"You Want to Do What?" Non-Traditional Pathways to Game Development

[Music] hello and welcome to you want to do what non-traditional pathways into game development as part of the game career seminar at gdc so for today's session we'll each be talking about our paths into the games industry and then we'll have a panel about what we learned on our journeys where things have overlapped for us and what has helped and what hasn't helped so we're very excited you can join us and before we dive in here are our panelists for today we'll each do our own introductions as part of our individual talks so let's start those now with erica all right so thank you for coming my name is erica mariko olsen and i currently work as a publishing producer at humble bundle um why am i here this is the slide just to tell you that i've been uh been

associated with different companies or ips so i have been the industry for a little while but um this wasn't my first career so this is what my resume looked like before joining the games industry um that's not to say that i didn't want to be in the games industry i've been a gamer my entire life but i didn't really have any role models or mentors growing up who encouraged me in that direction so i really just had no idea it was even on the table so my past resume most recruiters and hiring managers would look at this and really see zero connection to the games industry uh and yet i've now been in the industry for eight years so i'm going to super quickly take us backwards through my games career so that we can kind of explore where those intersect so currently working as a publishing producer at humble games and i also did the same thing for stadia uh this is primarily working with external teams on

multiple projects and before that i worked at riot games as an in-house producer focusing on internal teams and their overall work systems and i moved through a couple of different roles at riot and i started my career in the games industry full-time at least in recruiting so i'm going to talk a little bit about how did i get here um because it wasn't 100 intentional but i do think it happened because of these four things networking and volunteering timing and luck identifying skills without perfect context and convincing others so networking and volunteering after graduating college i was volunteering at soccericon and anime expo it's you know not quite the video games industry but it is adjacent there's lots of anime lovers in the games industry um and the thing to note about networking is

that it's really not just about meeting the right people um it's an opportunity for you to be building your social skills hopefully making friendships that last uh you know beyond just the one time um you're building credibility in a space that you care about especially with volunteer work and you're making your skills and passions known and you're creating an interesting bullet point on your resume a lot of recruiters look at these things on my resume and they just want to know more about it because it's it's kind of unique um but a key concept here is to be willing to give before expecting to receive um and one little bonus i'd like to add about volunteering um because i do think it is the best form of networking if you for example um you know maybe you have student loan debt and you can't necessarily afford to attend the types of events that you want to volunteering is a really great place to get in for free

all right so now timing and luck so we don't really get the opportunities uh we don't get control over what opportunities are presented to us we have control over saying yes or no and you can try to maximize the number of opportunities that come your way through that prerequisite networking um the reality is that a lot of jobs in the games industry need to be filled really fast and so you want to be remembered so that people will think to reach out to you when the time comes they you know a lot of times there isn't really time to have a thorough interview process and consider a whole lot of candidates again they're just trying to get somebody to do the job fast and so um because i had proven to be reliable and organized during my volunteer work i was remembered and asked by another volunteer to help on blazblue chronophantasma all right so here's where it starts to get a little bit harder

you want to be able to break down the things that you do into their most basic pieces and then if there is another role in the industry that you're looking to transition to i encourage you to talk to people in those roles and really break down what is it that they do and you'll often find that there's a lot of similarities and you'll be able to articulate them even though they were not necessarily in the same context so just for an example here here's some of the typical things that you might do in these two non-games industry roles um but how can we re-articulate them in a way that applies to being a producer and so as you can see like you know a lot of this stuff is just rewording it into a way that applies into our roles in the industry um and your previous experience may not be

one-to-one with what you want to do next but the combination of your previous experiences can um you know kind of merge into checking all of the boxes for the next thing so again it's not perfect context obviously because it's not from the games industry but they are the same transferable skills all right so now the actual hard part is convincing others there are a lot of people in the industry who look for that perfect context they want you to have games industry experience in order to work in the games industry and it you know it's kind of this catch-22 situation um there are people with a very fixed mindset and they're not going to be convinced but there obviously are people who can be convinced we have a whole panel of people who took different routes into the games industry um so just remember that you don't have to do it alone you will find allies and advocates and mentors who are going to help you and are going to talk you

through breaking down all of your core competencies and skills and applying them into the industry um so we're out there and we're willing to help you if you'll let us and with that i'm going to pass it on to osama thank you erica well hello my name is osama dorias and i'm the lead game designer at wb games in montreal i'm a game design teacher at dawson college and one of the three hybies on the heavy beast podcast here are some of the games that i've contributed to over the last 14 years in the industry i'd like to start my story at the beginning in 1979 a young boy was born in iraq little did he know he was about to embark on a great adventure that spanned many continents experiences and careers as most kids do i loved making up games as a kid and i do so on the playground with my friends and siblings but it didn't stop there i actually also love designing card games and board

