So You Want to Work in Game Development

Over the last few years, I’ve had occasion to speak publicly and passionately about the game industry. There is one question which is common to just about every one of these events. Quietly, gently, and with hopefulness and expectation in their eyes, people always inquire “How do I get hired at a game studio?”

It can be challenging even when you’ve taken very targeted college courses or when you have a lot of seemingly related experience. Those who are already in the industry seem to think it wasn’t hard at all. Those who are still slinging sandwiches at Subway while hunting opportunity and dreaming up new game ideas seem to find it really tough to break in. It’s happened so often that I thought I’d address it here where I can be a little less off-the-cuff and give the question the nuance and consideration I think it deserves.

I’ve seen some interesting behaviour, both positive and negative. People have transgressed unknowingly in ways that I would have considered obvious but the truth is, I’ve been working for over 2 decades now and a lot has changed in that time. I’ve been interviewed many, many times over the course of my career. I’ve learned a few do’s and don’ts — particularly in the game industry but also IT in general. I’ve been described a few times as someone who “interviews well” and so I thought I’d also try to outline some of those things I’ve learned for people who are looking for the best shot at getting into the industry.

Undoubtedly others’ experience may differ from mine but speaking as a studio head, a managing director and the person who is often doing the hiring, here are the things I care about. Here also, are the things I don’t.

Applications and Responses

My current studio has been interviewing people for a few roles which need to be filled but we’ve been very careful to find the right person at the right time. We try to take care to grow when we know we can assure stability and although there are no guarantees of a fit, there are some practices which can make things go a lot smoother than they would otherwise. It’s most important to find the right people who fit your team, your culture and the fluid needs of the company. Getting hired in this industry is equal parts team chemistry, qualifications and adaptability.

Once the ad goes out, it’s not uncommon for us to have several good candidates even though the budget only allows us to act on a small number of them. We’re also busy making games and our small team size (10 as I write this) means we have no official “HR” department. The first resource in our hiring toolbox is a quick glance over the applicants’ cover letters, resumes and any preliminary stuff that came through. From here, it’s decided who we’ll follow up with. Sometimes we advertise a position and then budgetary or project constraints get in the way. It means we can’t act until 2–3 weeks down the road and unfortunately appears to applicants that like their application just slipped into the ether. In most cases, it’s simply a matter of changing needs from day to day and internal business. Even though I pride myself on meeting people and trying to help them along, it sucks that every 2 out of 3 people might end up disappointed. But from a business perspective, it can also be costly and hard on the entire team to try and get rid of the wrong person when you’ve made a mistake. It’s far easier and less costly to be picky up front.

The point is, don’t take it personally if you don’t get an immediate response or any response at all. It should not deter you from applying again in the future. I’ve actually heard some people get sensitive about it and say things like “They didn’t even have the decency to respond … screw them!” That’s one way to approach it, but it doesn’t help either of us. We might need you later, and you might still be looking.

The Dubious Value of the Resume

In both IT and games, the resume is still, unfortunately, the standard practice for “first contact”. This archaic and often worthless ritual still manages to dominate even the most progressive industries. There have been studies that illustrate problems with everything from gender bias to racial prejudice and yet we still need that sheet of digital paper which says this is my career in a nutshell. After you’ve met someone at an event or party and they’ve mentioned there’s an open position, they will often ask you to “send over your resume”.

What you may not know is that with respect to hiring in games, it’s at the very bottom of the credibility totem pole. As employers, we recognize that resumes can be spun, they can become out of date, and may even be 4 pages of embellishments about a person’s vaguely relevant experience. Thus, in a very understandable way, most employers treat resumes as suspect, expecting that they’ve been customized to try to appeal to the company doing the hiring. If you’ve ever worked with a headhunter, you know that one of the first things they’ll ask you to do is “tailor” your resume for a specific client. Indeed, they’d be crazy not to. We know it, you know it, and they know it.

We look at the name and address — is the person local or will it cost us moving expenses? We look at the education — Computer Science grad? If so, it means you may have to unlearn some of the things you’ve been exposed to and trained with skills relevant to our industry. This is actually becoming less and less of a problem as Computer Science departments are increasingly adding game development components to their programs and evolving beyond just teaching java and web development as a basis for software development.

Are you a college grad? If so, the quality of the college and people we know who came through the same program may help inform us about some of the things about the sort of education you’ve received.

A resume is basically your contact information and (ideally) a brief, scannable way to remember who you are. In most cases, an employer can glean very little reliable information about you from your resume other than how much time you’ve spent in the industry and what you claim to know. That is to say, we don’t care about them much and we’ve hired people in the past without ever having looked at them. What’s most important is what happens one-on-one.

