"What should I study to become a game designer?"

That's a question that popped up a lot recently, on various occasions. It comes in all forms and flavors, really. Every other week on LinkedIn someone asks how and where he/she should start to pursue their career in game development.  We've lately even been asked that on twitch while we were presenting our game. Here's what the answer was:

And frankly... These 5% I mentioned were a big exaggeration. The real answer is "You don't need a degree at all". Let's even put aside the fact that a degree is pretty useless in most of the fields nowadays and that the education systems all over the world are so outdated it hurts. Think for a moment: how many great writers needed a degree in literature? How many rock stars have a solid musical education? A designer is more or less the same type of job. You learn it mostly by doing, not by attending lectures. You have to solve problems specific to your project and there's no universal solutions that could be just taught to a hundred students so that they can just go out and design. If these universal solutions existed, all games would be the same and that's exactly what the good designer is there to avoid.

Game industry is still young. So young that the people who started making the first commercial games are sometimes still in the business. And with the education lag we are facing nowadays, it takes long years until schools even realize they should teach something. That means only one thing - most of the people in the industry don't have the degree in anything game-related. So whenever you're applying for a job, the person interviewing you most likely never had any formal game education and therefore will not care whether you do.

When I met James Portnow on PAX Prime, a guy ran up to us and after a quite embarrassing display of worship, he started a rant about how he wants to be a game designer and how he's always wanted it and how he has been now studying for 4 (!) years at some design school. I did my research on the schools with gaming programs and there is maybe one or two in the whole US that can actually teach something valuable. That leaves the guy from PAX with a very high chance of wasting these 4 years completely, along with the money burnt into getting this "education".

I don't know if you've noticed, but formal education in general is for people who are not sure what they want to do. I myself went to my schools purely because I had no idea what I want to do with my life. Even though they were all among best schools available, I can't help feeling I've wasted a lot of my time. Because if you really want to learn something, you always have to invest your time in learning it. Teachers can accelerate the process, but at least equally often they will slow you down. And nowadays, with all online tutorials, all tools freely available, there really is so many ways to learn whatever you want without leaving your bed... Including game design.

So instead of paying some shady school and wasting 4 years, what do you do? First, check what a game designer really does and decide, if it's really what you are after. If yes:

Option one, for lone wolves: you download any free basic game making tool and start designing. If you get stuck, you check out tutorials. If some mechanics don't work as you wish, seek references. Your games will be simple. Your games will be ugly. Your gained experience will be incredibly helpful. You will learn designing, scripting, balancing, maybe a bit of coding and graphics. If you really put some time and heart into it, within a year you will build a decent portfolio that will get you so much further than any game design degree.

Option two, for online socializers: you find a modding forums or community for your favourite game and start getting to know the people there. Get involved, show that you want to help. Really help by getting your hands dirty, not give ideas. Someone will definitely give you the tools. Someone might help tutor you. Someone might take you in for a tiny project, after which you might help tackle a bigger one. If you have talent and are really active, within a year you'll be helping other noobs and doing crazy stuff like Oblivion Zelda mods, or even remaking Vampire: Bloodlines, who knows. Still, you'll be way more valuable to any company than after 4 years of attending design lectures.

Option three, for explorers: Study something else! Seriously. As a designer, you can always benefit from vast knowledge. Take up various classes - art, history, anything you can get your hands on and that sounds even remotely interesting. It will pay off. And instead of partying every night, try to spend some afternoons every week on including some design learning mentioned in option one and two. Otherwise you are just learing without a goal, which can be fun, but certainly not the point here.

Option four, for those who want in: start in QA! It's really not that hard to get in. It is hard to stay sane there, true, but you will learn a lot, being close to development. And testers get accepted as juniors for all other dev jobs, designers included. And you don't need to show anyone any degree, because they already know what you can do!

Oh, and for option one and two - prepare to get a job while you're learning. I know your parents would rather pay for your college instead of supporting you when you're "wasting your time on games". It might feel like it is slowing you down, but at least gives you some backup option in case you don't succeed as a designer of any kind. Play it smart - that's what designers do.

Of course, the designer is always on top of the list when people think of dream jobs in games. Let's not forget there are other ways to make games than just being a designer. If you'd like to check out the requirements for some of these jobs, just explore the jobs in gamedev label.

Jobs in gamedev: writer / narrative designer

Having finished my first game and being heavily involved in the story production for it, I now have a general idea what the job of writing for games requires. What's more, I've been neglecting the "Jobs in gamedev" series, so all the more reasons to bring you guys this article.

So you write stories...

Good for you! Unfortunately, it doesn't necessarily mean you will be able to write for games. There are hundreds of professional screenplay or novel writers that have failed miserably while trying to deliver a narrative for a game. And many of them weren't mediocre either. I'm talking awarded writers recognized for their achievements in movies or books. If they were so great, why did they fail in games? To explain that, I have to give you a brief tour, how the writing process for a game can turn into a nightmare, but first let's talk a bit how the narrative designer differs from a game writer.

Not every writer is a designer... and that's fine.
There is a huge difference between a writer and a narrative designer. Basically, a writer is the guy who deals with words. There are lots of game elements that require only that and the writer doesn't have to get concerned about how these words affect the game mechanics. These elements are the static pages in the menu, like bestiaries or equipment descriptions, stuff like that. Sure, the writer has to be careful to make sure they fit the general theme of the game, but these flavor texts won't really break the game or heavily interact with the gameplay. Dialogues and quest descriptions are a bit more complicated, as you have to know what's going on at a certain point of the game. What dialogue options need to be included and what information the dialogue or description needs to give to the player. That's still quite easily manageable if you are a writer, not a designer. As a writer, you have to be great with words. Your sentences have to be brilliant and snappy, your dialogues need great pacing.

The narrative designer kind of needs a higher awareness level than the writer. He has to take into account all these elements the writer doesn't worry about. He needs to make sure all the tools are being used, especially the gameplay, to tell a compelling story. The narrative designer needs to help guard the concept of the game, make sure all quests are in line with the story, all dialogues serve their purpose, all characters have their place. Paradoxically, the narrative designer doesn't necessarily have to be a brilliant writer when it comes to the use of words, although it is very often expected of him/her. Especially in smaller studios, the role of narrative designer is either held by the writer or by creative director or lead game designer. Also in bigger studios, there are many cases where the writer never designs a story, he/she just puts it into words. Let's get back to our story of a potential story development nightmare.

Image stolen from theiddm.wordpress.com

Step 1: World creation and preproduction.

This is the step where the general idea shapes up. Art style is chosen. The development team decides or learns whether they will be doing a game about pirates or ponies. Based on this, further decisions are rapidly being made - all the guys on the team have to start with their work. Concept artists are drawing characters and enemies, 3D artists are starting on the blocking of the locations, game designers are inventing game mechanics. And very often, they are doing it completely independently, exploring on their own based on their individual understanding of the theme. They do coordinate, but mostly on the most "gamey" things. For example, game design coordinates with level design on the metrics used in the game, but they do not talk about how the game mechanics work with the mood of the locations to deliver a story to the player. Of course, the "right way" to do it would be to have a creative director who would make sure every person does his/her work according to the same core esthetic and sometimes this "right way" actually occurs. Still, majority of creative directors focus more on the gameplay than on the story and we see results of that even in big titles.

