Getting the Most Out of an Entry-Level Games Job

[Music] hi there i'm hannah mccloud and i'm a narrative designer at crystal dynamics and one of the writers on marvel's avengers this is getting the most out of an entry-level games job and i thought the most appropriate way to get started would be to talk a little bit about my first job in the games industry my first job was at telltale games working on the walking dead a new frontier aka season 3 and minecraft story mode season 2. my job title was creative development assistant or cda for short and if you have no idea what that title means you're not alone most people at telltale didn't know either there were four of us one cda per project and our primary duties involved taking court reporter style notes in meetings and exporting voiceover scripts for recording sessions i loved my job but the reality of it could be a little

jarring we didn't have a manager well we had a manager the first couple months at my job and then she got promoted and moved apartments and they never replaced her we didn't have a promotion ladder we had two cdas former cdas who'd moved into narrative design and audio design respectively but no clear idea how they did it and if that method would even work for us we we didn't even really have a department we well our time card said we were in production but we could answer to creative audio and it could change by the day by the hour we didn't really have a lot of training our training involved shadowing a cda for a couple of weeks before getting dropped in the deep end of our own solo project despite or i guess because of all of this by the end of my tenure at telltale i was a credited writer on the last three episodes of minecraft story mode season

two that's me um and from talking to other developers uh i've realized i'm not special entry-level positions in the games industry are rare um even mine was phased out before the studio closed in 2018 so you kind of have to take what you can get um and it's not always the exact job you want beggars can't be choosers and i don't think i can change the entire industry with one talks especially their approach to entry level positions but i decided i'm going to try to give you a toolbox of sorts to get through this chaotic often nebulous time in your game development career a couple of caveats before we start though the studio i worked at no longer exists which is why i can be pretty explicit with my job duties and examples of the things that i did not everyone has that opportunity and well we're in an nda world so i don't begrudge anyone not sharing more details about their first job

i also work in narrative so most of my examples are going to be narrative based but the advice is meant to be as department agnostic as possible i also know that a lot of people including myself are still working remotely and may be working remotely permanently so i try to make the advice work if you're in a remote position or if you're in the office so your mileage may vary but i'm hoping by the end of this talk that you'll have at least one thing you can try to get yourself noticed which is the goal by the way it's to get noticed in your first job you succeed in this industry by building connections games are beautifully collaborative and notoriously unreliable and the reason i can even be here today is because people noticed me and helped me forward yes you also need to hone your skills and work hard and make a great game but i would be nowhere without all of the people that i did those things with

in fact even if you only get noticed by one person in your first job that's a success congratulations you've started building your network um and one last caveat do not do all of the things that i suggest in this talk at once for one job i try to um and it i don't recommend it and i'll get into that a little bit more at the end so the first piece of advice that i ever received was from steve mcmanus who was a designer who sat next to me at the open office at telltale he doesn't remember this but a couple of weeks into my first job he leaned over and suggested that i take my headphones off sometimes now if you've ever worked in an open office you know headphones are kind of necessary to get any work done but what he meant was if i listen to the studio around me i might

learn some things and he was completely right um so right that i kind of use listening as core to all the rest of my advice in this talk um it's kind of your secrets yeah it's kind of your super secret weapon that you can always fall back on when you're feeling overwhelmed or you're not sure what you should be doing so remotely listening looks a little different um it could mean following a slack channel even if you're not 100 sure it applies to you or um listening to the chit chat before and after resume meeting not just the meeting itself or it could even mean following an email thread as someone some team bats a proposal back and forth so it's probably better to say if you're remote to keep your headphones on sometimes okay so you have your sucres super secret weapon it's harder to say than i thought um now it's time to talk about who you want to get noticed by in your

first job we're going to start really really easy your manager i know i know i just said i didn't have one in my first job and that's true um but i have one now and she's great hi nicole um and if you are lucky enough to have a manager in your first job you gotta use it um so if you don't know what a manager does it's their job to kind of keep track of how well you're doing in your job they will give you performance reviews if your studio has formal ones and they're kind of your gatekeeper to any promotions that you might get um it's also their job to kind of gather feedback from your other teammates to see how well they like working with you and if they have any ways you could improve uh which is great because it avoids the awkward situation of having to ask people directly for that kind of feedback the reason that it is so easy to get noticed by your manager is because it's it's literally their job to notice you and advocate for you in the studio now not all managers are created equal