With apologies to career coaches everywhere, if someone is telling you that the resume is your foot-in-the-door and you should put it on thick stock paper, and make it ‘stand out’ — you may want to remind them that it’s 2018 and send them a link to this article. It’s not about the resume. At best, the resume is a flare sent up in the night sky which might interest us enough to sail the ship in your general direction to investigate further. The cover letter is actually far more important.

The Cover Letter is Your First Opportunity

The resume is often followed by or attached to a cover letter which is your first opportunity to talk directly to the person doing the hiring. It’s a great opportunity for you because they can’t interrupt you, ask questions, or fire back. So how should you use them? My advice is, like a human. If you met on the street would you use formal speech? Would you summarize your resume? (Correct answer: No). This is the area where you see the wildest disparity in approaches. It’s clear that some schools, programs or online articles are still spouting the old idea of “summarize your resume highlights”. It’s also clear that some people mistakenly conflate formality with professionalism. That’s fodder for a whole other article! Guess what — if your cover letter sounds like your resume, it’s going to be treated like your resume. See the previous section.

But before you drop the formality and start smack-talking, there is also the other end of the spectrum. You don’t know who is doing the reading. It could be a 20-something tech lead or a middle-aged stuffed shirt. Don’t assume your reader is cool and do not expect that you will be perceived as casual and cool if you fire off a 3 sentence nod with no helpful information.

“Dude… I’ve got the skills to pay the bills. Here’s my resume, hit me if you’ve got anything open. Best. — John Doh.”

In the above case John is likely to be written off, because while it communicates that he’s at least confident in his abilities (so confident, no additional information is required) it also puts him in the unenviable position of having a giant burden of proof to demonstrate that ability. More than someone who takes the time to talk about themselves a little bit. John will also have to evade whatever cynicism and skepticism may plague the reader from the get-go.

Personally, we are most fond of the cover letters which tell us a little bit about your background, your passions, why it is you want to work in games, maybe even why you want to work for our company specifically. We are most fond of the cover letters that sound like they’re an email between colleagues. We tend to give you the same consideration you gave us when you wrote them. We’ll treat you like a human who deserves consideration.

Grammar and Articulate use of Language Matter

This one is a controversial one. After all, many of the best people are new to the country or English is not their first language. That’s a steep hill to climb for them and as employers, we understand that. Nevertheless, in video games good communication across disciplines can make or break a project. That developer who evades it because they can’t find the right words or that producer who keeps misspelling the client’s company name can have absolutely fatal effects. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a role for someone whose spoken english is not ideal, but written english is something for which there are a lot of tools to help you. You should use them.

The absolute minimum and easy thing for a person to do in sending in their resume or cover letter is to give it a spell check and 2–3 re-reads. If you’re aware you have challenges with English (or whatever the employer's language is), contact a friend who is fluent to have them review it.

The most egregious and irritating thing is receiving cover letters with frequent misspellings or barely grade-school level use of grammar. It may seem petty — things happen. But it signals that either you have a subpar ability to communicate effectively or you were not taking the application seriously. It tells us that it wasn’t worth the time it takes for you to reread it. It tells us you don’t care. And if you don’t, we won’t either. You would be amazed at some of the barely coherent ramblings we’ve received. There will be, of course, more tolerance if we know the person doesn’t share our language. But when it’s an English-speaking person who tout’s “effective communication” as one of their skills while dropping “Your” vs “You’re” inconsistently, you’re at least going to the bottom of the pile.

This is an easy one to improve on — read more, write more and google it.

Don’t Just Show Up — It’s Disrespectful to the Team

For years, parents and teachers of my generation have been saying that you have to go “beat on doors”. They’ve been saying that “the squeaky wheel gets the grease” or by showing up at the office and insisting you speak to someone doing the hiring “shows initiative” or makes you “stand out”. Only the latter is true, and not in a good way. It only shows a complete lack of understanding of our business. This may well work at the Starbucks or the phone company — I am not sure. It does not work in a small to mid-sized game studio.

It amazes me that this continues to happen but picture the following scenario:

Our team is on a deadline, we’ve been working really hard on a super-secret project to get everything on our task list done for a game that’s supposed to ship by 3 pm this afternoon. The software developers have their headphones on and heads down, the producers are detailing last-minute launch plans and the artists are scratching away furiously with their digital pens. Suddenly, John looks up and sees a strange person standing quietly in the middle of the floor clutching a paper resume. One of them — nobody is sure who — is going to have to interrupt their work and go acknowledge that person. We don’t have security doors and we don’t have a receptionist because we are not a public-facing organization. We do have a sofa to relax on in a sort of waiting room with some snacks in the fridge, but — who is this person?!