At this stage, there's usually some kind of problem with a writer. In some cases there's no writer at all and all these assets are just being produced because the team knows the theme and knows there's supposed to be some enemies and some NPCs. In other cases, there is a designated writer, but he/she doesn't really deliver or delivers a first draft of the story that the dev team just keeps filed "for later" while doing their thing. In yet other cases, there are some guys on the dev team that have some story ideas put together in a more or less chaotic document. You as a writer, more often than not, are not present at this stage. 

Step 2: "But our story sucks!" also known as production.
This is the moment when the prototype has been done and accepted. The gameplay is shaping up, the locations are being produced, there's a few characters implemented, maybe some dummy dialogues or even a prosthesis of a tutorial. It's the moment when the general player's path is being decided on and suddenly, the dev team wakes up. They either pull out the story document someone created and realize it has an army of holes and irrationalities in it, that the current gameplay ideas have evolved way beyond the script, that one of the locations has been cut. That a key NPC won't be produced. That there's been a side quest system implemented or that there will be no more side quests. If there was a writer that was hired from outside of the game industry, this is usually the moment he quits, because "the dev team is unable to execute his vision".

The prototype is approved, the deadline for alpha is not far away, and in most cases, the team has no writer and only some general premise of the story. This is the moment when the writer is hired. It might be a full-time position. It might be an oversea freelance. It might be some person within the team stepping up with hopes of doing a decent job.

Whatever your origins are, the writing task before you is not trivial. There's already a lot of things that have been decided without consulting them with you. If you got in early, it's just going to be about getting into the theme and getting around some things, like having a fixed moment when the peak happens or having to meet some character sooner or later. The longer the team waits with bringing you in however, the more things like that get included. Suddenly you have a character that's in a specified place, having to go the specified route and very soon, what could have been a straight walk in the park with going around some trees once in a while, becomes a crawl through a tropical jungle with a rusty machete. Instead of creating a story, you end up creating justifications for what's happening on the screen. And then, whenever you fix the problems of NPCs appearing out of nowhere and doing things that are completely out of of their character, the dev team just comes up with another idea for something that doesn't fit the story no matter how you slice it.

With a bit of persistence and luck, you end up with a satisfactory story that makes sense.

Step 3: Story implementation.
If you were hired as a freelance writer, this is very likely the step you won't be involved in. If you worked closer with the dev team, you are likely to stick around and be able to prevent a shitload of things that can go wrong at this point. Dialogues that you've written might not exhaust all the gameplay options and game designers will try to fill the holes with so-called "designer art". Some tired designers will implement the dialogue trees all wrong and suddenly they will make no sense at all. There will be another change in the game scope and a key character will be cut out, making the current story pointless. Casting for the VO (voice acting) will be done by a deaf person and every character in the game will sound the same or lines of an old man will be played by a young girl. The VO script will be poorly prepared and the actors will read their lines completely out of context. The cutscene that was supposed to deliver the backstory will never be produced. Someone will add equipment descriptions that do not match your story or your world. The letter that was supposed to give clarity after the story twist will be accessible way before it, spoiling everything. The character animations will break and in the middle of a serious, heartbreaking dialogue, one arm of an NPC will start a pop & lock dance. And these are just some of the possibilities.

If you are still with the project at this point, this is the moment where the real video game writing skills get tested. This is where you see how your story holds up its limbs get cut off. How well the rest of the team understands it and how much they feel and agree with your vision of the story. This is where you find out whether you are able to solve the problems that pop out on the fly without generating too much additional cost and workload. This is where you really see the difference between writing for games and for any other medium.

"But I will do it right"
Of course you will. What I described was an extreme case where everything gets out of control, but don't fool yourself - it's not a domain of small and inexperienced studios. If you take a closer look at the stories of big titles with 80+ metascore you will easily find story holes, ridiculous moments, terrible execution and many, many more. It ranges from high-level absurds like going hunting to enlarge your wallet instead of rushing to free your friends in Far Cry 3 to choices between "No", "Not now" and "Not really" in Mass Effect. Most of the games have their narrative sins and most of them aren't necessarily the writer's fault. No matter how good or bad the writer is, it's not the writer that makes all the decisions. A game can be still pretty decent with a crappy writer and it can be a disaster with even the greatest writer in the world.

"So what do I do?"
First of all, the poetic lone wolf writer approach will get you nowhere. You have to be a team player and accept the fact that the dev team is not there to execute your vision. You are to support the vision of the team with your excellent storytelling skills. You have to get invested in the project. You have to be as close to the development team as possible and support them as much as you can. There's no other way to see your script really come to life than to help implement it. Your job will never really be done until the game ships. You can't just assume what you have written is enough and leave it in the hands of others. You have to remember, that the game narrative is way more than words. Gameplay tells a lot of the story too. You can't just write the words completely independently from the rest of the team and then just hope the game mechanics will tell the same story as your words.

Be prepared for changes. Lots of them. Game production is iterative. That means your script will have iterations as well. It will have to be adjusted many, many times. Sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, but you will have to accept it. In the end, the gap between the early draft of the script and what gets shown in the game will be extreme. Way, way bigger than in any other medium. You have to know that from the very beginning.

Oh, and one more fun bonus: you will never be the author of the game, like you would be an author of the book. Your name won't be on the cover. It won't even be the first name in the long list of credits. You won't be able to say "this is my game". Or "this is a game I've written". Or even "I wrote the story for this game". A lot of people will chip in to the extent of making your story not yours. All you will be able to say is "I have worked on the story of this game". If that is not enough for you as a writer, I can't blame you. This is one of the reasons so many traditional writers don't write for games. This is also the reason why good game writers are so rare and so highly valued. If you are able to harness all the chaos that comes with making games to tell your story, the impact your game will have will leave millions of people on their knees. Even, if they don't even realize it was thanks to the writer.

Image stolen from writerscabal.wordpress.com

"So how do I get the job?"
This is actually a very hard question, because writing for games is one of the most blurry areas of the industry. A lot of teams still live by the outdated story = words definition. In other teams, having someone hired as a writer seems like a waste of office space. Games that require vast amounts of words are actually in a minority and the narrative designers often derive from the team of game designers. So here's the first problem. Writer or narrative designer is not a position like a coder or a concept artist: not every studio needs one.

Another thing I have mentioned before is that just being a good writer doesn't necessarily mean you will be a good games writer. There are some personal traits that might help you in succeeding. Like being a team player, being open to feedback and being able to scratch or tweak your ideas according to the requirements of the project. All the time you have to remember you are the writer or designer for the game, not its author.