some are more invested than others but you're only really going to get as much from your manager relationship as you put into it so the first way to get noticed by your manager is to tell them your career goals right from the start i was clear in my interview for the cda job that i wanted to be a game writer i submitted writing samples with my resume um and it just so happened that my temporary manager was one of the people interviewing me so she also spread the word um about my career goals so that when i started on my first solo project which was minecraft story mode season two the team already knew going in that that was something i wanted to do um and i am a woman in game development so i know what they're there is this hesitancy to not come across too ambitious in our work but i want to nip that in the bud right now no one expects an entry level employee wants to be in that role forever so um sharing your ambitions is one step closer to making them a reality so be

ambitious the other way to get noticed by your manager is to schedule weekly one-on-ones so um your manager is also a game developer which means they're super busy um and they're even more so if they have to manage more people than just you so you want to try to stay on their radar as much as possible and these one-on-ones can be short check-ins or long vent sessions depending on your relationship but it's supposed to be for talking about how the job is going and if you're having any issues that you need feedback or advice on and any feedback they might have for you on how you could do better if you're remote i really suggest that you check in with your manager more often than just once a week right now i work from home so my manager and i are kind of in constant contact over slack that way we can raise any issues that we're having as quickly as possible and we don't have to wait until the next check-in there's this kind of out-of-sight out-of-mind

mentality if you don't do that it's also fine to skip these one-on-ones occasionally if you don't have anything to talk about that week but i highly recommend you keep them on the calendar so that your manager can see the notification and go oh yeah that person is here and they're doing well if you don't have a manager or your manager isn't as invested as you'd like them to be the next easiest person to get the attention of is the person you report to so sometimes that is your manager but for a lot of people it's a different person in fact i gave a survey to some of my fellow game writers and i asked them what they wish they would have known before their first job in the industry and a surprisingly large amount of people wish they'd known who they were supposed to report to so some advice on figuring out who this person is ask during your interview it's actually a really great question to ask early because it can give you an idea of what the position is for based on who it

reports to and if the person you report to happens to be in your interview it gives you the chance to sort of ask about their leadership style and the day-to-day task load if you miss a chance to ask during your interview ask during orientation because the last thing you want is to be dropped off at your desk or dropped off as off of a zoom call and not know who you're supposed to be talking to or what you're supposed to be doing the person you receive your day-to-day tasks from is the person you report to they're also the person that you show your work to to receive feedback also this person can change unlike your manager which tends to be pretty stable if you have one the person you report to can change depending on the project you're on what part of the production process you're in for me when i first started the person i reported to was a fellow cda who was training me um so i would report to him and then he would divvy up his own tasks between us when i got assigned to minecraft story

mode it was still a pretty small team so i answered directly to the lead writer and he would have me do research and that sort of thing as we got well into production i answered to the creative producer who was in charge of scheduling and meetings and all of that stuff and then as we got to recording because i was the one exporting the voiceover scripts um i would report to the voice director and then would make sure that the vo was all getting in where it needed to be in the game um the way to get the person you report to to notice you at first it looks a lot like your manager you want to tell them your career goals but for a slightly different reason the person you report to controls your tasks so if they know your career goals they can start tailoring those tasks to help you achieve those goals they can also give you face time with the departments you might want to join if you're not in the department that you want to be right now and they can also volunteer you for tasks when you're too shy to or maybe you aren't there when the task comes up

in fact the person you report to can end up being your biggest advocate for increased responsibilities and promotions because they see you every day you can also schedule one-on-one meetings with them if you want it's slightly less necessary because you're seeing them all the time but if you feel like the person you report to could be doing more to help you with your career advancement then absolutely set those up but the best method to get the attention of the person you report to is actually to report to them when you're out of tests and not sure what you should be doing go ask the person you report to if there's anything you can do to help it shows initiative and that you can be dependent on and they might even give you tasks that they were thinking of doing themselves until they realized you were free um at telltale i really enjoyed the fact that i had multiple people to report to because it meant if one person didn't have any tasks for me they could i could go to somebody else um the other way to get the attention of the person you report to is to employ our super super secret weapon listening so when someone comes up to the person