This scenario happened exactly has described no less than 6 times in the first month we advertised a position and in every case, it was considered baffling. What made it even more strange is that it often fell upon another busy engineer or artist to literally stand and politely listen while a recent grad went through a well-rehearsed introduction to someone who had no responsibility to hear it or to care about it. In the end, we took their resumes and the same people sometimes even showed up the following day to repeat the routine.

If you would like to meet with us — reach out by email and maybe we could make an appointment with the appropriate person. Maybe not. Either way, it’s a rare and usually large budget game studio that can afford to pay someone to entertain people who just knock on the door. And I can guarantee you that even in those cases, the resumes handed over often get lost on a random desk, misplaced or regardless of what happens — treated as secondary to those who followed a more modern electronic protocol. There are a lot of advantages to an electronic workflow, not the least of which is ensuring that your resume is easily accessible by a quick email or search query and doesn’t become someone’s phone-side scratchpad.

There is no reason in 2018 why a creative or digital worker would show up in a studio with a resume in hand without having previously made an appointment or connection — unless such openness was the explicit policy of that studio.

Make Games

Of all the things that increase your chances of getting hired in the game industry, nothing improves your chances more than having actually built and (ideally) shipped a game on some platform. Whether it was PC, Steam, mobile or console is irrelevant but knowing that you’ve been through at least one entire cycle, even by yourself, puts you ahead of other candidates. At a minimum, it means you know what it takes to get a game out. It often means you’ve experienced much of the joy and the pain that comes with collaborating with artists and designers and other creatives to achieve something.

Perhaps more importantly, having shipped a game on your own free time is demonstrable proof of the passion and dedication that most people only talk about on their resume or cover letter. Regardless of your discipline within the game development community, nothing is more important than your portfolio. Once you get a few dev cycles under your belt, potential employers worth working for will stop caring entirely about your education and they’ll want to know one thing — what have you done? What can you show me?

The best way to accomplish this is your local game developer community. Get involved in game jams. If they don’t exist, organize them. You can also participate remotely with events like Global Game Jam and Ludem Dare. Here in Halifax we have the Halifax Game Collective meetups. If you are coming into a games job never having made a game, it looks very, very bad. Especially if you’re a programmer, there is absolutely no reason given free tools like Unity, Unreal or GameMaker why you could not have — at the very least — participated in some small way to a shipped game. The only reasonable explanation you might have is that you’ve been too busy with your part time or day job to focus on it outside of a day-to-day work. That is certainly a reasonable excuse, but some of the game developers I’ve hired in the past have never let a reasonable excuse stop them from making games. They do it because they love it and, to put it simply, they’re the people we want on our team.

Dress for Success?

Dress code is an old idea and should be sneered at by any thinking person in our industry. We are creative, progressive and most often not client-facing. The only possible exception to this rule is the business development or media-facing production roles but even in those cases, you know, especially if you’ve ever visited the Game Developer Conference, that there is no standard of dress unless you consider jeans, and t-shirts to be business attire.

That said… We’re still in the realm of humans, judgments, and first impressions. It’s always a good idea to step it up a notch just for a show of good character and decorum. The rule of thumb when I began was to find out what the employers' environment is like (jeans and t-shirts, I promise) and go one notch above. Wear jeans and shirt with a collar perhaps. Honestly, this makes little difference and the only reason it’s worth mentioning is that it can work in your favour. It still matters a lot to some studios who consider it just good manners to show a certain decorum in the interview process. We have had the odd case where someone has shown up looking completely un-hygienic, dishevelled or even foul-smelling and though it had nothing to do with their skill set, it definitely left a negative impression. You want to avoid that.

Be In the Scene

The best way to get hired in this industry is, without exception, to know someone who’s in it and have them recommend you. In every single company I’ve ever worked for, the first tier of any hiring process is to talk to your staff and hire from their pool of friends and relatives. There’s a very good reason for this and it’s commonly known as the web of trust. Very simply, if we know and like you and we work well with you, there’s at least a better than average chance that someone you vouch for will have similar values and standards. Of course, that’s not always the case, but it certainly helps narrow the work that the Human Resources department has to do if you’re jumping up and down and saying, “Hire my friend Dave, he’s awesome!”

There is a common misconception that the door to the games industry is through the job boards and ads. If you’re knocking on that door, you’ve chosen a very narrow path. There are as many doors as there are studio staff members you can befriend and get to know.