As for how to break into the industry as a writer, keep a portfolio of your writings. Preferably short, brilliant stories that show off a lot of your skill in a short period of time. Get published in some literature magazines, win a contest or five. If you have already published a novel, that's all the better. In general - have some relatively objective proof that you're far from illiterate. When you have all that, start spamming the companies with your portfolio, but do it wisely. Studios like Telltale or Bethesda are way more likely to need writers than Riot Games.

There's of course a lot of different ways to get your hands dirty with game writing. I'm working as a producer, but still had my chance to work on the story a lot more than the producer's job description requires. Game or quest designers with a knack for storytelling can move to the narrative section of their team quite easily too. And as always, there's QA, from where you can jump to anywhere in the game industry, if you are good and persistent enough.

PAX Prime 2014 - personal highlights

Hello guys and gals! With jetlag out of my way I can now focus enough to bring you some info on this year's PAX Prime. Being freshly after the GamesCom 2014, I can tell you - it is really different!

I guess a lot of these differences are because of the venue. Washington State Convention Center is both confusing and cosy. Confusing, as everything is happening on various floors and even hotels across the street. Still, getting from one place to another was way faster than drowning in the crowds that visit Cologne's Messe. Cosy, because there were no giant halls that overwhelm you. Companies didn't buy out spaces that could fit a football stadium. The floors of the corridors next to the escalators were littered with giant pillows for people to hang out on. The parties in the evenings take place in clubs and hotels around the place. Whichever hotel in the vincinity you entered, people were sitting around on the floors, playing their handhelds or board games and everything was just way more relaxed. If anyone tried to play a board game on the floor on GamesCom, he would catch a cold from the freezing surface at best, but most probably just get trampled by thousands of people trying to get from one hall to the other.

Just as on GamesCom, I didn't get to see much - I spent most of the time in our media suite in the hotel, showing off our game. We also had a booth in the public area, where we let people try their best against a boss, gave away t-shirts and showcased the incredibly cool hammer that was a prize in a facebook contest.

Highlights of Friday would involve the ScrewAttack live stream and Angry Joe so overwhelmed with our game that he forgot his wallet. On Saturday I had bit more time, so I went gift hunting. The selection was much smaller than on GamesCom, but it was somehow more attractive. Instead of studio-branded toys and tons of anime merchandise, there's way more custom t-shirts, jewelry and plushies. Also, lots of board games, retro video games like N64, NES and PS1 titles and tabletop game figures. I managed to find super cool earrings for my girl:

Right after that we headed for the Twitch booth, where we hosted a spontaneous first ever streamed hands-on of our game, Lords of the Fallen. You can check it out here. Overall, the reception of the game was really good and we were very happy with how things went. My job on PAX was done.

It was time for the party with the Extra Credits crew. It was way off-site, but it finally let us meet in person. We have exchanged so many e-mails that we found out gmail has a limited number of messages in a single conversation. Here is me and the boss of them all, the sweet Soraya.

If anyone thinks James Portnow is the boss in Extra Credits, think again. It's thiss blue-haired girl! :P

The party was quite intimate with maybe around 30-40 people. People played Portal 2 co-op and Divekick on the beamer while the rest scattered around the tables to have some board game fun or to just socialize. I had a lovely time chatting with Carrie, the clips editor, and then, if we're to believe the Cards Against Humanity game we played, me and Dan Floyd were the least funny guys at the table, scoring last with 0 points. Of course we don't believe the game. We're both hillarious.

Around midnight James and a bunch of other guys started a design analysis of the new Deus Ex. Since I personally find the Human Revolution incredibly boring, I didn't want to be the asshole that just sits there, trolling, A bunch of us have left to get some sleep. A final photo got taken somewhere in the tunnel of the Washington State Convention Center:

From the left: Daniel Floyd (narrator), Carrie Floyd (editor), Games Making Noob (translator), Scott DeWitt (artist)

The next day I took off before noon to get to the airport. Spent another 15 hours to get to my own bed, exhausted. It was all great fun. Many thanks to all Bandai Namco folks, to the Extra Credits crew, Twitch guys, everyone who visited the media room and the public booth to see Lords of the Fallen. Thanks for making it not just work, but a great experience!

GamesCom in the eyes of a GameDev

Hey everyone! Last year I described my first GamesCom experience. It was a... simpler time. Last year I've only been there over the weekend and my job was to do a stage show two times a day and look after the cosplayers my company hired. It has still left me plenty of time to look around and soak in all the stuff, even though getting from one hall to another took ages. 

This year was different. Extremely different. I arrived in Cologne on Monday evening to help set everything up on Tuesday. We had 20 PC's in the public area and another 6 in the business area to show off our game, Lords of the Fallen. All of them were provided by our partner, so we had to check if our game works stable enough on those. Luckily there was no major issues and we were able to wrap it up within maybe four hours. Tuesday has passed relatively smoothly.

Media room ready for the visitors

Wednesday. Media and development day, GamesCom is still closed to general public. Everything starts at 9:00 a.m., but we arrive at the venue around 7:30 a.m. to double-check everything and get ready. Even though general public theoretically can't enter the fair yet, the public area is already pretty lively. Some clearly underaged peeps are running around, amateur cosplayers have also most probably confused the dates, but oh well, who really cares, as long as they don't get their hands on the 18+ stuff, right?

The business area is getting crowded. Our BizDevs are having one meeting after another while my job is to help out the press representatives with the controls of our game. Repeating the same controls over and over every ten minutes I fail to notice that the last time I ate something was around 6:30 a.m. and it's almost noon. Luckily, our booth in the business area comes with catering, so I am able to grab a cheese and ham toast, wash it down with a glass of coke and get back to my controls mantra. Every other visitor needs some help with the game or asks some questions, so I end up going back and forth between them.

When they finish playing, they usually have questions and those questions take anywhere from three minutes to half an hour. Most of them walk out happy, complimenting our game - makes a gamedev happy. In the early afternoon someone wants to shoot a video interview - usually with our Executive Producer (EP). "Sorry, busy, you do it" I hear. Allright, let's pop a cherry, shall we? The first interview starts awful, but gets better with each question. It's time for another toast when it's over. They're out of toasts, so I grab some fruit snacks that I swallow together with another glass of coke and that's what keeps me going till 7 p.m. Our community manager comes back from the public area to share what was happening there and I realize I didn't even have time to check out the showfloor.

20 stations occupied for 10 hour straight in the public area

The next day, Thursday, turns out to be almost the exact copy of Wednesday for me. Luckily, this time we can arrive just before 9:00 a.m. Explaining controls, answering questions, guiding the guys who are playing, showing the advanced stuff in the game, answering more questions, giving interviews, grabbing two toasts before they disappear, sitting down to close my eyes in tiny breaks before someone new comes in. This time video interviews get a lot easier - there's no question that you haven't already answered a dozen times already. Thurday is the first day with general public on the showfloor. The line to play our game is between one and two hours long. We're closing the booth at 7 p.m. again. There's supposed to be a party tonight. None of us wants to go, everyone just wants some peace and quiet.