you report to and asks them for something is it ever a task that you think you might be able to handle is there anything that's on their plate that you could take off their plate um for example my creative producer was often asked for collated data of our voice over process so like how many lines did we record for the last episode what is the line count for this character i knew that information was easy if slightly tedious to find so i volunteered to do it and then i put it together in a living document that i could update so that everyone who checked it had the most recent information um our writers were often asked for minecraft driven solutions to creative problems so it was a little hard for them to come like have an encyclopedic knowledge of minecraft so i would volunteer to research things like if they needed a block that had certain characteristics i would volunteer to research that for them um the upside of listening uh into what the person you report to is being asked to do is it means you don't have to be

caught up on tasks you are already up to speed i get a lot of compliments for this even now basically every time someone comes up to the person i report to i would take one headphone off and listen in just in case an action came out of it and i could help um it also helps the game of telephone that sometimes occurs when a task is getting to you can confuse like who asked for the task what problem it was trying to solve what exactly they want from you so it's sometimes better to just hear it directly from the source um if you're not sitting near the person you report to it's probably good to ask if you can be moved if you can't or if you're remote then you just need to be a little extra vigilant so if you see that someone asks in an email for something from the person you report to maybe it's worth following up on that or if they're tagged in slack or my manager who's also the person i report to right now i have her jira tasks up on a board so that when someone

sends something to her i can see if it's something that i could take off her hands the more of these kinds of tasks you complete the more you'll get and the more positive attention you'll receive in fact these kinds of volunteer opportunities are sort of the first big steps i took towards becoming a game writer on minecraft story mode so for example our lead writer was asked to create the quiz at the beginning of season two that lets you do all the big choices from season one without having to actually play season one and i volunteered to do it because i was familiar with season one and that ended up being my first writing in the game um another episode writer uh was introducing a bunch of new characters in her episode and asked me to join her doing or she had to create a bunch of casting sheets um they're like bios and descriptions and personality for the character to help us cast them and i volunteered to split the workload because there were a lot of them and because i done the casting sheets for those particular characters

she then asked me to do the scenes that introduced to those characters because i was so familiar with them um we also had a creative team member in every voiceover session listening in on skype so they could provide contacts to the voice director and the actor and um these were lengthy four-hour sessions so the creative team often didn't have time to be there the whole time so i would volunteer and it let me kind of show off my knowledge of the story and show i could do lengthy tasks without someone looking over my shoulder okay that was a lot take a breath before you freak out about not knowing how to do any of these things or thinking that you'd never have enough knowledge to volunteer for something um let's talk about what you should be doing when you have nothing to do you've asked the person you report to or your manager or both if there's anything you can help with and there really isn't um so you've got nothing to do but you're trying to get noticed

it this alone time is rare so it's really a good time to take advantage of it to build your knowledge because the more knowledge you have the more confidence you'll have to volunteer for things in the future so when you're asking yourself what should i be doing right now let's start simple play the game seriously um you may think that's kind of obvious but most of your co-workers are not going to have a lot of time to play the game in its entirety like they'll play the level that they're working on over and over and over again but it's probably been a while since they've played it from beginning to end and you have no idea how much confidence you get if you're the only person in a room who can answer a question about the game as a whole because everybody else is so focused on one small part um if there's no game to play or no build that's working try looking for documents so pitch decks are a great buzzwordy way to get an overview of what the game's supposed to be there's also design documents which can

give you overviews of the gameplay or animatics of the storyboards or even a script of all the cinematic moments the idea is you're trying to get the big picture of a project because a lot of your co-workers will be pretty focused on their individual parts and won't have that same viewpoint so that can give you something of value to contribute to a conversation if your game is a sequel or prequel or spin-off it's time to get familiar with those other games for some people they don't have a lot of time to play a lot of different games so i would still recommend looking at a play through or reading summaries or looking at wikis your co-workers have probably already done this too but it's probably been a while so the details will be more fresh for you it's also good to consider why changes were made from these other games to the one you're working on now it's also a good way to break the ice with your co-workers if you could ask them like why was this particular change made