games one of my earliest memories is asking my father to bring home an empty pizza box he was baffled but he complied and when i had that box i created a board game inside of it so the inside of the box was where the game was and when you closed the box that was the container of the game and i still find that incredibly clever to this day as i got older i moved on to making maps for video games like duke nukem starcraft heroes of mighty magic unreal tournaments this is one of the maps i made in the back this hobby persisted into my 20s but i'm getting ahead of myself in addition to making games and maps for games as a kid i also loved legos and building things so naturally i wanted to be an architect that was my dream i wanted to design gorgeous elaborate spaces this was

my dream from a very young age but right before applying to colleges i kind of had a change of heart and suddenly i felt directionless i didn't know what to do with my life that's a really scary feeling especially for a 17 year old i decided to major in political science because it was a study that interested me even though i really didn't have any real desire to work in the field and after university i got a job as a shipping agent i kind of had a love-hate relationship with it i loved going on ships and meeting the captain and the crew from all over the world but i hated doing the customs paperwork i did learn a lot from my time as a shipping agent though i had to have impeccable work ethic and punctuality paperwork had to be ready on time i couldn't be late or the ship would be delayed and that could cost millions of dollars to the client i learned to or to be organized and have

impeccable attention to detail one wrong number in the wrong field could cost a small fortune i learned to respect process even when i didn't like it i learned to communicate and negotiate but most importantly i developed my emotional intelligence when you work with so many people from all over the world with different customs and backgrounds you quickly learn how to identify shared values and how to speak to those values i eventually quit that job and i started freelancing as a graphic and web designer i was self-taught i dabbled in it in my teens i made a website for my dad's business at one point and i'm a pretty fast learner so it didn't take me long to line up some clients and get some work i eventually learned flash and then i of course made flash games they were pretty awful as a freelancer i had to learn how to manage my own time and tasks as well as manage client expectations i was a team

of one so i had to be self-motivated and resourceful there was no one to give me answers or to bail me out of it something went wrong i also picked up some hard skills along along the way i learned how to script which eventually helped me prototype i learned how to use photoshop which helped me create convincing mock-ups and fakes and most importantly i learned how to iterate i didn't have a choice when you're working with customers they're never happy with the first version of anything i have to del develop thick skin and learn not to get overly attached to what i made that is one of the most valuable skills i have as a designer right now at that point i'd been making games my entire life but i had never even considered a job in game dev everything changed when my friend ahmed became a game designer see ahmad also studied political science and he was brown like me and representation matters seeing him

make it opened my eyes and i knew i had found my calling my entire life had prepared me for this moment thus became my first mentor and over the next six months he guided me in creating a portfolio i had plenty of things already to put in a portfolio i mean i've been making things my entire life so he helped me just parse the bad from the not so bad and make it good even better and i must have applied to over a hundred different companies at that time all over the world and i initially didn't hear back from any of them i eventually got one interview and that luckily for me translated to a game designer job and i've been a game designer ever since leveraging all of the aforementioned skills in the process and that's my story thank you take it away marina you so much osama hello everyone i'm marina diaz uh i'm 27 years old i'm the ceo of my own company free of caps games

i'm also the lead designer of doldonia with angeline sequoia studios in france and i have an undergrad in italian and german and a master's degree in games design and some of the awards that i won were forbes 30 under 30 game the heroes 2020 and i'm also part of after crew and other associations in the games industry and this is what you normally see about me if you look for me on the internet but now i want to tell you about what you don't see but it's very important to know regarding career when you are considering uh just studying in the games industry or even doing whatever you want to do so first of all i wanted to become a bet when i was a kid i had lots and lots of dreams but the biggest was to become a bed i really love animals and i still love them today however my biggest dream was changing quite often someday i wanted to be a bed any other day i wanted to be a paleontologist any other day i wanted to be a journalist and so on but then i

also discovered the big truth that it's also one of the things that get me a bit far from the game's industry and is that i'm super bad at maths so basically when you're not good at maths lots of things uh cut from your way but then when it's when life started happening and when i was five my dad suffered a heart stroke and then my mom needed to do everything by herself and taking care of my dad you can see here my parents and two years after that my dad started suffering from depression and a while later he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder so basically uh when these kind of things happen at home and i was also an only child uh basically it was very traumatic for me because i really i really didn't know what was happening at home and that means that often there's no room for dreaming anymore because you need to grow very fast and basically it was like a whole mess i didn't understand what was happening at home