Friday, the same drill. At 9 a.m. we get first visitors, more controls explanation, more interviews of all kinds. There's a twist though - at 4 PM we're going on Twitch, yay. Somehow I managed not to die and the video is already roaming the web. People seem to like it, challenge Near the end of the day we gather the stuff we don't want thrown out, erase the game from the PC's and head to the hotel - the business area is going to be no more within hours.

We have our flight back on Saturday evening, so we have a whole day to finally attend GamesCom public area, check out what's going on, soak in all the gaming coolness. We arrive early again to take advantage of our exhibitor's passes. We get in 15 minutes before the general public is even let in to stand in line to check out Bloodborne. We're first in line. We get in exactly at 9:00 a.m. and after more or less 10 minutes it's over. We head towards our public booth, where we spend less than an hour checking out if everything is okay. After spending 10 hours a day for three days straight watching people play our game we don't really feel like doing the same on day four. We split to take a look around.

Thanks to a VIP pass I got to see Alien: Isolation. First five minutes left me unimpressed. Then I got a basic hang of the alien management mechanic and I have to say that even though the game is definitely not my cup of tea, I enjoyed it quite a lot and will gladly check it out once it releases. Then I took a walk around the shopping area, taking photos of merchandise and looking for a gift for the girl I left at home for almost a week. With the shopping done I looked at my watch... 11:00 a.m. I take a brief look at the Nintendo zone, get a glimpse of Final Fantasy IV, check out what Sony offers and get amazed how much free space EA has paid for and... And I didn't even feel like visiting all the halls. I just met up with our EP and around noon we both decided to just head for the airport.

Imagine how exhausted an avid gamer has to be to prefer sitting at the airport for a few hours instead of spending them on the biggest consumer gaming convention of the year. A week of rest and... already preparing to leave for PAX.

How to search for a job in gamedev

One could think writing an article telling people how to search for stuff in the age of Google is ridiculous. Sure, if you are an advanced researcher, you probably will be able to search for gamedev vacancies using the most popular search engines, but I would argue it still won't be the most effective way to do it. 

First, a bit of a disclaimer. In this article I won't be covering skills required for any position in gamedev. Also, the article will only be informative for people who haven't worked in gamedev yet. Once you get your foot in the door, what follows is either obvious or intuitive, but most importantly - not necessary, because once you are in, you gain way more powerful tools than the "outsiders" have.

Well then... How do people search for jobs? They visit the most popular sites, like Monster or Careerbuilder. Yes, click on those links. Spend some time there, search for game designer or a producer or a concept artist or whoever you wanna be and get these few results actually matching your query. You have just looked for a job in gamedev in the worst possible way.

When looking for a job in gamedev, you have to understand something. People are still a rare resource in this industry. When a bank or a consulting agency posts a job offer for pretty much any position, they get hundreds of resumes within first 24 hours. They probably throw half of them away randomly before actually looking at them, because they can. These industries have been here for decades. They have an opinion of respectable and stable working environments and every year, universities spit out thousands of wannabe bankers and consultants. Society has managed to produce thousands of HR directors, brand managers, community managers and chief financial officers. At the same time, it failed to produce enough ZBrush artists. Therefore, unlike in any standard industry, an opening in gamedev is not so easily filled. This means a few things.

One: the vacancies in gamedev stay open way longer than in other industries. If you apply for a marketing manager anywhere, you pretty much have to do it within 24 hours from the moment the opening is posted or you don't stand a chance. In gamedev, you might apply a month after the job offer saw the cyberlight and still get invited to an interview. Obviously, it has disadvantages too. Offers that are over a week old get buried under hundreds of other offers. This is one of the reasons why gamedev companies often don't bother with searching for employees through most popular channels.

Two: some of the vacancies are not getting filled for so long that companies might be willing to shift responsibilities between existing members of the team and create a new job with a different profile. Therefore, if you meet most of the key requirements but lack in a field or two, for which you can make up in other useful areas, you still might have a shot. In traditional industries, not meeting one minor requirement almost certainly means a failure. There's just too many people out there that have all the skills (at least in their resume).

Three: almost every company in the world has an e-mail address where you can send your resume "in case they need someone with your skills". These resumes often don't get a second of HR's attention and the whole "we might want you even if there's no opening" is more a part of employer branding, not an actual recruitment effort. In gamedev it's quite different. Most companies are in need of specialists. Ubisoft alone now has over 400 openings across the globe. Don't get me wrong. These companies won't take just anyone to fill these spots, but reading randomly sent resumes is one of the ways they try to actually recruit. In many cases, gamedev companies are really getting these out-of-the-blue CV's and might actually call such applicants.

Having all this information in mind, how do you actually search for a job in gamedev?

First, find a good source of gamedev job offers. We have established, that the biggest jobsearch engines are rarely the way to go. Many gamedev companies advertise on smaller, but more targetted sites. Many bigger game-related sites have a "jobs" section. You can try gamedev.net or gamasutra, there might not be many offers there, but if you add sites like that up, you might get some results in staying up to date with job offers. There also exist small local sites, like polish skillshot, their only purpose being listing the gamedev job openings.

A much more powerful searching tool would be LinkedIN. This is where most of gamedev people are and where you should be too. You will also find, that "game developer" or "game designer" query spits out hundreds of results, as opposed to Monster's 0 to 10. I would still advise checking out the smaller sites too. LinkedIN may list the most job openings, but also most of them are in bigger gamedev companies, where you often need quite a lot of experience. Smaller companies tend to be easier to get to for beginners and these smaller companies rarely spend money on LinkedIN job ads. Also, these smaller job sites are visited by less people. Less people = less competition for the job = higher chance you can get it.

Second, reach out. Companies don't always advertise their vacancies on external sites. They only post them on their own website. Search for companies in your area. You will be surprised, how many there are. You don't have to start in AAA industry right away. Mobile teams are also lots of fun. Gamedev map is a really nice tool to start with. It might not be most up to date in all areas and it definitely doesn't list all the smaller studios, but it can still provide a nice database of your friendly neighborhood studios. If you don't fit the profile of any job offer they list on their website, still send your resume. You never know...

Third, network. If there is a company you would like to work for, get in touch with them. This will sound like I am advising you to stalk people, but really try to get in touch with employees of that company. Find someone active in the community and writes a blog (lol), comments on LinkedIN, tweets or whatever and follow him/her. Start being active in similar groups, show your knowledge / skill / friendliness / enthusiasm through your posts on forums and other means of indirect communication. Sooner or later you might get into some more direct contact. Also, check if someone you already know can't get you in touch with someone in the company you wish to work for. Ask them if they could forward your resume. There's a huge difference between "Hello, my name is Brian, I would like to work for you guys, here's my CV" and "Hey bro, my good friend Brian is very enthusiastic about working in gamedev and he really seems like he'd be fit for it. Here's his CV - please pass it on if you have a second."