minecraft story mode season two was obviously a sequel so i played season one and that was why i had the confidence to volunteer for that quiz job because i knew the details more in my head than the writer did um the next thing you can do is use your superpower to listen in to what games your game is being compared to so game developers like to talk in comparisons because our different departments have very specialized technical language that doesn't really translate to other departments so sometimes it's easier to compare something rather than try to explain all the technical details like if a boss designer is trying to explain a mechanic to the writing team it's sometimes easier to go like this boss fight because then we can all be on the same page um it gives us a kind of common developer lingo that we can all use um

for minecraft story mode season two we actually got compared to things that were not games a lot which is also totally valid and worth checking out um lord of the rings came up quite a bit i actually have not read the books and i've only seen the movies once so every time a scene from lord of the rings came up i would write it down and i would go look at that scene later so that i could understand what everyone was talking about um probably the one that came up the most was avatar the last airbender because a lot of us had seen at least one episode of the show so when someone brought up that as a pitch or an example everyone was on the same page it's also worth understanding why these kinds of comparisons are being made to your project it's going to help you pitch ideas yourself in the future because you already have this lingo down that everyone else is using it's also worth sometimes checking out what people don't want your game to be compared to because it can be easier for some people to describe what a thing isn't than what a thing is okay

so if your game is based on an existing ip which a lot of games are now it's time to get to know that ip as well as possible um for minecraft story mode obviously it was getting to know minecraft so i played minecraft but i also looked at wikis and watched uh youtubers who play minecraft in fact watching the youtubers was almost more useful because they were a higher skill level than i was so they could do more things in the game than i could just by myself it also let me get to know the minecraft community a little bit which ended up being pretty important because minecraft story mode features character versions of some of these youtubers for avengers obviously i've now read a lot of comics uh i have opinions on lore that i did not know the first thing about in 2017 so you're trying to become something of an amateur expert in your ipe because again your co-workers have probably done this research before but um it's been a while and it gives you even

more of that shared language you all have something that you can connect on and use as an example in fact you can even ask your co-workers for recommendations so in my case for minecraft i would ask people about youtubers that they particularly liked or for avengers about comic runs that were very influential for all of these things uh you want to take notes just it helps you digest all of the things that you're taking in um and you can use them as a reference for later which is really useful uh even if you never look at these notes again it slows you down and lets you really take in what you're looking at and it'll make it easier to remember it later okay so you've done your research you've built your knowledge base you're feeling a bit more confident you've even got a good rapport going with the person you report to or your manager or both it's time to get the attention of the rest of your team your co-workers

so why do you want your co-workers to notice you well game development is a team sport whether you're a team of 20 or 220 the industry is actually really tiny and we talk to each other so it's probably better if people have something nice to say about you you know also most people don't stay in the same studio forever so let's say you're going to a new studio and someone at your new studio knows someone at your old studio and they ask about you would it be better if someone has something nice to say than to not know who you are at all and maybe you aren't in the department you want to be in yet so you want to get the attention of that department um so here are some ways that i've used to get the attention of my fellow co-workers it's all about volunteering to take notes in meetings to play tests to do scratchview and to audit new higher training so we're gonna break these apart and sort of go into each one in detail

so you should always be taking notes in meetings for yourself every developer i know has a notebook that they carry around but this is more volunteering to make notes for everyone in a meeting one huge gigantic caveat before we dive into it uh women in game development are often relegated to being the note takers in meetings um male developers i'm sorry to say are less likely to volunteer for that or even to think to volunteer for that um so now that i'm not entry level i don't volunteer for this especially because it was part of my job description as a cda and i'm good at it so it could be very easy for that to just become my job but for entry-level employees taking notes in meetings is a really easy way to get the attention of everyone in the room if you do it right so here are some tips um okay so telltale had us taking court reporter style notes which i don't recommend they're very

hard to skim through and they're very dense the reason we did it was because it was very hierarchical there so it mattered who gave what note because some people's notes were gospel and you had to do them while others were just suggestions and so they needed to be able to look at a note and know exactly who said it i'm hoping most of that hierarchy is kind of on its way out and so that matters less but one thing they did have us do that was very useful was take attendance at the beginning of the meeting so in addition to helping you learn people's names and giving you an excuse to ask people their names it helps the people looking at the notes to know who still needs to be run through a proposal or who still needs to give feedback on something if you're remote that calendar invite is not good enough because there will be people who say yes i'm attending this meeting and then they don't show up or vice versa so you really want to take attendance based on the actual call and some studios actually a lot of them have kind of databases of names and photographs to really help you as kind