So what’s the best way to make these friends? I bet you’ve heard this before — Networking. Networking. Networking. Be at the game jams, be at the GDC’s, be at the Gamescom and Game Connections. You may or may not be able to afford such events but in some provinces and countries, there is cash available for students and new hires to send them to industry events. Even if there isn’t, I can’t imagine a better vacation than LA, San Francisco, Paris or Cologne to meet up with thousands of other like-minded potential friends and employees.

If that’s out of the question, use social media and online projects to the best of your ability to make a name for yourself. Hold your own local events. In the 90s rave scene had all kinds of private parties that were difficult to find or get into. People would ask “how do I find out about these incredible parties?”. The answer was always the same — be in the scene. That means volunteering to hang posters, become a DJ, hang out at the places the scenesters hung out, listen to the related radio shows or podcasts etc. For the game industry, it means simply following, reading about, and participating as much as you can in your industry and local non-industry events. Eventually, you will find ways to connect with people who you’ll find surprisingly willing to help bring you into their world if you’ve got some talent.

It’s not You, It’s Me

So you’ve followed the rules, you’ve sent in the resume and maybe you’ve even had an interview and now there’s radio silence. What do you do? What’s happening here? Well, the short answer is, you don’t have any idea. It’s a huge mistake to draw conclusions about your eligibility for the position or, short of obvious transgressions, to assume you’re being ignored. A follow-up email is warranted, polite and even expected in most cases. Any more than a single follow-up email is starting to wander into unstable territory. The trouble is that as people applying for a job, we assume we have a 1–1 relationship with the person doing the hiring. It would be reasonable to think that given that relationship you should get some kind of response back. The truth is different, however. The employer often has a 1-many relationship. The person may have interviewed 10 or 20 people. In terms of economy of scale, it gets less and less reasonable to expect anything but a positive response to the successful candidate. That said, it’s a common courtesy and we usually try to do at least a single follow up within a matter of weeks but sometimes it doesn’t get done. Apologies.

There’s more you can’t know. There are hiring budgets, unstable contracts, projects that go bad, employees who decide to stay rather than go, freezes on hiring and all manner of other potential reasons why there may not be an answer to give you yet. It’s been my experience that at least 50% of the time, when a person is asked to start the hiring process, they are well-meaning and sincere only to be suddenly told that for any number of reasons, they are to “hold on” indefinitely.

Usually, no response simply means there is no response. It’s not a “no” and it’s not a “yes”. It can best be interpreted as “not yet — nothing has changed”.

Please don’t assume it went badly or that the person who interviewed you is an asshole. It’s far more likely that there is simply nothing to report to the long list of people they spoke to.

Be Easy

“We’d like to interview you online, if that’s possible. How about some time late next week? Maybe Thursday or Friday?”

“Um, I don’t actually have a video camera on my computer or a smart phone or a tablet.”

“…”

Imagine being a carpenter and showing up for a job without a toolbox. When you get there, the client would be confounded. Don’t get me wrong — nobody expects you to bring your own equipment to a development studio. In fact in most cases that would be a breach of security but there is something to be said for being someone who practices their trade or at least participates in technology. If you’re making mobile games and you don’t have a smart phone — how do you play mobile games? You’d expect a game developer to be actively engaged in the craft regardless of whether or not they’re employed.

Obviously, there will be cases where it’s a student's first job and they may have previously lacked the ability to afford a smartphone and a data plan. Canada has insane data plan costs — some of the highest in the world, so nobody is going to fault you for not being able to afford a smartphone. That said, self-proclaimed techies who have no access to the tech they love is a rare and questionable thing. In most cases, anyone who is passionate about tech is going to prioritize it, sometimes to their own detriment. Lacking enough passion to drop some money on the tools to do what you allegedly love is certainly not a show-stopper but it looks unusual and far more importantly, it can make the interview process unnecessarily difficult and, well, odd.

There are internet cafes, libraries and public computers even in third world nations. The idea that a candidate would site lack of access to these tools to conduct the first interview is ludicrous. The point is, if this is your first test of resourcefulness, telling your interviewer you’re challenged by a lack of ability to digitally show up is already a huge fail. Game Development is problem-solving, and you might have 99 problems but internet access ain’t one.

Conclusion

The intention of this article is to encourage and help new grads or unemployed game developers understand what happens behind the scenes and help them make the most of their opportunities. There are aspects of hiring that are unique to every region, country, culture and company but I’ve found that the things I’ve mentioned above have remained fairly stable throughout the last couple of decades and across many of the studios I’ve worked for both large and small. I hope it’s been helpful.

Gogii Lighthouse Studios is always looking to have a roster of talent to consider when building out our team and we’d love to hear from you. Please feel free to take a look at our job board or reach out to me for details.