and that led me to teenager depression and basically i used to stay up in the nights until the morning on my computer or not sleeping at all during days i used to have great grades but then i stopped going to school and missed a whole year that i needed to repeat of course then i surrounded myself with bad people and then things like tobacco and alcohol appear in my life and then as a result of that pretty bad environment i ended in an abusive relationship that i can say i was lucky enough to survive and then at the school people were not supporting me very much either and the teacher said to my parents that i was never going to achieve anything in my life so you can see it's not like the best of the best but then things started changing even though i got lots of bad things that were happening around around me i found sheltering studying again it was kind of like my way to escape from all those uh bad things and during the rest of high school i

also changed the school i got great uh grades and honorific mentions that was really nice and then that all of that gave me the power to live that abusive relationship even though in that case i also think i was extremely lucky but then thanks to my grades in high school i got a grant for going to uni and i decided to study languages and literature italian and german specifically you can see me here the day of my uni graduation that was not super far ago just in 2017 and then after uni when i thought that i found my thing i got lost again because i couldn't find a job so basically i started working in digital marketing first as a trainee and then as a manager in the fashion industry and i thought i liked it a lot at the beginning but then i really felt i was not doing what i really wanted to do that was basically to kind of help making change and helping people to uh to improve their lives so then one of these days i was a bit sad my mom suggested to me

uh to go into games as it was like really the only thing that i kept um being constant about and you know like i come from spain so when my mom said that to me i was like you are really crazy that's impossible because our community in spain is small and there are not much funding for game developers so basically it was like a crazy idea but i decided to to follow what my mom said because a tiny thing remained in my heart with what she said so i decided to apply to a master's degree at grinnell university london and i really didn't tell anyone about it just one friend and then in the meantime i started making my own games with bitsy and started going to local games events in madrid after my work hours so then one uh one day in march in 2018 i got uh the letter from brunel university in london telling me that i got accepted and i couldn't believe it but then they make cost almost 8 000 pounds and

we couldn't afford it i still remember when i called my dad telling him this amazing thing and he was so angry at me but he was not angry at me because he didn't want me to do it he was angry because he didn't know how to help me in that moment but then my parents uh asked to the bank if they could help them with a loan and it was possible so my parents did that for me and i'm super grateful today and then from my side i also needed to ask for a loan in the uk so i could survive in london because it was impossible to get a job and at the same time study so i got 10 000 pounds that i finished paying this year and then um happened that i moved to the uk to london and during my main 2018 2019 i was extremely lucky i made amazing friends in london my teachers at brunel helped me a whole lot and i was very lucky that i got an igda velocity ground to attend ubc in san francisco and i did things like going to park jam

in thailand with my best friend to to make games in about 14 days after all these adventures and once i finished my ma i still needed a job many times interviews and interviews i was turned down because i didn't have the experience in the studio even though they liked my work and then is when i started working as a lead designer with ancient sequoia because at that moment they didn't have money so i started helping them for free but it was good for me because it was kind of an excuse for working with a studio anyway and then i found a game set up charity in the uk that hired me as the operations coordinator this experience helped me to stay in london and not going back to spain and then 2021 arrived and basically in april 2021 i was featuring forbes 30 under 30 europe that was like a big achievement because uh they basically highlighted my experience as an emotional game designer that it's

something that i fight for every day in the games industry and then i had uh i was very lucky that i could lead a project about identifying your own emotions and accepting them instead of instead of dismissing them and then i keep working with aldona today and dreaming again and what i want to say with all of these basically keep dreaming and that dreams are out of self-care um i know really know that life can be pretty harsh and it's not easy but there are sometimes some small actions that we can take from today to pursue our dreams and being a step closer to make them true so for me uh when i started in the games industry um and you know like going with my with my working market in digital marketing at the same time for me was to take 20 minutes per day to make some games anything i could you you know anything i could make in that time sometimes was a bit more you know whatever uh it helps you then that you're important you come

first i burn out myself several times in this industry and i don't recommend it it's really not worth and you can do so much better change if you feel yourself good and not so that you can keep with example for others coming behind you and then become to yourself and treat you with respect thank you so much and now i give the word again to the amazing jaycee lao cool thanks marina hi i'm dr j.c lau and i'm a producer at hambrine schemes and i also serve on the board of directors for global game jam and the seattle chapter of the igd8 now in my time in games i've been a scrum master i've been a test engineer i've been a project coordinator i've worked in qa i've written scripts i've had a job translating american english into australian and new zealand english and that's all a lot of stuff but before i was a game developer i was a college