of a cheat sheet if you're really nervous and zoom obviously has little little names and faces so that can also help you in taking this attendance the actual style of note that you take during the meeting does not matter just take it the way you're most comfortable um at telltale we typed our notes because once again it was court reporter style but also we had laptops and obviously work from home it's easier for me to type my notes but some people they prefer to handwrite it slows them down it helps them digest things easier it helps them remember them better so it's really up to you what you want to do the most important thing is what you do after the meeting which is when you organize and internalize your notes so organizing your notes means making them clear and concise for public consumption shorter is always better bullet points over sentences every time i also recommend doing headers for different discussions um maybe highlighting certain things or changing the font color in some places

this makes your notes easier to skim for other people and they look pretty and i get a lot of compliments when my notes look pretty so i do recommend that organizing your notes can also help you internalize what you've heard in the meeting like maybe as you're going through your notes you remember an example that someone used and you can now add that to your list of things you want to look up um so you're building your knowledge and you can also edit into your notes for other people also don't be afraid to send the messy version first so let's say you haven't uh they want the notes immediately following the meeting and you're a little nervous about it because they're kind of messy and you did them in just your own style don't be afraid to send those out because they'll just use those to pull their action items out of and then you can send the organized version later and they'll use that for reference afterwards um at telltale we used google docs so they could look at my document as i was editing it so they could get their action items and then

when they went back to it it would be fully organized all right so uh there are two major perks to taking notes in meetings that will get you attention um and the first is getting into meetings way above your pay grade seriously because i was taking notes i was in every leads in director review um i also got to be in department meetings for departments i wasn't even in just because they knew i took good notes probably my favorite was i got to be in our weekly ip holder meeting with our executive producer in mojang which meant i was learning things that even the leads didn't know in fact i would sometimes be cornered by the leads after the meeting to ask how it went which made me feel very important and got me attention the other thing that taking notes can help you do is get into meetings with the department you want to be in so in my case it got me into the writer's rooms which was really fun um so i got constant face time with the writing team and they knew who i was and knew i went

above and beyond with my notes um so that was all very very positive it's not necessarily possible for everybody to be able to get into other departments meetings and i totally understand that but if you get the opportunity to i highly recommend it okay so next play testing if you're in qa this obviously doesn't apply to you you don't need to volunteer for more play testing and small tirade but qa is a completely valid career path and not just an entry level stepping stone into another department the qa team is they're the unsung heroes of game development and they're constantly crapped on by the twitter sphere so be nice to your qa team qa you're awesome tirade over so for the rest of us volunteering to play test has a lot of different benefits for example it can get you in front of people you normally wouldn't talk to for minecraft story mode season two we introduced a lot of new game mechanics

so i got to talk to programmers and things like that that i never would have normally spoken to just because i was testing their thing i have very low skill level when it comes to playing games i'm not very good and that can sometimes be helpful for play testing because i'm kind of the lowest common denominator player some review meetings will also ask that someone play the game while everyone else watches i'm really nervous to do this um because i don't have a lot of confidence my skills um but at telltale that meant that the player was the one making the dialogue choices so it was a little less scary just make sure to be ready to answer questions as you play that's really the biggest point of play testing for example i play tested a boss once for avengers and the designer asked me things like what visual cues i was picking up or if i knew what i was supposed to be doing at any given moment for telltale it was all about if you took a long time to make a choice or you chose the silent option the question was

were there any choices that you felt were valid or did you think they were all valid and that's why you didn't choose one our display text also was slightly different from the dialogue that would come after it and so we were often asked if it felt like the game honored our choice um but really you're just being a data point for whomever you're play dusting for so just be honest um next is scratch vo which is probably my favorite way to get to know my co-workers um and to get attention from other members of the team uh for people who don't know scratch is the temporary voice over that's put into the game to help get levels on their feet before the script is really settled and before you bring in voice actors which costs a lot of money so this is typically done by employees who are decent at reading a line they don't have to be super great actors they just have to be nice to listen to i did theater in case you couldn't tell i did theater growing up so i really love doing scratch and i'm a woman in game development and because there are