When I was looking for a job in gamedev, I have successfully managed to get in touch with a man in one of the companies I applied for. We have exchanged dozens of e-mails and during this electronic conversation he hinted two jobs in his company that weren't even advertised and I got an interview this way. Ultimately, I didn't end up in that company, but the interview alone kept my enthusiasm up and taught me a lot.

Lastly, be up to date with the industry. It will give you hints, which studios might be more eager to hire. A company is opening a new studio? They will likely be prepared to include some juniors in their structure there. Capcom boasts about hiring 500 people in the next 5 years? You know where to send your resume first. I highly recommend Develop Online for getting info like this and also, a lot of general, but useful tips on getting a job in the industry.

I promise to cover some more "getting a job in gamedev" topics in the future too, so stay tuned.

Jobs in gamedev: Game Designer

The problem with not writing for so long is that when you return, you should get back with something that will justify the long lag between posts. This way you can say "hey, I know I was away for a while, but here, I've been doing research for this baby!". Sad truth is I've been so occupied with work lately that I barely managed to finish one game in the last month. Still, I wanna deliver something nice to all the people that waited. Here goes another one of the "Jobs in gamedev" series and definitely the sexiest one - Game Designer. And speaking of sex...

What does Game Design have in common with prostitution?

There's at least two things that these two jobs have in common: they are the oldest jobs in the world and they both can start at surprisingly young age. Remember when you played hide and seek when you were kids and then, when everyone started to run too far, someone came up with a rule limiting the hiding area? Remember when there were only two of you to play soccer so each of you stood at the different side of the field as a goalkeeper, kicking the ball from one side to another? And then, when it was too hard to score, one of you said "ok, but we can't use our hands from now on". That was applying new rules to the game. That was, in a way, designing a new game.

People always needed some kind of games. Something fun to do. Ancient Greeks had their olympics - someone had to come up with the rules. When our apelike ancestors were hunting and the prey was too easy to catch, I am pretty sure they were coming up with ways to make the hunt more entertaining for them. Like competing which hunter will catch most of umm... I dunno, mammoth snails or something. 

Yup, a little mindfuck for people who only read the bold text and stare at pictures :D

Game design is everywhere nowadays. Teachers design new ways to teach their students. Sure the game isn't too engaging to any of the participants, but there are clear rules, goals and quite a lot of competition. Politicians are designing our surroundings, applying new rules, shaping the reality around us. Too bad they are rarely similarly skilled or logical as game designers and, unlike the latter, they get paid in spite of the outcome. 

I think you get the idea. Game design was present in our world millenias before Super Mario Bros and will continue to be a discipline that will never limit itself to electronic entertainment. And that's what I find extremely cool.

Everybody wants to be a game designer

As soon as I thought of getting into gamedev, I decided that being a designer is the ideal job for me. You can utilize your creativity, make up your own games and man - I had so many cool ideas for games! A vast majority of people who want to get into game development has this one job in mind. Programming sounds boring, to create assets you need some artistic skill, but here you just need a head full of ideas! Of course, this perception of the role of a game designer is distorted by a terrifying lack of knowledge, which is quite common among the wannabe designers. It still doesn't mean the job itself isn't cool. Scott Rogers in his book Level Up!: The Guide to Great Video Game Design says that "designers have more fun [than people doing any other job in gamedev]" and he has some pretty damn good arguments for that, but I won't quote them here. If you wanna know - buy his book. It's a really good read and will let you get some nice knowledge on the game design topic.

If you can figure out what this picture is doing here, well... congrats.

The common desire to be the designer comes from the basic oversimplification that a game designer designs games. Sounds logical, doesn't it? A car salesman sells cars. A portrait painter paints portraits. It is only fair that the game designer designs games! Well, in AAA industry, that logic leads to a bitter disappointment.

What is it that the game designer actually does in gamedev?
A game designer creates a set of rules for a game. In the "good old days" it pretty much meant that he's creating a game. Games didn't have much story, they were made by small teams... Setting the rules of Tetris equals creating Tetris. Nowadays however, in biggest productions, roles are extremely divided and designers get their own pieces of the pie. Take a look at the credits of a few big games and you might find out that apart from the "game design" section there can be things like "combat system design", "quest design" and many others. Sometimes, the "game design" section can even be completely gone, replaced by all the smaller design teams. That's because making and designing a game is a team effort and - in the AAA industry - hardly anyone can say "I've designed this game" without either oversimplifying or being a swaggerer.

There's a common misconception that a game designer more than anything needs to be an extremely creative and innovative person. These elements are of course very important, but from what I have seen so far, the best designers didn't really come up with many ideas. They group the ideas, they review them, they design systems based on them. And if you think about it - it is getting harder and harder to come up with an original idea that will work. There's millions of ready ideas out there to mix and match. At the end of the day, a designer that can cleverly combine the existing ideas is way more valuable than a guy who just comes up with ideas, reinventing the wheel for the nineteenth time.

Systems over ideas
What are these systems I am babbling about? They are the very core of game designer's work. The ideas alone are neat, but they can't work without a proper system built around them. Let me explain on a simple example - jump.

Let's say we are designing an action game where a big pile of goo fights with oversized fruits. At some point (probably very early on) there comes an idea: "it would be cool if the goo could jump!". That was an idea. An idea that could have come from anywhere, not necessarily from the game design. To implement this idea, we need a jumping system that will have an answer to every question we can come up with:
- how high will the goo jump?
- will it bounce off a ceiling if it touches it or will it stick to it? Is the type of ceiling a factor?
- what will happen to the goo when it lands?
- how far will the goo jump?
- if the goo doesn't make it to the other side of a cliff, will it bounce off the wall it or stick to it? Is the type of the wall a factor?
- will the goo be able to crawl up the cliff if it sticks to it after jumping?
- what will happen if the goo jumps onto an enemy fruit? Is the size of the fruit a factor?

Suddenly, you start coming up with a system that derived from a simple "let's jump" and has all these cool possibilities and all these problems that you have to solve. Thanks to this jumping ability, you are building ceilings with spikes, hard floors to splash your goo on and creating mechanics of swallowing strawberries with the goo, but bouncing off the watermelons. Then you realize that this jumping system closely connects to the battle system, movement system, special skills system, scoring system - most probably every system that makes it into the game.

Yes, it all starts with an idea, but the idea itself is worthless without a careful analysis, problem solving and lots of crash testing. If you are a game designer, the coming up with the idea part might happen without you. What won't happen without you is turning this idea into a logical and complete system that the player will have a very hard time breaking and that will work well with all other systems in the game.

One more idea-related myth to bust while we're at it: A game designer rarely comes up with the game idea. In many cases the game idea is thrown at the design team from above. Be it from the company's CEO, the publisher who simply ordered the game at your company, the marketing team that decided that the next title should be a platform shooter with experience system "just like Skyrim" or a movie company that wants a game based on the movie they are releasing next year. In lion's share of cases, none of the designers that work on a game has actually come up with an idea for it. If you have a game idea and think that by becoming a game designer in a big company will let you bring it to life, stop thinking that.

