I am applying for a game design job in my area. I do not have a college degree in media arts or anything, but i have a pretty strong portfolio with my modeling and games that I have designed. Do you think that I have a shot without a degree and being self taught?? Or do you think they will look down on me because of that?? Obviously, I am hoping that the portfolio carries me…
I have certifications: Photoshop CS3 ACE, Flash CS3 ACE, Illustrator CS3 ACE
just looking for your thoughts, nervous about what to expect…
Well if your portfolio is strong and have good work is going to help you is better to have someone with experience then a person with a degree but does not know much what he suppose to do, so if your portfolio is strong then you got a chance even with out a degree, the degree basically so you get paid more
It depends mostly on where you are applying. If you are applying to a big corporate studio the interviewer may not have any game design experience and will not be interested in a portfolio (Because they are not really qualified to judge its contents). But in that kind of “programmer mill” style environment, certifications and charm should carry you just fine.
For smaller studios, a portfolio and past work experience is all they care about.
I’ve been teaching myself to program since I was 11 but have a degree in electrical engineering yet I feel that I’d be more qualified for any type of software position than many of my friends who have degrees in computer science (or a similar degrees.) Many who only started programming when they started their degree and I feel are extremely poor programmers.
If I was hiring for game design, or any other similar type of job (which I may be doing in a few months!) I would not even look at education but rather work produced or projects completed in spare time. I’d much prefer finding someone who is motivated and competent and a strong portfolio is a much better indicator than the education they have.
That said, not everyone is the same and there will be those that just discount you straight away after looking at your education, which may be a blessing as I don’t think working somewhere like that would be a great environment anyway.
LoL in reality someone with a degree in game design is laughable IMO, unless their portfolio they made during the end of their schooling shows they are competant.
I know people who get their Masters who shouldn’t ever be in their field. College entry is for anyone, and completion is based on attendance and submitting their work-- not quality of work. The standard for an acceptable paper is so low, anyone can complete a degree if they are committed to it.
And IMO, unless it encompasses more than what I think or is merely just an associates degree, a bachelors in “game design” is like a bacehlors in “art” or “history” lol. Or witchcraft. Unless the “game design” degree has more. IMO game design is talent and experience, but mainly talent. Like Invention. Any form of invention.
But…
This is not to say that the people doing the hiring aren’t also graduates of their local community college (or art program). Nothing is more hilarious than someone scoffing at an experienced talented designer, “LOL, you didn’t graduate COLLEGE? I graduated in 3 years and 10 months, instead of 4 years. …NEXT!!! Oh wow, graduate of Local Community College #23 in theoretical game design? You’re hired!”
It’s actually quite cool to see a list of things that actually show me I am a real game designer, and not just a lunatic.
I don’t have a degree, but have been designing a game for over a year, nearly 24/7. That’s 8760 hours I’ve spent on ONE game and a HANDFUL of features (not literally, more like half that, as I do sleep and do other things like eat, although I do think about it while eating or pooping!)
I could tell you in-and-out every feature, how it works, the problems I forsee, the problems I believe won’t occur-- and WHY I believe of all of this, and how I know it is not a sure thing and WHAT I would do to counter the problem or WHAT I would do or replace if a feature just had to be cut, and which one is most likely to be cut and WHY.
This makes me VERY excited to see myself fulfilling the majority of that list. I have always wondered how people I have met who have degrees in “game design” don’t even play games beyond their favorite genre, which is almost entirely console based action or FPS games (God of War or Call of Duty or World of Warcraft).
I have been playing video games since before I could walk (literally) and the majority of my life, spent 24/7 gaming or dreaming of gaming, planning, or designing. I have spent over a decade playing MMORPG’s almost entirely 18 hours a day for many years (not every year of that decade… but several, several year chunks) as well as an intense love for all genres. FPS, RTS, MMORPG, RPG, Tetris, Checkers, FlashGames, Browser Games.
And when I wasn’t gaming? I was spending 18 hours straight watching marathons of amazing T.V. series or a marathon of movie after movie after movie. Reading Lore, researching mythology, creating my own PnP RPG’s.
I completely agree with this link. Game designers need to bleed gaming of every variety, and be able to explain their passion in depth with endless reasoning. They should be able to talk your head off about games of ANY genre.
That’s what makes a real game designer. Not a Halo playing console fanboy who spend $80,000 on a bachelors in game design, yet thinks everyone but Gears of War 2 is carebear sissy stuff (which includes Gears of War 1, which is the MOST sissy of all!) rolls eyes
Man I hate college students who are working in game design or any field of gaming EXCEPT programming or intensive 3D modeling or 2D artwork. Those are not wastes- but a lot of it is. The majority of game design you can teach YOURSELF, and with a budget equivalent to the cost of a bachelors degree— you could hire an entire team to make several games, and just claim the work yourself…lol…
I got my first video games designer job by sending a couple of concepts I’d put together with a covering letter to every games company I could get the name of in the UK. I have no degree at all. I got 3 interviews, one of which led to a job at Acclaim as a level designer. This was 1997 when Acclaim were a big company and there were no game design degrees.