professor of moral and political philosophy and then before that i was a family lawyer so in my journey into games i've had to develop a lot of different skill sets and what i'm going to talk about today is something that i learned on this journey which is basically that when you have hard skills hard skills are important but soft skills are important and i'll talk about what i mean by this shortly but first here's the thing let's go back a little i knew as a kid i wanted to go into games and i just didn't know how to do it game schools weren't really a thing when i was young and my degrees were in history philosophy political science and law and i developed a whole bunch of skills around just like being a lawyer and being an academic and argument and research and i didn't know how to apply them to games or

whether these skills were even relevant at all so my question was basically how do people enter the game industry from like what i was doing a completely different area and succeed and now success is really important here because i also knew the games industry was relatively volatile and it has a high turnover so for example there's studies that have shown that the average career lifespan for a game developer is five years and i wanted to get into games but i wanted to make sure i could make that change into development in a way that was still sustainable so i devised a strategy as a lawyer and an academic i knew how to do research so i just started by doing a bunch of research about what games um were and what roles they were in games and i knew i wanted to be in the game making part and not so much publishing for example but

without any actual expertise in art or design or programming i rolled out those areas of games um the alternative was i went back to school for a couple more years and at this point in my career i really didn't want to do that so i also looked at what skills i did have and how i could align those with any particular roles i'll talk a little bit more about skills later but based on what my skills were and what my interests were i was looking at production so once i had my research in order i set about getting ready to make that jump into games so i took a couple of computer science courses online and i also did some stuff like playing with game maker and unity so at least i knew something about the technical side of making games i went to

some networking events and i just went there and listened to people talk about games and in doing this i learned a lot about what the landscape of the industry was like and i could also look for people who could be potential mentors or sponsors for me and this one i have some thoughts about so if money is a consideration it's not a bad idea to save some and i did this for practical purposes while i was still employed as a college professor so in case i didn't get a job in games right away i had something to fall back on and after all that i felt like i was ready to apply for jobs and i worked on my resume and submitted it to a lot of different places now in applying for game jobs i relied heavily on my soft skills and assuming that you have the technical or hard skills for a role soft skills

are really the things that will set you apart from other applicants so soft skills are required for all jobs and roles but they're usually a lot more difficult to cultivate than hard skills and part of this is because they're a lot more nebulous or the quant the quality at which you can do them is much more subjective than hard skills so for example can you write an api or can you do a lighting pass uh very different types of questions from can you empathetically support your team through a pandemic now in my experience both when i was applying for jobs and even now as someone that is involved in hiring other developers people focus on soft skills a lot more than you might think and what i'm going to do is talk about three skills that i found to be really effective here and those are collaboration communication and having a growth mindset so firstly collaboration collaboration is the ability to be a

good team player so unless you plan to be a solo dev collaboration is absolutely essential to having a functional team you're going to come across a lot of different people with a lot of different personality types and being able to navigate your interactions with them is a really vital skill to have this is also especially important if you're working across teams or across functions so if you're an artist but you can kind of work with an engineer and understand what they're talking about and so on so the better that you can work with different types of people the more effective as a team member you'll be so secondly is communication communication deals with questions about understanding and being understood so are you able to articulate your view clearly do people know what you mean when you say something communication is vital to making a game because it requires that people understand what you're saying so you can collaborate better and be aligned on your goals now for me collab um communication also

includes things like knowing when not to talk and being able to read social cues and also holding space for others to speak okay and finally the third one i'm going to talk about here is growth mindset now this is the ability to understand how you like to learn and look inward at what you have learned and make plans for how you will continue to get better having a growth mindset also prevents you from stagnating on your hard skills because you will continue to learn as new like hard skills develop or as new tech comes out and it also helps develop emotional resilience so if and when something goes wrong on your project you'll know how to do it better next time so you'll have other skills that will be useful in your journey through the industry so make sure that you keep space for that and find out what works for you so i've only listed three here and this is not an exhaustive list

okay using a combination of my skills i started my journey into games at xbox and after that i went to bungie to work on destiny 2 and its dlcs and then i moved to her brain schemes for battletech and its dlcs so even within the industry you'll be moving between studios and projects and roles and it's important to keep those soft skills developed in summary prepare yourself for the games industry do your research and take stock of your skills and once you have your hard skills at the level that you need for the roles you're applying to focus on your soft skills regardless of what role you end up taking or what studio you go to or what project you're working on you'll need your soft skills to work with other people and finally don't forget to keep developing your skills