A game designer does not need to code
I am giving this one a separate section as it is a very, very common question. The idea that a designer = coder comes from the times when small teams of people were producing games. The coder had to be a designer, a producer and ideally, a marketing genius. Nowadays it is quite unique for a designer to actually code. They do need to think logically. They do need to know what an algorithm is and even be able to think in algorithms, but they don't really need to get their hands dirty in low level programming. Sooner or later, a designer will have to learn how to script the things in the engine, but scripting is about as complicated as using MS DOS, so no real coder would call scripting programming. Therefore, programming experience is never a requirement for a game design position. If it is, you are looking at a job offer for a designer/programmer in a relatively small gamedev company.

If the designer had to code, there would have been only Two Amigos on this picture :)
Awesome image stolen from http://blog.teamtreehouse.com

What is it that you need to get a job as a Game Designer?
There are generally two ways that lead to becoming a game designer in an AAA industry. First would be to start at a different position like QA or a producer and then join the design team as soon as you prove yourself worthy and there's an opening. Second would be to get the internship or an entry-level job straight away. In both cases there's a number of things you will need to prove.

Simply having ideas is not good enough, as I think I have emphasised a few paragraphs back. You need to show that you can make your ideas work. This is what a portfolio is for. There's a lot of software nowadays that lets you easily create your own games. They come with some generic assets that you can use. There's really a lot of them:
- UDK (Unreal Development Kit)
- Unity 3D
- Construct 2
- RPG Maker
- Engine 001
You can easily google for many, many more. Both free and paid. Both basic and user-friendly and very advanced. Countless small game studios use these kits to create their games. Just choose one that looks best and create! Start with something simple and see how far you can get on your own. The further you will get, the better it will show off what you could accomplish if there was some actual game designer that could guide you. Don't worry that you're using generic assets. What counts is how you connect them. If using all this software baffles or limits you, try the good old pen and paper. Design your own universe, rpg system, board or card game! Anything that will scream out "this guy knows what it is to design a system around his ideas!". So yeah - portfolio. Get it.

If I had to choose a second most important advice it would be "experience as much of various media as you can". Swallow everything - books, movies, TV shows, music, blogs, games. Whatever the modern pop culture spits out, you lick it off the ground happily. Good or bad. I don't mean you shouldn't be critical - be as critical as you wish. The more the better actually. If you know what the second image of this article is doing in it, you are probably on a good track. As a designer, you need thousands of examples of how certain things worked in different media, how they appealed to the audience and how much fun they delivered. This will help you decide things like what topics are worthy of touching and whether it's better to go with an 8-player hot-seat or an online multiplayer. When you are interviewed for the position and a book, movie or game comes up you will get silver points for knowing it, golden points for having something interesting to say about it. And believe me - there will be titles coming up.

Read at least a few books about game design. I cannot stress the importance of this point enough. If I followed this advice two years ago, my early interviews would have gone much, much better. Following this point will let you set your head straight and actually more or less know what the game design is instead of imagining what it is. Some books worth checking out:
- Jesse Schell: The Art of Game Design: A book of lenses
- Scott Rogers: Level Up!: The Guide to Great Video Game Design
- Ernest Adams: Fundamentals of Game Design
It also won't hurt to watch the popular Extra Credits series. Their episodes are short, fun, insightful and informative.

Know what's going on in technology. Gamedev is an incredibly dynamic industry. New inventions revolutionise the whole business within few short years. When things like 3D technology, motion control, touch screens or Oculus Rift happen, game designers need to already be able to use these to their advantage instead of hoping people will keep playing their games in the old way, without new possibilities.

These would be the most important things you need in order to get a job in game design. Whether you are "just" migrating from a different role within the same company or you are coming from the outside. Already being in the company obviously lets you show off your talents much more easily. And don't get concerned when all these websites that tell you that a game designer needs drawing, 3D, programming, software, storytelling, communication, presentation, marketing and whatever other skills and knowledge you can come up with. Yes, those can be very helpful, but are not always crucial and since it's an entry position job you are most probably after, they can always be learnt along the way. You have all the time in the world to try to learn everything.

GMN at GamesCom

I started writing this article on the plane back from Cologne and with head full of stuff I have seen and thought during GamesCom. Yes, I am writing this to justify the possibly chaotic nature of what you're about to read. Oh, and if you want some GC 2013 summary or photo gallery, you'll probably have to look somewhere else. Here's GamesCom in the eyes of a noob developer. 

Before GamesCom

If you are going to a fair with your product, you need to have something to present. A trailer, beta gameplay or at least some artwork. All this needs to be prepared. That means that a big chunk of the studio's work will not be going into developing the game further, but into preparing the trailer or gameplay demo or both. The bigger the fair, the sooner the studio starts preparing for it. In case of the biggest events, the preparations start months before. Close to deadline the team is very likely to go into crunch mode. The producer goes to a convention like GamesCom tired after the last minute preparations and full of guilt. Guilt, that he spent way too much time on promotional tasks and that he has so much to catch on with productionwise.

Business area

There are two types of a place a company can have in the business area. Some decide to have a stand-alone booth that - as a rule of thumb - gives better visibility. Others might get a booth in larger areas prepared by third parties. Such areas have the convenience of external maintenance, a dedicated bar and lots of tables for networking. To be honest, the business area of GamesCom looked pretty boring. Sure, the walls have nice logos and arts on the walls, but if you don't know where the cool stuff happens, it looks pretty close to any job or trade fair. It's what happens behind closed doors matters in the business area. Since only press and people from the industry can enter, studios tend to show much more of their currently developed games than they would show in public. My studio, for example, was showing only a CGI trailer in the entertainment area, while people in the business area had a chance to see the gameplay. Another perk is shorter lines or no lines at all if some exhibitors decide to show off their products in both areas. People in the entertainment area waited in a line for hours to check out the Oculus Rift. I waited five minutes. People in the entertainment area could crowd around a booth with the racing seats while people in the business area could casually try the seats out without any crowd and enjoy a race.

Sounds like a dream comming true? Not really. If you are there as a developer, you are most likely booked from early morning till late evening to deliver the same presentation over and over with just small breaks to pee. The shorter the presentation, the worse. A guy from CCP Games briefing people for EVE Valkyrie was explaining the same controls over and over every five minutes for three days. After that, he'll probably be repeating these controls briefing in his sleep for a week. The only people who can actually fully enjoy all the perks of the business area are high level executives and press.

Entertainment Area

This is where I spent most of my time on GamesCom as I was responsible for showing off the trailer of our game. It is also what most of the folks came to see. The amount of people in there is truly ridiculous. To play some of the more popular games for a few minutes you need to spend at least an hour in a line. To get from one hall to another you need to slowly move with the crowd - getting from the closest hall to the one most far away can easily take 20 minutes of travel. In the halls themselves, if there are two big studios having an exposition next to each other, the space between them will probably be so crowded that it'll be impossible to go through.