so few of us you tend to get asked to do practically every female character in the game so it's really fun i know not everybody is comfortable doing this they don't like to do something that's silly or they feel silly or they don't like the sound of their own voice and that's okay but i have been pleasantly surprised by every single one of my co-workers that's done scratch fio seriously telltale even had employee table reads where employees would get assigned the roles and it kind of felt like you were in high school again reading a shakespeare play like there was that much giggling um but it was really like a team bonding experience to do it um so why am i telling you to do scratch vo number one the audio team is the best i am extremely biased because i work with them a lot but the audio team they're amazing um they're at the end of the pipeline so they're often forgotten or left out of decision making even though they touch

every single part of the game like every single part like if you are an enemy designer um and you're creating a robot army don't you think that roman army would be so much scarier if they all spoke in unison and there was like this creepy radio fuss over their voice or maybe you're a level designer and people are not figuring out that they need to go in the direction of the explosion because they keep missing the explosion so you add explosive noises like right in their ears so they know they should be looking for one they touch everything um so getting some time with the audio team one-on-one uh doing scratch vo just is gonna make you a better collaborator it means you're less likely to forget them when you're putting something together um it also lets you see the game's story from a different perspective let's say you don't touch the story practically at all in your day-to-day job and you get asked to read for a minor villain and you find out from their script that they're trying to take over

the operation from the main villain it's something you never would have known had you not come in and read that part it also gives you a chance to get away from your desk if you're remote obviously you're still at your desk but it's a nice break from whatever your job is um and probably my favorite part uh is you get noticed when your voice shows up in the game probably my favorite thing in the entire world is when i'm in a meeting and i'm talking and someone realizes why they've heard my voice before especially if it's for a role that's very different from my own personality like i would be the scratch voice for stella who was the minor villain in minecraft story mode and someone would go oh my god that was you and immediate attention it's really fun um audio is always looking for more people to do scratch and i think a lot of the time it's because people don't know what it is or don't know that we do it so please volunteer even if it's just to read three lines from a character

that immediately dies it's a blast and you can get to know your audio team and it's awesome okay one last way to get to know your co-workers and get noticed by them is to audit new hire training like i said at the beginning onboarding and training in the industry is not universal but if there's a formal process at your studio or you just know someone got hired in the position you want to be in or the position right above you ask if you can listen in on their training the worst they can say is say no the worst they can do is say no um but it'll let you get to know people who are closer to your level um if it's someone who has the job just ahead of yours they have been in your position recently and you are basically peers so you're gonna be growing up in the studio together so it's good to get to know them um it also lets you learn the kind of skills you'll need for your next promotion um and you can direct your self-study and all of that research toward

bettering those particular skills you also won't need as much onboarding when you're promoted you can hit the ground running because you've already had this training it's valuable to listen in on this stuff even if you think you know everything there is to know about that position because hearing about it from somebody else will give you tips and tricks you never would have come up with on your own um at telltale we hired a big group of narrow designer narrative designers and writers at the same time and so our narrative design director put together a kind of formal class to teach them um the uh proprietary engine and how we approach storytelling at the studio and i asked to sit in and i didn't participate because obviously this is their training they're trying to get to the point where they can just jump in and work so i didn't want to take time away from that but it let me see more about the engine which meant when i was actually writing for the game i already knew all of the stuff i needed to and i also got to know a lot of people who were new to the studio and were

similar or just above me in level and so it was a really great experience to kind of create a peer group plus i was volunteering for a course taught by the narrative design director who had an opinion on whether or not i could be a narrative designer so it was a good idea to get face time with him too and show that kind of initiative all right so work over busy stuff over it's time to talk about the best people to get noticed by at your studio friends um you are probably spending a lot of time at your studio at this point or at the very least on the computer with your studio at this point um and maybe you like the people you work with maybe you even want to be friends with them i'm not going to teach you how to make friends and influence people but i do have some unconventional methods for if you're still eating lunch alone and you're just really nervous about talking to these really cool people who