one cool thing about the games industry is we are constantly evolving our tools will continue to improve and our products will continue to improve so remember to keep improving yourself as well all right so now we'll go into our q a session where we'll ha we have a couple of questions that we'll talk about in the panel so firstly let's talk about skills so we've talked a lot about our skills and our previous experiences in our individual presentations so how did you all try to leverage your previous experience during your job searching games um i could go first for that one um i i did have a lot of smaller jobs but the two main jobs or careers that i had before video games were freelance graphic and web design and shipping and the type of skills i had from both of those are very different from freelance graphic and web design mostly i actually had some hard skills that i was able to apply pretty much directly into game development so i

learned some scripting because you needed to do some scripting and even though it wasn't in the same languages that we were using in video games just having a some kind of a background and understanding how you know that works um allowed me to learn more proprietary editors and the scripting languages that went with them and surprisingly my photoshop skills were actually really strong because i was a graphic designer right and that was a thing i was able to leverage but i think i had to actually scale back because game designers are not supposed to make their mock-ups look good and spend a lot of time on them that's not the point um we're supposed to like just you know make fakes or like something that's quick and dirty just to give an impression or an idea um and one of the one of the funny stories that happened actually is that one of the games i worked on shipped with a mock-up of an options menu that i made as a mock-up because i polished it a little too much and we put it as a placeholder into the game and nobody noticed including myself we forgot about it and only much later did

someone say hey you know that looks a little bit different than the other menus but it was too late the game released that much i will tell you which game because i i still you know nda's i don't know how when they expire when i'm allowed to talk about it but yeah however those tools those editors that i that i learned a lot of the those skills were able to be leveraged directly um in terms of my shipping industry experience a lot of that was just dealing with people and that i was able to leverage specifically into the interview um you know just talking to people negotiating and those are skills and what i tell a lot of people is that interviewing is a skill like any other even if you're happy with your current job it doesn't hurt once in a while just to say yes to an interview if there's just even a small chance that you might say yes to the job um because you'll get better like you'll you'll start to understand what the expectations are you'll start to see your worth but you're actually gonna get better at interviewing you'll start a lot of the interviews you hear the same questions

uh and um you know you'll be able to see patterns of thought so i had had a head start in that because a lot of the uh skills i had was meeting new captains almost on a weekly basis from all over the world so i had to like i was very good at making a good impression and understanding where they're coming from and learning you know knowing what their values are laughing at their jokes and all these little things that are subtle i had a head start like i had a lot of experience doing that that helped me in my career it translated well into freelancing graphic web design i was able to meet clients and relate with them really quickly it also helped me with my one interview that i had at the beginning of my career that i got lucky and i i was able to land cool yeah so more about skills um where are there any skills that you feel like you should have had but you didn't have when you moved into games and if so

what would you suggest to people that are considering entering games to like with respect to developing those skills i can go with that one so i think that for me was specifically that as i wanted i had pretty clear that i wanted to be a game designer right now i don't know if i want to be just like a designer and also a narrative designer so like as you can see like you don't need to choose one path at the beginning of your career and stick to that you can do many things um but basically i think that for me it was that i was a bit lost with you know how to do things like in terms of like okay i saw people that was pretty technical but i i think i'm i don't really don't enjoy making lots of spreadsheets and stuff so i felt i was not like a technical game designer i felt that i wanted to be a game designer but not a technical one and i thought that maybe that's why it was not a place for me in the games industry but then i

realized that it's possible to find your voice in the games industry not not everyone works in the same way so that i was not less game designer because i didn't enjoy spreadsheets but i could you know i sometimes don't enjoy spreadsheets but it's not my favorite thing and um i realize then that it's possible to to kind of work on your own way and that to show others that you are efficient the same and that you do you can do different new things uh just working on your way because if all of us we work in the same way there is no innovation at all in the games industry and everything will look the same so it's actually like i think my recommendation is that follow your heart and try to work on your own way with your own skills and contributing with your uniqueness because you probably there is no one else in the world that works like you do so like you know it's really good to to kind of um get inspired by other people in the games industry and your work colleagues every day and even our friends but it's

also important that you look at what makes you unique because probably there are lots of things and i think that's also part of the kind of spiciness you can add to your career from your own self cool yeah that's awesome um okay so we all have very different backgrounds into games and i know sometimes like we've mentioned not having a game's background to go into games has been this weird vicious circle but also is some sometimes problematic if you have particular backgrounds that you know don't seem to obviously fit into games so for me i know when i started applying to the games industry um and this was across a bunch of different roles like you know in qa or in marketing or in production i got rejected from a bunch of places just because i was told i was overqualified