What you see here is maybe a 1/3 of a corridor between halls.
This year, GamesCom was invaded by over 340 000 people.

If you want to visit a big games convention (which I highly encourage you to do if you have the means to do so - it's an amazing experience!) then I would advise you not to assume that you will get to play a lot of games that are still in development. Still, you will get to see lots of cool presentations, professional battles in the most popular online games, like LoL or SC2. You will have a lot of chances to win some nice gadgets - be it t-shirts, baseball caps, sometimes gaming hardware or peripherals. Also, don't worry if you don't get to play a game - it is almost as fun to see others play it. You will at least learn what the game is about this way.

By the way, it is completely amazing, what people are willing to do for a freebie. Guys from Roccat have told me about a show they did where in the end they only had one mouse left. Two guys - strangers to each other - went on the stage to battle for it. To win the mouse they had to... kiss. And they did. As a reward, they got this last mouse. One. How they shared it remains a mystery. And I've seen with my own eyes people having dance-offs for keyboards and bare-chested air guitar battles for headphones... It was incredible to watch how people don't want to take fliers from hostesses, but would kill each other for them if you throw the same fliers off a stage.

Just look at the cute chibi chocobo!

A common misconception about the entertainment area is that you can meet developers there. People in Blizzard, Nintendo or Square-Enix T-shirts are mostly hired hosts and hostesses that know extremely little about the game they are letting you play. They are mostly there to check ID's for mature games, direct the line of people waiting to play and to hint the controls to the currently playing if needed. If you want information, you will sooner find them on fliers, posters or screens than by asking the hosts. Even if the guy at the stand is actually an employee of the studio, he's most probably from marketing or PR. Let me just put it this way - lots of people asked me what my role in the studio is - sales, PR or marketing. When they heard that I'm a producer that's actually working on the game, they were very surprised.

Merchandise

In the back of Hall 9 of Kölnmesse was where you could actually buy some goodies. Surprise number one - I haven't seen a single game being sold. T-shirts, posters, action figures, plush toys, trading cards, wallets, keychains, soundtracks, mousepads, more T-shirts... but not games. A lot of the stuff was obviously low quality and overpriced. Others were incredible quality and even more overpriced. Some were just a plain robbery, like selling a hoodie heat-prints for 25€ (you of course have to provide the hoodie). Browsing through all this stuff makes you regret you are not a millionaire who doesn't care that small silver replicas of pendants from Final Fantasy series aren't worth 230€ no matter how you slice it. Still, it is nice to at least look at some extremely nice stuff like Portal's companion cube pillow, vinyl Final Fantasy album or massively detailed, hand-painted figures from Starcraft 2.

Yup, look at the prices.

Boobs. I mean... girls, ah, who am I kidding :)

By now, hostesses are an integral part of every convention. How to better reach a bunch of nerds like us than with a pair of D-cups? The funny part is, one of my responsibilities on this GamesCom was to take care of two cosplayers for promotion of our game: Ari Campari and cosplaying celebrity, Ophelia Overdose. Since I now have a full two days experience on the matter (+ some previous experience from RPC), I can now tell you - don't go cheap on the girls. It might not sound like a hard work, but apparently not every pretty chick is cut for the job. I had the pleasure of observing a wide moat between zombie-hostesses creeping around, handing out fliers and my girls who were actively comming up with new ideas, attracting attention. There was a very visible difference in general attitude, body language and awareness of the role between Miss Overdose and other girls. I never expected I would be able to learn professionalism from a cosplayer.

The awesome team promoting Lords of the Fallen over the weekend.

So once again - don't just get any pair of boobs for promotion. There's more to a hostess or cosplayer than a cup size. And even though - to quote Ophelia - "they're not there to be intelligent", I can assure you that you won't regret having girls that can actually say a few things about your game or hardware, not just giggle. 

Saturday Parties

This was something I didn't expect. At 8 PM Kölnmesse closed for visitors that left literally tons of trash on the floors behind them. After that, parties of exhibitors began. The biggest one, hosted by Sony, started at 10 PM. At that time, the venue turned into one of the most incredible clubs I have ever seen. Free beer, gaming-related environment and on top of that... hundreds of hostesses who somehow managed to look even sexier during the night than during the day (no, it wasn't only the lack of light and amount of beer). Which got me to conclusion: in your faces, jocks - guess who are your cheerleaders partying with now!

Sorry pervs ;) no photo of the party and sexy girls. 

Being not exactly a dancing type, I left the party really early to check out the geekiest party in the Messe - a party of casemodders. Modified PC-cases stood among full beer-cases. Groups of four were playing a custom-made automated drinking game machine that automatically filled the glass of the looser with a scarily glowing alcoholic liquid. Some guy from Netherlands was showing me the case they prepared for the contest in 24 hours that was made out of trash, was both spinning around and lighting up. I saw a laptop with water cooling, PC's shaped as Terran miniguns, Ferrari engines, boxes with bloodbags... almost as crazy as a club full of nerds and hot chicks.

Games that noob is waiting for

I decided not to stand in line to the biggest titles - I didn't have the patience for it, and besides, everyone knows everything about these already. So, apart from Lords of the Fallen (impudent self-advertising), I am now really looking forward to two games:

- Rain by SCE Japan Studio: a nice example where a simple idea makes a game. From gameplay mechanics to art direction, everything comes together.

- Contrast by Compulsion Games: a mix of 2D and 3D platformer with an excellent idea of shadow mechanics.

After GamesCom

Getting back from GamesCom feels like getting back from a summer camp. You head home with your bag full of dirty clothes, wanting to finally sleep in your own bed. You ponder on new sexual experiences (I still don't know how I feel about female Link cosplayers). You say "see you" to the people you have met there even though the chance of seeing them again in the next few years is extremely low. You carry dozens of new phone numbers with you knowing that it's unlikely you will call even 10% of them. On the train/bus/plane home you are completely exhausted, but full of positive feelings and memories that probably won't last longer than a day when you get back to your everyday reality.

Jobs in gamedev: Tester / QA

When I told my boss I wanted to write about testers, he just said "oh, boy...". When Extra Credits did an episode on game schools, James Portnow wrote "Ask the school what their hire ratio is in the industry (not including jobs in QA)". When an executive of our befriended studio visited our new office, he asked me "How many people are working here? And how many of them are QA?". As you can see, there seems to be something weird going on here. Why is QA (Quality Assurance, a more "official" name for testers) often treated like a spare wheel? Why is it such a complicated topic? 