make games for a living in addition to making you more comfortable at your studio which is great um there's actually some job reasons that you may want to make friends at your studio um in that same survey where i asked people what they wish they would have known before they started at their first job i got a lot of responses like this wishing they'd known some of the internal politics or office gossip at the studio because they'd kind of stumbled into some awkward situations without knowing it and kind of put their foot in their mouth um a lot of people are too embarrassed to ask about this kind of stuff to their manager or the person they report to your or their co-workers that they don't know very well but friends will give you the unvarnished truth um i relied on my friends a lot at telltale for dealing with executive leadership and directors because i would observe something or or see something or listen to something and be like i don't understand what's going on here and i'm really worried about getting in the

middle of it um so i would ask my friends and they could kind of clarify so it it avoided any kind of embarrassing situations um another good thing about making friends at your studio is that it sort of dismantles or demystifies i suppose the hierarchies in your studio um it's kind of hard to be intimidated by the senior programmer if you're also killing him once a week in one night werewolf um i really like seeing people in both their professional and casual settings at crystal uh while we were still in the office we had a running lunch game of resistance which is a deception game and it was always really fun when someone came up to one of my friends and asked them a work question because they would go from absolutely lying about not being a spy to answering professional work question and then they would go back and it was so cool to see those two different settings because i couldn't be intimidated by them anymore i saw at the switch so how do you make these friends you

listen you listen for opportunities to make friends a lot of game developers are also board game nerds so they maybe there's a weekly board game night at your studio ours was on fridays at telltale or maybe there's a game during lunch like our resistance game or something i was really proud of at telltale is i volunteered to play a campaign of pandemic legacy uh with three co-workers i'd never spoken to before we were from completely different departments and we ended up becoming this extremely tight-knit group that i would never have known about had i not put myself out there board games are really great because there's a task to complete so there's less likely to be awkward silences or a lot of personal questions even if you're joining a long-standing board game group they're going to be so focused on teaching you the rules and whatever home brewed home rules they have that you're not going to be the center of attention quite as much as you think you will and

by the fourth or fifth game with these groups you're going to feel like one of them there's also dungeons and dragons i didn't play a lot of dnd before i joined the games industry um but i'm really glad that i had some knowledge of it because though dungeons and dragons is more complicated than your average board game it gives you a longer amount of time to get to know a group um so it also gives you this sort of standing social engagement outside of work especially when you're an entry level employee you can kind of go work work or work work work and not focus on anything else so it's nice to have dedicated like four or five hours that we're going to be playing this game so listen for games and groups that are looking for new players maybe if you don't want the time commitment of a full campaign someone is putting together a one-shot with pre-generated characters in fact if the character sheet is what intimidates you which it was for me you can ask your game master to help you make the character even make it for you

um and so you can kind of dive in without all of the complicated math and skills and things like that um we had a running d game during lunch at crystal so we only played for an hour once a week but we got to know so many different people at that table um and and it was kind of cool to see who became sort of the heroes of the story um and i really really liked that and then during covid i actually joined an online game with a co-worker and it let me get to know some people from different studios which was pretty cool um and we hope to meet in person one day to roll dice at a table so i'm i'm by no means an expert in dnd but every time i played with co-workers it has been a blast so i definitely recommend it um and if you want some less nerdy hobbies okay there's always sports um telltale had a push-up club where once a day people would get together to do 100 push-ups which was always very interesting to see out the window

maybe there's a running group at lunch that you could join or an intramural studio team so maybe your studio faces the other offices in your office park and volleyball or something again if you're not looking for a huge time commitment maybe try out a studio fitness class um i visited our yoga class once or twice at telltale and it was a cool bonding moment with a lot of people um again time commitment issues um look for one-off events like maybe your studio organizes a karaoke night or one of the teams is going to do an escape room i highly recommend looking for activities for the same reason that i recommend board games if you have a task to complete there's fewer awkward silences and it can be less uncomfortable than say a mixer or that kind of thing going for coffee might be nice but it's kind of hard to get the conversation flowing especially with people you don't know very well

if you are remote obviously this is all a lot harder but you just gotta be looking for those opportunities um our resistance game actually went fully online when we all started working from home they homebrewed a version that worked over zoom um i know there's a discord server that plays one night werewolf completely text based which is really cool to find out our studio organized zoom events to get to know people one-on-one but sometimes it's as simple as noticing when a co-worker brings up a show you love and then following up to see what they think about it or maybe someone in a zoom call is wearing a critical roll shirt and you're like there are critters at the studio maybe we could all maybe watch live once and and talk about it over discord that would be cool um if you grew up in the 90s or the 2000s you know that internet friends are just as valid as in-person friends and that goes double when they work at your studio so