due to having a phd and that also made me a flight risk so studios were concerned i wouldn't want to stay at that particular workplace once and and i was just going home using them as a foot in the door so i was wondering do any of you also have stories about you know your backgrounds being challenging for entering games or moving through games yeah i can um say something real fast about that like so when i entered the games industry at riot games so i started in recruiting and a big reason i was able to do that is that you know recruiting isn't one of those roles where people are like oh you need a computer science degree and things like that but when i eventually wanted to transition from recruiting to production and leading teams um i got a lot of pushback and i like i really really had to lean on finding mentors and advocates

for myself because you know there are some people who are like i you know they just didn't see how what i was doing could possibly apply to leading a team of game devs um and so yeah it just falls back to those you know there are people who have a fixed mindset and you'll they'll look at your background and completely judge you for that um but again like riot games is also the same company where i found my mentors and i was able to transition into production so they had both those people there right the fixed mindset people and the girls mindset people um but yeah it has been held against me i could add something to that as well uh it's a little i mean it's not a 100 answering your question but it's still something i think is pertinent and related uh working with people from all over the world as a shipping agent um basically it helped me develop thick skin because people have different

cultures and norms and backgrounds and values um and a lot of times they'll say things that are somewhat inappropriate when your first name is osama or you know you have an interesting background uh interesting background to them um this actually helped me develop thick skin so at the beginning of the industry uh the topic of microaggressions which i didn't even know the word back then uh was one where i was able to shrug off a lot of things directed at me and that sounds like a good thing but it's actually not a good thing uh to a certain extent um you like there are some things that you shouldn't be tolerated in a workplace and it took me a while before i understood that you know these skills that i had learned in the shipping industry were probably not a good thing and that i could have leveraged them differently i should have been able to be more vocal and whatnot so it probably saved me because at the beginning when you're a junior you probably should keep your

head down because you don't have a lot of power or the agency to be able to do much but it's also something that was complicated later because i had this unhealthy relationship with microaggressions that i had to unlearn and learn how to you know stand up for for myself and my values uh later on so that's something to watch out for uh you know this diplomacy can go both ways well we're glad you got you got through that and now you're here thank you cool so yeah speaking of interacting with different types of people um we've we've also touched on networking and you know networking is a key skill that people develop in their job searches especially in the games industry so yeah i was wondering if you could tell me something about like the role that networking and making contacts had for you know job searches

yeah so for me like i 100 got into the industry through networking right and it wasn't on purpose or anything like that it was just that i had done all of this volunteer work and through doing that people recognized um you know my abilities to be organized reliable etc um and so i guess um when you think about networking it is less about you know rubbing shoulders and like just trying to make the right connections it's really about trying to establish actual relationships with people because again you want to be remembered uh you never know when opportunities are going to pop up i think that i had been volunteering for two years before an opportunity popped up so you know if i had gone into it thinking oh three months after i meet somebody i'm gonna have a job i would have been very disappointed

um i could add to that as well so uh my network in the gaming industry before getting uh into games was exactly four people i knew four people who worked in games all of which i met before in different contexts before they were in in video games like ahmed who i mentioned in my in my presentation uh we played field hockey together that's how we met the first time we played he played on my team um and i also 100 got into the game industry because of my network because ahmed helped me build a portfolio and one of my friends alexi who worked at gameloft at the time and that's where i had my first job in the industry put in a good word for me i don't know how far that went but it's also the only place that gave me an interview and it's the only place i had someone put in a good word for me so i would like i i have very very strong reasons to believe that it was because of his nudge that i got the interview even though there's no direct proof for that

um what i wanted to add is uh a good way to expand your network is to look for a mentor and um people often get this wrong but oftentimes when they look for a mentor uh the instinct is to overshoot they're gonna look for someone who's already for example uh art director a creative director a game director that's not a bad thing i'm not saying don't do this but what i'm saying is those people will generally have much less time for you and their experience in terms of when they got into an industry is removed by several years so it's not as fresh i was lucky because ahmed was my my mentor as i even used a word in my presentation he had only been a designer for less than a year by the time that he showed me how to build a portfolio but it was fresh in his mind he knew what to what he had to do to go through and was necessary plus nobody else was asking him to be a mentor so he had a lot of time to dedicate to me so a lot of times uh i if i mean shake

it up get different mentors from different places but don't snub your nose at a junior who was just in the industry who might have a lot of valuable information will be able to help you uh it'll probably be much easier for you to get a hold of them and that relationship will probably give you more yeah i think i want to just like echo that and say that i've worked with some you know more senior level people and at some point they're so far removed from what you're going to be doing like i probably wouldn't ask an executive producer how to do scrum because they've probably yeah yeah i i'll also add um given the pace at which this industry changes um someone that is in their first maybe like first two three years like that's probably the range where like they will have seen like what the work will be like what the tools you'll be using will be like and someone who's like i'm a 25-year veteran like that's great if you can have contact with those people and