Let's start with some undeniable facts. Compared to the other jobs in gamedev, it is relatively easy to become a tester. A vast majority of testers are in their 20's, most of them start their jobs in the first few years after finishing high schools, no university degree is needed. Creativity, art / sound / programming proficiency or even a high level gaming skills are not required on the entry levels. It's really no wonder that the job in QA is statistically the lowest paying job in gamedev. Another reason, why testers are low paid is that QA is often outsourced to low-cost countries. These outsourcing companies often give feedback of relatively low quality and importance for the developers. Apart from the average cash the developers are willing to pay, it also affects the general reputation of testers. There is also an ongoing debate in many studios, whether QA is even a part of development. There is one quite solid argument against - testers don't produce anything. On the other hand, QA is usually engaged in the development process from the early stages, it takes a significant part in it.

All these factors explain pretty well, why the QA is often treated as a completely separate department. It seems to justify why getting a job in QA isn't a measure of the game school quality. It explains a question how many QA people are working in the office, as it is easier and cheaper to hire more testers, so the number of testers can quite easily boost the number of employees, creating an illusion of a bigger studio.

Now as much as all these statements are true, they are also highly unfair for all the testers out there. Getting hired as a tester might be a bit easier than being hired as a programmer or an artist, but it doesn't mean that you can just walk in to the studio and get this job.

What are the requirements for a tester?

- you need to love games and to play a wide variety of them;
- knowing foreign languages is a real asset - the more exotic the better. You will often work with different language versions of the game - being able to find spelling errors increases your value as a tester;
- you need some proof of logical, analytical thinking - to understand how the game mechanics work in order to break it down. You have to be able to find a way to reproduce it so the developers can fix it;
- you should be really resistant to stress and routine - you will be given repetitive assignments, be ready to play the same game over and over and over again;
- you should be quite flexible - overtime is very common;
- the better you know your gaming platform, the better - only being able to run the game isn't enough. You should know about the hardware and software your platform is running. The more platforms you know (PC, PS, Xbox, Android, MacOS, iOS...) the better;
- having an eye for the detail is a must - you are supposed to catch all kinds of bugs: gameplay, visual (including lighting, physics, etc.) and sound.
- interests like art, music, game design, history, science fiction, fantasy, game theory, math, coding, creative writing, travelling, literature - all these can really come in handy.
- showing that you took part in some open (or even better - closed) beta tests can certainly be a big plus.

As you can see, it's way more demanding than it seems at the first glance. Yes, all these requirements are for the lowest paying job in gamedev. Yes, this is the job that gets so underestimated and looked over. Sadly, QA very rarely gets used the way it should. Imagine having a room full of dedicated, demanding players that aren't heavily invested in the project, since they weren't directly developing it. Sure, they might have less experience that than the game designers or artists, but still they are one of the best focus groups you could possibly dream of. Incredibly often feedback from this group is looked over or belittled. Incredibly often QA is pushed down to be just mechanical bug seekers. And that's a shame, really. In most gamedev studios QA is dependant on all other departments, never the other way round.

A great thing about guys in QA is that they are always ready to help. It's usually the youngest team in the studio and a lot of testers treat their current position as their first step towards their dream job in game development. That's why they love being included in all kinds of activities outside testing. For example, when we were preparing a trailer for our game, we weren't sure about one of the elements, we made a focus group out of our testers. Not only they were really happy to help and share their opinions, but also they gave us some very valuable points and insights we would never gather all by ourselves.

How does work as a tester look?

There is actualy a movie (heavily sponsored by Konami, Microsoft and Mattel), where the protagonist is a video game tester. The movie's name is "Grandma's Boy". It is quite fun and worth watching at least to see how hot Linda Cardellini looks in a business suit or how hillarious Jonah Hill is when he sucks on a pair of plastic tits for a few hours straight. However, if you want to base your opinion of gamedev industry on it... Well, don't. It's like learning woodcutting from Monty Python's lumberjack song.

The biggest mistake you can make when it comes to being a tester is thinking it's about playing games. It is about testing one game. Over and over. For a long period of time. And you don't even get to enjoy a game that's finished. You get a half-product, that is more or less playable, often with placeholder textures, basic lighting, generic music and dialogues written by whoever took a pen and paper to their bathroom break. If you are a player that gets easily annoyed when a game just randomly crashes and you need to go through the same gameplay elements again without being able to turn off the long cutscene... It's not a job for you.

What's more, while playing the game, you are obliged to find all the issues you are able to and describe them in some bug-tracking system, for the other departments to review. It requires not only patience and resistance to routine tasks, but also lots of precision. You also never know when a new task will arrive and you may rest assured that most of them will be "for yesterday". This means that no matter which part of the studio is crunching, the QA is always crunching with it.

There is of course the plus side. You get an access to the new technologies long before they hit the market. You get to work in an amazing, young team, as testers are usually the best integrated parts of a gamedev studio, who work hard, but play even harder. Being a tester also means you have access to a lot of knowledge that would be otherwise very hard to get anywhere else. Since QA works with all departments, it also learns from all of them.

Ok, let's start with QA... What next?

For many young developers, being a tester is a starting point in their career. It certainly is one of the easiest ways to get your foot in the door. QA is probably always the team with the biggest rotation. Many people quit because of the stress, amount of work and because the reality of being a tester isn't how they imagined it to be. On the other hand, people do manage to get into other teams if they want to, and there is no real rule where they might end up. If a person shows some talent and manages to catch the eye of the lead game designer, art director, head writer or whoever is in charge of the target team, there is a much bigger chance they could become a junior quest designer (or a junior writer, junior concept artist, junior level designer, etc.), than if they applied from the outside.

But let's not treat testing like an unpleasant mid-point for thei aspiring designers. There are also people who live and breathe QA and whose personal development takes place entirely in the testing area. These people specialize. What are the higher positions in there?
- Senior Tester - he is the more experienced tester who is often responsible for teaching the basics to Junior Testers. Think of a Senior Tester like a special task commando who becomes a sergeant if less experienced people need some advice or training.
- Localization Tester - a tester who is fluent in foreign language(s) and is responsible for verification of localizations
- Compliance Specialist - something you won't learn elsewhere. Tester responsible for preparing the game to meet all the certification requirements for a release for a specific console.
- QA Team Leader - responsible for planning the tests, distributing the tasks among testers, management of the bug-tracking database, solving problems, communication between departments and preparing reports of the current project status.

The QA department is like a goalkeeper - they are rarely praised, often blamed for any fuckup. And not only by the development. When "more aware" players find a bug in a game, they think "oh, someone in QA didn't do their job". In reality, testers find much more bugs than the other departments are able to fix to deliver the game on time. Some problems just take too much time to solve compared to how critical they are.

If reading all this didn't scare you off, then you just might have it in you to become a tester. After all, it's one of the easiest ways to get into a gamedev, and I can assure you, it is an exciting industry. Being in QA is probably one of the biggest learning opportunities and one of the toughest gamedev life tests. If you dream of making big AAA titles and are in the beginning of your professional career, take a game you really, seriously hate and spend 2-3 hours with it every day for a few months. If that didn't kill you, you should apply for a job of a tester!

Quality of this article is assured by Raczyn, my awesome QA Team Leader - great thanks!