you may have figured out kind of what i've been hinting at this whole time why you're getting to know these people because i'm trying to get you mentors you can definitely go around your studio and ask for mentors if you want to but sometimes it's easier to have mentors find you i asked those same game writers if they had mentors in the industry and i got some pretty overwhelming responses including a mentor is extremely crucial for growth in the industry um so how do you find mentors that is the question that i have technically already answered for you a couple of times so how do you find mentors maybe your manager is giving you career advice now that's a mentor or the person you report to has already started tailoring all of your tasks to help with your career goals mentor or your co-workers from the level design team have enjoyed having you take notes

for them so much that they just invite you all the time even when they don't need notes taken they just want your opinion on stuff you've got a group of mentors um or maybe you have an audio designer in your dnd group and they volunteer to teach you the audio engine on the side because they know you're interested mentor most of my mentors i've realized are mentors in hindsight because i think about all of the things that they've done for me um and i'm grateful for every single one having people looking out for you in this crazy creative industry is essential um so use your listening power build your knowledge base get noticed and these people will find you but if you are still having trouble and you just haven't found the right mentor yet ask yourself these questions who is doing what i want to be doing who in your studio has your dream job maybe

it's time to get some one-on-one time with them who is one step up from where i am now maybe you met them in new hire training or maybe you just know that somebody is just above you it's worthwhile to seek this person out because they were where you were super recently you can learn from their immediate successes and failures has anyone made the move you want to make uh if you're changing departments has anyone already made that jump you better believe i sought out the narrative designer who used to be a cda um and i consider him a mentor hi juan and finally who has time because game developers are busy and not everyone has time to be a mentor um it's important uh notice there are mentors on this particular slide because it's really important to have more than one your mentor is going to get busy and so you want someone else that you can turn to at any given time um it's totally fine if someone doesn't want a mentor

if they don't want to mentor you totally fine i haven't run into a lot of people who don't most people just don't have time and if they don't have time they tend to recommend someone they know who does and don't worry if that person is outside of your studio either again not everybody stays at their studio forever so it's good to know people elsewhere and who might have different experiences so okay all of this advice has been to help you get noticed by other people in your studio my last piece of advice is just for you go home on time not enough people in this industry are telling newcomers that um this entire presentation is not to give you a to-do list it's just to give you options this this right here is the only prescriptive advice go home on time

in november of 2017 uh the day that the second episode that i'd written on for minecraft story mode launched i was unceremoniously laid off with 89 of my coworkers including the three cdas if i had known back at the beginning that that was how it was going to end the only thing i would change is having a life outside of work i worked upwards of 60 hour weeks at my job trying to do all of these things at once and we had a deck on the fourth floor of our building and i spent most of my time on that deck sobbing because i was burnt out and stressed and didn't know if i was doing anything right i wished i'd had a life i asked those same game writers how important work life balance was for them and these are my answers i mean it's pretty important very important huge the

most important thing i don't think i can change the entire industry with a talk i said that at the beginning but i can get newcomers to stop buying into the idea that crunch is necessary the average person only stays in this industry for five years i don't want that to be you i want you to succeed and i have people you count on that's why this talk exists when i was laid off i ran to my mom's house and i hid for a week i stayed off the internet i didn't talk to anybody but when i came out from under that rock [Music] the people i reported to had written me these glowing reviews on linkedin and my co-workers had gotten me my writing samples and had put me in touch with narrative teams that were hiring and my friends were all giving me

support and saying it was gonna be okay game development is tumultuous and unstable and i'm not going to sugarcoat that but getting noticed by the right people can make it easier okay so in summary your goal is to get noticed by your manager by the person you report to your co-workers your friends your mentors gain confidence to get their attention by using listening and building your knowledge base letting it inform your self-study and do not burn out to succeed work hard be exceptional then disconnect and have a life making games can seem like a dream but the real dream is working on something you love and having a life you love one last request

pass it on i am here right now because people noticed me and i want to give people that same opportunity i hope you'll do the same when it's your turn to notice thanks for listening bye [Music]