learn from them but like the tools have changed so much and the methods and the culture has changed so much in that time so just i think it's really important to be aware of what the current targets are and also you know the trajectory that you're taking cool all right so one thing i als also wanted to add to just the point about networking is for me it was finding the correct insertion point so i came into the industry in a very like through a very weird angle because i had academic knowledge of like for for example the philosophy of race and gender because i taught that and that transferred into networking with a very particular intersection of people at between people that cared about diversity and inclusion stuff and games and then i went from that into dna work in studios and that turned into founding the bungie diversity committee and also founding

what we now call the jedi council at herring schemes where jedi stands for justice equity diversity and inclusion so one thing to take from that i think was even though i had these skills for getting networking into this particular angle i could use that to amplify things i cared about once i got into the industry and into a studio and so networking isn't just here as a person i'm using that person to get into like you know get my foot in the doors to get into the industry but it's also about maintaining those contacts and then once you get there hold the door open for other people cool okay speaking more about networking um let's talk about linkedin because i know developers love to use linkedin and for me when i entered the industry i had to basically make a profile from scratch because academics don't use linkedin we use this thing that's called

academia because creative names um we where you basically make a profile and then instead of just all your workplaces you list all the places that you've taught at and where you're you got your degrees and you publish your papers on this website and so from going in from academia into games i had to make this whole profile from scratch because otherwise i had no online presence in any professional capacity and after i did that people could find me and see what i did and what i cared about so i was just wondering about the impact that networking online or linkedin had on your job searches yeah for me um i didn't really use linkedin for networking at all but i did i was sort of like you know one of those early adopters of whenever a new platform would appear and i was like oh linkedin um and i put all of my volunteer experience on linkedin and because volunteer

experience counts so yeah i put all of that on linkedin and then i also had like my one paid experience with the blaze blue chrono phantasma in the industry um and before joining the games industry i was i was a teacher so i like had all of that on there too but um somebody from riot games ended up finding me on linkedin initially and so you know i you know owe a lot to just having visibility and discovery discoverability on that website because otherwise i don't know i may not be in the games industry maybe i'll be in the anime industry who knows um but but yeah i like highly highly recommend making yourself as discoverable as possible because you never know who's looking for your skill sets speaking specifically to that actually the first um poke that i had for an interview was for a poker expert and apparently one of the things that

made my portfolio or cv stand out was because i had poker written in the interests i used to play poker with my friends so uh yeah don't be afraid to become a human and be a person and to show that side of you like the interesting things the different things about you anything will help you stand out cool yeah it's important i think just as we go three games also i know there's been this kind of cultural shift into seeing developers as human beings with these multifaceted like identities and we do more than just make games so yeah i think that's really important just to show really who you are um yeah so let's talk a little bit about supplemental education so i mentioned that i had done a um like really short computer science course and marina you went to school for games so

yeah what kind of supplemental education or certifications do you think are useful or not useful for people who are trying to break into games so basically it's true that i have a master's degree in game design but um even though it was a good thing because um like i don't know in my times like three years ago everyone was saying that if you didn't have a you know a certificate that said that you were a game designer no one was gonna hire you so i wasn't scared of that and that's how i thought i needed to apply to a master's degree but the thing is that when when i arrived to uni uh i had ahead two years almost two years of uh you know going to events in in spain to games events to networking with people of networking with people of um making bbc games in my free time so once like i arrived to the masters i actually had much more experience than

when i thought so they you know like everything was there was very useful to kind of refresh knowledge and you know like even for example getting um skills on the production side or even pitch decks was a thing that we we saw in the master's degree but i wouldn't think i i don't think that it was something that helped me like to discover new things it just gave support to things that i already did my homework at home years before so um and then i wanted to talk about another important thing is that i did a whole lot of uh courses that were from coursera and those kind of things that are for free many times and i did lots of them like i did courses from colors i did courses from brown university like many of them in many things and especially in graphic design and you know those things in game design as well

hey i got a very good course from colors in corsair actually before going to to uni and i think that uh that's also very important because many times as uh erika said as well we don't count kind of experience that we have with things that are kind of for free but it's time you're taking into you know like time you're putting from aside to to learn new things and that's important as well the only difference between those things and going to school is that honestly that you pay and that you maybe have like a physical space where you do that well i think one of the good things with the pandemic this year has been that we could see that we can do lots of things and we don't need sometimes those spaces even though of course being with other people with the same interests helps a whole lot but also like uh wanted to highlight the experience from disabled people that with the pandemic they were able to do much many more things than before so we should really count these kind of things better in job experiences so

