Before anything else
Being in the game industry is difficult. People get taken advantage of. Communication breaks down. Leadership hands you a direction that makes no sense, or changes everything overnight and you rebuild months of work. There are a lot of hurt people in this industry, and some of the work is harrowing.
So do this if it's absolutely the thing you want. For some people there's a point where it stops being a preference and turns into "I have to do this, there is nothing else."
Wherever I've been in a position to make this a safer place for someone, I've done it, and I always will. That part I can control, and I've never stopped trying. The industry as a whole I can't promise you. I feel like I have to say that in good conscience before you spend years chasing it.
If that makes you reconsider, that isn't a failure. It might be the smart call.
Get a stable job while you chase this. You need to be okay with or without the games thing, because desperation leaks into everything. It's in your emails and in how you talk at meetups, and people pick up on it fast. You do better work and better networking from a place where you're already fine.
Back to top ↑Do you need to go to school for it?
School can help. I'm not going to talk you out of it, and plenty of good people came up that way.
The funny part is that when you come out, it comes down to your portfolio. And the portfolio they're looking at is the one you built in school. So school was the reason you made the work, but the work is what gets you hired. That means there are ways around school if you can find another reason to make the work and another group of people to make it with.
One warning if you do go
Some educators hand out wrong information, and you carry it into interviews sounding uneducated. Example: "narrative level designer" is not a real title. There's a narrative designer and there's a level designer. When you smash the two together you're telling everyone you don't know how the disciplines work. Learn the real names of the real jobs — they're mapped out further down.
The two things that matter most
Out of everything I've done, these two moved my career further than the rest combined.
The GDC Conference Associate program
Apply to be a Conference Associate at GDC. You work the conference instead of paying for it, and you land inside a real community of people doing the same thing.
It's a safe, supportive place, and I'd love to meet you there. Fair warning about the wider conference floor: some people are rude or short with you. Usually that's burnout, or years of being bombarded by students at every event. Don't take it personally. I've caught cold shoulders as a working professional. Look for the people trying to help and stay close to them.
Apply to be a CA ↗DevPods.gg
Better than any game jam, and I've done plenty of jams in person.
DevPods runs long-term projects with larger teams. A jam teaches you to build something in a weekend. DevPods teaches you to collaborate, hold a schedule, handle real team dynamics, and stay with a project past the fun part. Those are the skills studios hire for.
My own credits there go back five or six years. Scroll their pages far enough and you'll find them.
DevPods ↗ Their games ↗Volunteer at conferences instead of attending them
Volunteer at every event you can. In person if you can travel, online if you can't. Two reasons. You skip the ticket price, which matters when you have no money. More importantly, you walk in as a contributor instead of a taker, and that reputation follows you around for years.
I volunteered at IndieCade in LA and got stuck at a booth for six hours with someone running a program. We got to talking. I joined the program. Within six months I'd led three projects and contributed to eight more, and my portfolio was unrecognizable. A lot of these events also run free resume and portfolio reviews.
Local meetups are worth your time. GameDaily Connect, IGDA meetups, indie meetups on Meetup.com. I picked up mentors at these. One casual "play games and hang out" meetup in LA turned into a mentor relationship over LinkedIn. I'll save you one trip: the game dev drink-up in Irvine was three hours each way for me. Did it once. Don't recommend.
On paying for the main GDC conference
If you're brand new, have nothing to show yet, and you're feeling insecure about all of it, I would not spend the money. It's extremely expensive and it climbs every year. Start with smaller local events, and volunteer instead of attending whenever there's an option.
Which community to join
Coming out of school you feel lost. Joining ten Discords does nothing, so pick based on what you're actually trying to do.
Whichever you join, don't lurk. Post your work and answer somebody else's question.
Back to top ↑Immerse yourself, all of it free
Watch these and take notes
- Game Maker's Toolkit — design and level breakdowns
- Steve Lee — level and game design from someone who's shipped
- Level Design Lobby — a good on-ramp for level design
- Brackeys — foundational, especially early
Riot's "So You Wanna Make Games??"