Now there are specialist degrees, and a lot more people taking degrees in the UK, and more people doing the interviewing who went through university when it was the common thing to do, not the exception (this is UK, I don’t know if it is the same anywhere else). So now there are some companies that demand a degree, some that don’t care, and others that would like one but will look at experience as an alternative.
I have now been on both sides of the interview process - interviewee and interviewer. You seem to have passion, which is a big thing that is often lacking. Knowledge of games is important. You don’t have to like every type, but you should know about more than one genre unless you are being interviewed at an absolute genre specialist.
If you are using Unity, do you have a complete, or nearly complete, game you can show them? That would score major points. Try to get that to them ahead of the interview, so it can be tried and discussed by your interviewers (I find it rare to only have one), then they can ask questions about it.
You highlighted an important point. You should be able to say “Why?” about all decisions. Also, a common question is what are your design philosophies?
Actually it isn’t true in all the cases that degree is nothing and portfolio is everything. While some local indie studios may not care about your education and whether you have a degree in say Arts or not, but only look at your portfolio, many big game studios DO care about education and they may not even consider you if you don’t have a degree unless you’re some super duper talented guy with extrodinary skills.
And it may also depend on the university. If you’re going to some lowest rated university that doesn’t really teach you much and don’t prepare you for the industry then it’s quite obvious that you will finish knowing nothing and will find it hard to get a job.
I’m not just saying, my college teacher said that and he knows what he’s talking about
I find it idiotic that employers refuse to hire talent if they don’t have a college degree, as if a college degree proves anything.
Of course, it’s ENTIRELY realistic and believable that idiots fill this world, so employers can (and often do) fulfill the role of idiot. Hehe!
But university “rating” is laughable, as the quality of education is going to be very similar in ALL of them: crappy. Prestigious schools are just fluff, and some don’t even have higher test scores than “unheard of” schools. I’m NOT saying it doesn’t matter, because it probably DOES. Employers are probably the idiots who graduated from these schools, finding the work to be “difficult”. Anyone with intelligence or experience knows that a college degree means next to nothing, and actual skill and experience matter MUCH much more.
That is just my opinion anyway. Why? Because there are more bad teachers than there are good ones. Because schools want money, not furthering education. Because the average person is too dumb for anyone else to actually get taught anything worthwhile, and even dumb people get into “higher” education and “advanced” classes.
I don’t like these degree vs experience kind of arguments because they always walk the line between a discussion of the way things are, and the way things should be.
The fact is, there are people that won’t hire you without a degree. Whether or not that makes sense is irrelevant, its just the way it is. But on that same note, there are some people that would laugh in the face of a graduate with no work experience wanting to get hired without a year cutting his teeth interning first. Which poses the question of what that degree was worth in the first place.
The problem is that this argument is emotionally motivated. Autodidacts feel like they are looked down on because of our higher-education-is-the-answer culture. We are told constantly that college is the key to intelligence, and because of this the self-taught/private-tutored among us feel like they are being grouped in with the unambitious slackers because they have no piece of paper to prove otherwise. On the other hand people with degrees don’t like the hearing evidence that the 4 - 8 years and tens of thousands of dollars they spent at University wasn’t a valuable investment. So both sides do the adult equivalent of plugging their ears and humming, ignoring arguments that don’t fit with their pre-conceived notions of what it means to be intelligent.
But in reality both sides are lying to themselves. Fact is, without a degree there are some doors that are closed to you that would otherwise be accessible. And conversely there is a very significant chance that your hard earned degree will never pay for itself, and you will most likely wind up working the same job as someone who went straight into the job market after high-school only you have $XX,000 in student loan debts.
In the end, it REALLY doesn’t matter. Persistence is the only real decider. No matter what combination of degree, certificate, portfolio, resume or none of the above you have, someone somewhere will hire you eventually. And once they do you have one more past position to leverage your way up. No matter what you do, it will be the reason you got one job and the reason you didn’t get another.
Persistence. There can be a whole lot of reasons why they’d accept you over someone who has a degree (like perhaps they are looking for someone with your exact kind of experience). And the opposite is also true, they could be looking for something else in their candidate. But you won’t know that before the interview happens. That’s their main purpose, after all.
Another important thing for your interview; remember that the evaluation goes both ways. As much as they will evaluate whether you are fit for their company, you should evaulate whether their company is a fit for you.
Even if you don’t get accepted right off the bat, don’t give up after that first try. You’ll get your name out there and -that- is also very important.
I learned to create and edit video game graphics in 2 months on the side, and I already have a permanent job with an AMAZING game company and my entry salary was half of what the CEO makes (meaning… 2 months of self-teaching and I landed a job that pays more than most people fresh out of college)
Fortunately, I am also in school for a degree that has nothing to do with gaming or computers. This is good because this isn’t a stable job I have right now (if the company fails, then so do I, and we all get payed depending on the game’s success, although it is doing really well right now) and the job I am getting after I complete my degree is 100% stable and 100% well paying.
Either way, I win. The beauty is that I will be doing BOTH part time. One which REQUIRES a college degree with no way around it. The other REQURIED only 2 months of self-teaching and nothing more.