yeah cuny's cool if you could go or if your parents can help you it's fine many countries is very difficult like in the us and other countries is it's very difficult for many people but i think it's not completely necessary today to get a you know an official thing so i would put more effort in things that we said already in this panel like networking like not only for um you know get your your food on the door but also to make friends very good friends actually and you know like keep being courteous and unopen i that's that's the best thing i think yeah from from my point of view to answer the same question i agree with what marina said wholeheartedly i would say it also depends on the role that you have uh many of the companies that i worked in um they didn't hire junior programmers unless they had a degree programmers specifically but designers it didn't really matter as long as they had a

portfolio and the most likely people to be hired as designers for people who are already in the company in another role like for example qa or anything else because at that point um a lot of things that designers have to know it's really hard to put in a portfolio it's really hard to show that you know how to do it so if you meet somebody and you work with them even in a different capacity you'll start to see if they have the soft skills or the you know the analysis skills or analytical skills or anything else similar to that that they would need so it's really hard to give an answer that just says this is what you need but from game designer specifically is if you have some experience with an editor any editor because most of the company or many other companies use proprietary tools so they won't expect you to know already what they're using but you have some experience they feel that you could leverage game editors like unreal or unity either or that's going to give you a plus if you know how to use like photoshop or something similar for mockups if you know how to use excel for for formulas and this is the one that i didn't know

at all before getting into games vizio for you know flow charts and things like that that's the thing that took me by complete surprise i didn't know that existed i used to make my ugly flow charts and photoshop myself and it's not very easy to do uh i didn't know they of course didn't make sense now but you know you don't know what you don't know uh once i i learned about how to i used one a free one called y ed a million years ago uh which i would recommend if it's still around because it's free it's not it's not like video but there's a lot of other tools like that because a lot of things are really hard to show unless you show them in relation to other things so it's a very graphic way to show your designs so if you're in a different role it's a good idea to get that mentor in that role and ask them what tools that they're using and find something equivalent where you get the same experience as well yeah as like a producer or a project manager uh again like it's really hard to show

your work and like show off a portfolio and so when you have um certifications in scrum or pmp or whatever it is you know it's just one of those things where it's to give people some level of confidence that you know how to do what you're doing and you've been educated on this kind of kind of thing i don't personally see value in the certifications like i have several agile certifications and a lot of times i'm sitting in those classes i'm like yes obviously talk to people and then you'll figure out the work system but um but you know it's just one of those things that i feel like it's a good resume point but practically they're not like necessarily super helpful and so it also um you know unfortunately disadvantages people who can't afford to get those certifications so the agile illuminati is going to be mad at me but i think that you know a lot of these classes are a waste of money or they overcharge um but yeah it's just you know if you can

get those additional bullet points on your resume when you're trying to break into the industry it's just you know gonna make it easier for you because um when you think about applying for jobs you think about it as like how risky am i as a hire and so that's sort of the assessment that interviewers and hiring managers are trying to make like can i trust that this person can do the job and so just like every little thing you can get to make you look like less risky of a higher is a benefit yeah well if i could take it back add one last quick thing uh if your heart is set on studying game design in university that's fine um no problems with that just the most important metric with that is ask them about their placement rates a lot more designers graduate per year than there are junior positions that open up and the schools that are most successful they're the ones who find the jobs and that's what ultimately what you want to do at the end if they don't share their placement rates that's a bad sign so

just putting it there one thing i think i would also add to certification issues is i agree with erica in terms of at least from production scrum certification is highly highly contested and um i know people like some courses are up to like two thousand dollars and if you're new in the industry and you don't know what you really want to do that's a lot of money to drop in you know exploring a particular path and so if you do want a certification there are cheaper alternatives you can look for so marina has suggested coursera and i actually did a coursera program just in project management which was half the price and still gave me that one line on my resume so that's also fine um one other thing is it does demonstrate motivation for self-starting which is a soft skill that people care about cool um okay we have a little bit of time left so very

quickly one sentence what advice would you give other people regarding moving into games be good to people people will remember it if you're good to people um i would say try to model the behaviors that you want other people to also do i would say i thought like again take care of yourself and rest and that's all we have time for so thank you to our panelists erica osama and marina and thank you for coming and listening to our panel so here we have our handles on twitter if you would like to follow us and continue the conversation so thank you have a nice day bye