Ten episodes, free, one per discipline, made by the people doing the job. It covers intro to game art, concept art, character art, environment art, technical art, character animation, VFX, sound design, UI design, and game design.
- The full series
- Visual Effects
- Sound Design
- Game Design
- League of Legends VFX Style Guide (PDF) — useful well outside League
Read, then go past reading
Design blogs are a fine start, but the real thinking lives in conference talks and podcasts, especially the GDC talks. GDC Vault.
Then build something
Reading isn't practice. Make small things and finish them, because a finished small thing beats a big unfinished one.
Back to top ↑Networking and mentorship
People want to help. You have to make it easy for them, and you can never force it.
How to reach out on LinkedIn
Message people at the studio you want, on the game you love, or in the role you're aiming at. Come with a specific, intelligent question. Something like "I loved how you handled X in this game, because [an actual reason]." You're a fan with a real thought.
Do not open with "hey, will you mentor me?" I've tried it. It almost always bombs.
What the response rate actually looks like
That's normal. Sometimes I'd show up to an event and it was a complete failure, nothing came of it. You keep going, because eventually you find the people who step up. They exist. I found several.
Rotate your mentors and keep them for years
I ended up with a few at once, each with a format they liked. One was happy on the phone. One preferred email. One only wanted LinkedIn. One wanted to meet in person. So a different one every week, and none of them felt overloaded. You maintain those relationships over years and build on them as you move.
Then listen
Make changes based on what they tell you. I've had mentees who asked for guidance, got it, and ignored it, and it went nowhere for them. If you're going to ignore the answer, don't spend the person's time on the question.
IGDA runs a mentoring program too. Worth signing up.
Back to top ↑The disciplines
The clearest way to understand the design roles is by the scale of the player's experience you own. Zoom all the way in and you're a combat designer. Zoom out and you're a game designer.
| Role | What you own | Scale |
|---|---|---|
| Combat designer | The fight. Enemies, weapons, encounters, how it feels to swing. | Moment to moment |
| Mission designer | The objective and the structured content around it. | Minute per minute |
| Level designer | The spaces, and whether moving through them feels good. | The place |
| Game designer | The systems and mechanics. The whole machine and how it generates play. | The whole game |
| Narrative designer | Writing, stories, characters, and all the barks. Threads through everything above. | Across all of it |
| Technical designer | The bridge between design and programming. Scripting, tools, the systems designers use. | Across all of it |
Who each role works with
Every one of these hands work to other disciplines and takes work back from them. Open one to see who.
Combat designer
| Works with | On what |
|---|---|
| Animation | Attack timing and hit reactions |
| Audio and VFX | Impact feedback |
| Engineering | Weapon and AI systems |
| Mission design | Enemy spawns and difficulty |
| Game design | Damage numbers and balance |
Mission designer
| Works with | On what |
|---|---|
| Level design | The space the mission runs in |
| Combat design | Enemy spawns and encounter difficulty |
| Environment art | Blockout through to final art |
| Engineering | Scripted events and objective logic |
| Production | Schedule, priorities, and scope cuts |
Level designer
| Works with | On what |
|---|---|
| Environment and level art | Blockout handoff, then art passes |
| Mission design | What happens inside the space |
| Combat design | Encounter spaces and sightlines |
| Engineering | Triggers, collision, nav mesh, AI paths |
| Audio | Ambience and how the space sounds |
Game designer
| Works with | On what |
|---|---|
| Every design role | The rules they all build on |
| Engineering | Systems implementation |
| Production | Scope and roadmap |
| UX and UI | How the systems get read by players |
| Data and analytics | Balance |
Narrative designer
| Works with | On what |
|---|---|
| Audio and VO | Dialogue and recording |
| Cinematics | Story moments |
| Mission design | Story beats inside missions |
| Level design | Environmental storytelling |
| Game design | Where story meets systems |
Technical designer
| Works with | On what |
|---|---|
| Engineering | Tools and systems |
| Every design role | The tools they use daily |
| Tech art | Shared pipelines |
| Level and mission design | Scripting support |
| Production | What's buildable |
The rest of the disciplines
Art and tech art
- Technical artist. The bridge between art and engineering. Shaders, pipelines, and the tools that keep art running in engine.