I know this topic is old but I figured I drop my two cents in.
I think the article posted above and other things I have read put too much focus on “loving games” as a credit to potential employees. Now I am not in the position to hire anyone myself at the moment, so maybe this is wishful thinking, but I feel that a decent employer would want you to be more than just a guy/gal who plays games all the time.
The most “dedicated” gamers I know are not the kind of people who would make good employees in this field (except as testers perhaps). Likewise people who watch a lot of TV aren’t necessarily going to be the best production assistants. There is a huge gap between producing something and consuming it. Being an avid gamer doesn’t show me you are intelligent or throughtful or interesting, in fact it shows that you spend a lot of your spare time amusing yourself instead of learning/reading/exercising etc.
I don’t think the implication is to just randomly hire basement-bound, poopsock-using hardcore gamers to be game designers, but that a game designer should at the very least have a passion about what they design (and you can’t really have a passion about video games without playing them).
That really goes for any art or design career. As a web designer, I spend at least an hour or two of my day reading web design blogs and browsing galleries of beautifully designed sites, studying their interface design and staying on top of current trends, so I know what works and what doesn’t. Of course you always want to innovate, but if you ignore the competition and ignore trends that have already established things that work and things that don’t, thinking your going to somehow magically divine them yourself, you’re doomed to fail.
I would be looking for a hard-working person who demonstrates that game design isn’t living in a dreamworld. As an indie who makes games, I know the idea is always the easiest part. I have zero respect for the ideas man, because chances are - I’ve already thought of it and its shit.
True game design is a very hard job. Its all about finding ways to entertain the player. What is game design? thats right it is pure entertainment. You want the player to look up and wonder what IS the time?
That means you have been successful. Game design is difficult not because of ideas, I am able to draw on thousands of ideas. It is difficult because you need to a) move in on the idea and see if it works b) is it actually fun in practise and c) most of all, does it increase the player’s enjoyment over time the more he or she plays the game ie the big picture?
Thats game design. It’s work not little lightbulbs and dream worlds. Although some insanity/dreaming madness is required.
I have a passion for games I just don’t really get very much time to play them. My interest in them has grown to the point where playing them doesn’t satisfy in the same way as making them does.
Game Design as a college career was by far the best move I made in my life… That said, 90% of those that graduated from my class were just as clueless about game design as they were when they got in…
Happily for me, I was in the 10% who used the time in college to actually learn something…
I guess most people who go into game design major do so because they like to PLAY, not because they actually want to make games. there’s a world of difference there…
And even so, I’ve graduated, but never have I been asked to show my degree on an interview…
The degree itself counts for nothing, really… in fact, your whole CV is pretty much meaningless for a game design job… Portfolio is all that matters.
Having conducted 4 interviews today for a content designer post, I can tell you exactly what I was after.
I wanted to see gamemaking experience first of all… I can’t tell you how many 3D modellers are out there, doing amazing photoreal rendering work, but wouldnt have a clue where to start when asked to, instead of rendering, exporting a structured model for a game engine.
Same goes for programmers… not all programmers have actual game experience, and while they might be database gods, they couldn’t program character physics to save their lives
Now where I live, game experience is hard to come by… In fact it’s hard enough finding people that can do quality work, let alone one that has done game work… that’s not true for many other places though… Whether this is a good or a bad thing depends on which side of the interview you are.
Next after real gaming experience, comes a true honest interest in game making… I wanted to see someone who really wanted to do games, and wanted that above all other career choices. I wanted to see someone with ideas in his head, prototypes, attempts, and a real passion for the job. Sometimes, one with a true passion for game making might shine above someone more experienced, but who’s not really into it…
So these are my suggestions… hopefully other people who do interviews think like me
If you want to make an impression for a game design job, try modding a game… if you’re a modeller, model something cool, and put it into a game you like. I myself once did a 3D model of a boeing 737, and added it into Microsoft’s Flight Simulator… that is the first thing I show to people on an interview, and it grabs attention …I also did a 3D remake of Ben’s bike in Full Throttle (way back in the day, when free time was abundant), and went on to add it to GTA: San Andreas… it’s also a very good feature on my portfolio.
Crazy-ass stuff helps too… at my current job’s interview, I showed them a USB gearbox I had cobbled up out of a mini-keyboard, some scrap parts I found around the house, and some springs from an old joystick… I’ve found later that it was the key point that led to my being hired.
If you’re a programmer, try modding a game that will run player-made code, like ArmA2 or Orbiter…
Or do small gameplay prototypes to showcase ideas… You don’t have to do a full game… just enough of a prototype to show off your mechanic. This shows people you’re really into it, and you have ideas of your own.
In the end, the guy that really stood out today, was the one that showed the most interest in game making, and also an impressive portfolio, full of quality work. Even though he had almost no experience with the engine, he stood above another who did have Unity experience, but seemed less enthusiastic about games.
In the end, I can honestly say I don’t even remember what his resume looked like
…I also did a 3D remake of Ben’s bike in Full Throttle (way back in the day, when free time was abundant), and went on to add it to GTA: San Andreas… it’s also a very good feature on my portfolio.