of uh back channeling that you're doing yeah um but you know once you once you have one job and then you have the second job and then it starts to once you have that established experience space you're you're directly applying less and less often over time and then eventually

nobody comes to you for jobs at all and you go and retire and live on a boat with your cats I think the great news is I will say that like once you are in a company if you have a unicorn skill set you everybody knows you like Kate and I work together at Maxis everybody knows Kate I also baked a lot of cupcakes that's right that's true another skill set uh everyone everybody near me you know I'm working on these little apps using our API and the thing is when you're working Kate to visual effects she's just scripting she she's made a programming language that I constantly run into people who use uh once you're working on like these multi-skill projects you can make small things fast and then people find out about them quickly and then everybody is just familiar with you so you do rely a lot less on job enter I mean I interviewed once and then I got into the industry and then I've never I've never needed to interview for a job since then like you don't necessarily so even though it's hard to interview as a unicorn it might not just come up that

much so I'm going to propose a very unorthodox method of getting into the game history which is kind of the one I took which is take your favorite games mod them put your mods everywhere what you're doing is you're creating a portfolio of game design or if you're really in the game jams do lots of game jams save all your games save the source code again you're creating a portfolio of games so if no one is giving you a foot in the door if your resume right out of college right out of high school is just not impressing anybody it's going right in the bin you know it's it's a lot of work but just on your own time everyone's here because they love making games make the games then show people that you've made all these games and they'll be like wow holy [ __ ] they made all these games by themselves you're hired you know so that's that's my advice there yeah small and finished is better than big and unfinished yeah absolutely and that's that's like that's one of the secret sauce things you can do to get in right because if I'm looking at a stack of 200 resumes everybody who's built a janky little mobile game that they shipped on their

spare time goes to the top of the pile versus people who have come out with a college degree and maybe have a couple of things that they've worked at that were really big or worked on that that were unfinished and it was student work like the you cannot get around the fact that games is a Passion Play right the the we churn through so many people in this industry the ones that stick around are the ones who love this stuff and the sooner you can illustrate that to recruiters the faster you can get in my my very first job was based not on my art degree not on my English degree not on on you know any of the other stuff I've done it was based on the fact that I was doing uh Unreal Tournament art asset mods that was that was that was literally what got my foot in the door is in my spare time I was I was making textures for Unreal Tournament because I thought it was really cool and that was that was the that was the secret sauce right that was the thing that I was willing to spend the spare time that's not to say that you should spend your spare time on behalf of your

employer making games right to be clear that is a clear line that needs to be drawn but the idea that you that you love doing this enough that you will just do this whether or not you're getting a paycheck um is one of those things recruiters will look for right is they want to see that you're doing this anyway um you know at whatever level and another good thing just a soul deep reflection of yourself if you find the idea of working on a game in your spare time to be super tedious and aggravating this probably isn't the right industry for you I think to their point if you if you are coming into an interview situation and you want to zero in and understand the assignment and and focus on a skill set that's great if you if you do tack on a couple of games that you've made it shows two things that are very valuable one initiative you know that initiative is going to generalize across a ton of problems that your employer is going to have and they're going to love that and two it shows that you have a skill set

for spackling you understand the What It Takes the skill to combine and Bridge to disciplines or more you understand what it takes to combine the audio and the timing and the visual effects the programming and the art all those things you you can have a game where let's say you have an artist an engineer and a designer and they're all sort of like b-level people B level skills your game can still be a C Level game because the game itself the product is not necessarily an average of the skill of those disciplines it also really relies on things not falling between the cracks where the disciplines meet and if you can make your own game yet that demonstrates you understand how to bridge How to spackle over those um those meeting points between disciplines yeah I think we all know that like or at least people who have been in the industry long enough know that the invisible skill that every game designer who is successful has that is necessary for any unicorn or any game designer is the ability to keep going

when game design is tedious is miserable uh we don't want to keep going and yet you keep going anyway and that is the hardest skill to identify in people except with these shift games so I've worked on a lot of independent projects that I've taken from start to finish myself and you're always really excited when you open up a new uni project or start working at some new concept art as this is the gold now or right and there's going to come a point you know maybe 20 30 hours in that you're gonna [ __ ] hate it you're like this piece of [ __ ] I don't want to work on this again I want to go do whatever else I want to go drink so you need to push past that so it's gonna suck and you're gonna hate it but you'll find if you just open up the program and just say I'm gonna do just this one thing I'm gonna implement this one dialog box I'm gonna put this one piece of art in you'll start rolling with it you'll be like okay that actually wasn't that bad let me do another little piece of art let me add this one other little feature before you know it you spent six hours in your game and you're a lot farther in than you were before so it's

like the important part is keep going until you're done because that shows perseverance that shows self-innovation those are like the golden goose eggs for any employer or for making your own studio if you want to pair up and make an indie studio with somebody in this audience and again that's a that's a like as unicorns we can or as anybody we can patch over our lack of skills with other people so if you are on if you have friends uh you can support them in getting past the really ugly times so we're running almost out of time I think we got four more minutes left I would like to ask one of my questions uh what is one skill that you have that you've never gotten to use professionally and kind of wish you were in a situation to use professionally at some point woodworking in college I took a sculpture class and I learned how to use an entire wood shop and I got really good at it guys and I've always wanted to like make a toy or something like that and use these

weird skills but we work I work on digital products so I haven't been able to use it one day make a woodworking game yeah mobile Idol game I'm saying you know perfect 2024. yeah I mean mine's I'm in a weird spot because for a long time I was I was either artist or Biz Dev in this industry and I never got to use my engineering skills um and now I'm in a position where I kind of get to use a little bit of everything um I do wish I could hook flashy lights up to a lot more things that's sort of like my my current hyper fixation in terms of of physical engineering as opposed to digital engineering uh but that you know that it's it's a little difficult where I sit right now um I don't know if this is counts as something that I'm not doing because I prepare the question with uh the an answer with um I I'm really into playing strategy board games and um surprisingly that has that has come

up as like super helpful and just like running a company and assessing the resources available figuring out what my competitor strategy is you know and playing into the hand that I've been dealt and it's it's it's funny that like there's such a direct connection between playing these games and being able to like run a company but also like run your career like as long as you're being strategic about it you can use the skill so oil painting for me I'm a classically trained artist and you know when I was coming up in school I was convinced I was going to make my living being just a painter and of course that went um but I would love theoretically to be able to just stick oil paintings in a game but you know that doesn't happen so ca's do I do we go to 10 okay yeah so we got one more minute uh in the one minute remaining is there anything that you want to tell the audience either senior people looking to hire unicorns senior unicorns or little

baby unicorns just trying to get in the door what would you tell them that we haven't told them already take out two business cards do you want the person you're right give one that the person on your left um I just want to tell people like it's really hard to get into a like creative leadership role but if you are a unicorn that is a great place for you to use your skills so hold out don't give up be stubborn this industry is a Passion Play it will not necessarily go quickly but do not stop if you can't do the work and get paid for it do the work for yourself and eventually you'll get paid for it marry a Shader engineer the one in the corner the rich one all right [Applause]

[Music] thank you