- VFX. Real-time effects. Real Time VFX and the Riot episode above are where to start.
- Lighting. Smaller discipline, and one good Discord plus a solid reference sheet gets you far.
- Cinematics. In-engine and pre-rendered story moments.
Audio
Three related disciplines that overlap constantly:
- Narrative and voice-over. Dialogue and VO.
- Composition and music. The score.
- Sound effects and sound design. Everything else you hear.
Production and publishing
- Producer. More below.
- Publishing, live-ops, and product. The side that gets the game to players and keeps it healthy after launch.
Pick where you fit and go deep
Don't claim five disciplines at once. It reads as unfocused.
What a producer does
The producer is in most every meeting that needs to happen. They take the notes, run the meeting, and drive it forward. Not literally every meeting on the calendar, but the majority of them.
That means the producer usually holds a view of the entire game at once, understands how the pieces fit together, and can see a collision coming between two teams that don't know they're on the same road.
The job is to take that view and make everyone else's job easier. When production is good, the designers and engineers spend their time on the game instead of on figuring out what's going on.
Scheduling, roadmapping, tracking, risk, communication, and unblocking people.
One clarification on the word "developer"
A developer is not just a programmer. In this industry, a developer is everyone who touches the game. Designers, artists, animators, audio, QA, production, the backend engineers, the people running version control, and to a degree even marketing when they're in the game doing capture and campaign work.
How a studio is set up
Departments usually break into design, engineering, art, tech art, animation, VFX, lighting, cinematics, narrative, audio, QA, and production. Each has leads, with a director layer above. Production sits across all of them.
How the work runs day to day
- Agile and Scrum
- The framework most teams use to plan and ship in cycles, called sprints, with regular check-ins.
- Roadmapping
- The plan of what ships when, and in what order.
- SOPs, standard operating procedures
- The written "this is how we do X here," so the team isn't reinventing process every time somebody new shows up.
- Tracking
- JIRA or something like it, where the work lives and status is visible.
Knowing these words and what they mean makes you easier to work with.
Back to top ↑Portfolio and resume
- Show your process, not just the finished thing. Sketches, docs, iterations, what you tried and why you abandoned it.
- For each project, put your role, the team size, the tools, and the impact up front where someone skimming will see it.
- Curate. A few strong pieces beat a long pile. Cut the weak ones, even the ones you're attached to.
- Get free reviews at events and inside ASGC, then take the notes seriously instead of defending the work.
The mindset
Work on it a little every day. A couple of hours. That daily grind is the difference between the people who make it and the people who talk about making it.
Chase it from a stable place. Push the desperation aside. Be a giver rather than a taker. Keep your mentor relationships alive over years instead of burning them for one favor. Listen more than you pitch.
Back to top ↑The resource list
Start here
- ASGC Discord · asgc.gg · Community Coaching
- GDC Get Involved — Conference Associate program
- DevPods · their games on itch
Communities
- Funsmith Club — Game Design Skills
- The Design Den
- Level Design — Steve Lee
- Brackeys
- Real Time VFX
- Bible Study for Game Developers
Level design
Learn the disciplines
- Riot, So You Wanna Make Games?? — 10 episodes
- Riot, Visual Effects
- Riot, Sound Design
- Riot, Game Design
- League of Legends VFX Style Guide (PDF)
- Real Time VFX getting-started thread
YouTube
Industry and career
- IGDA
- GDC Vault
- Game Developers Choice Awards
- Independent Games Festival
- Networking tips — GamesJobsDirect
- Career networking — Game Industry Career Guide
That's all of it.
If any of this helped, or you want to ask about something it didn't cover, my inbox is open. I'd rather answer a real question than have you guess at it for six months like I did.
Get in touch →