Advice For Getting Into The Games Industry – 2025 Edition

Earlier this year I went to Develop – a big UK game development conference in Brighton – and while walking round the expo hall I was approached by a recent college graduate who wanted to know who I was and what I do and whether I had any advice on getting a job in games. Some time later I remembered writing a long post on the subject about 10 years ago, which is probably no longer online. So here I am, back again, with some contemporary advice on getting into the games industry, particularly as a designer, particularly in space year 2025.

I’ll say in advance: A lot of this post is really just tips for dealing with the psychological struggle of just trying to land a job – a sort of pre-emptive therapy session, trying to give you some perspective to help endure the chaos. Games studios are often looking for very specific skills, the working conditions are often a little worse than in adjacent industries, and in spite of this there’s usually a much-too-large number of eager hopefuls competing for every position. Breaking in is hard, and the average career in games lasts about 5 years (that’s a number I hear a lot anyway, but it’s very rough statistic – 6.9 according to one recent survey). It is extremely normal to bounce off the games industry without ever getting your foot in the door, and this does not make you a failure – it might have very little to do with you, personally. We are but tennis balls in the washing machine of life.

Before I get to the advice, I feel like I should bring up some tools you might find useful:

• GameDevMap – An industry directory arranged on a map. Not always accurate or up to date, but a quick and simple starting point if you want to find out who might be hiring in a particular city or region.
• gamejobs.co – My current favourite one-stop site for finding vacancies. Has lots of filters to help trim the list down towards what you’re looking for. Doesn’t always catch every vacancy – if there any specific companies you’re interested in, you should still check their recruitment sites directly.
• Hitmarker.net – Similar to the above, but worse (in my experience). Nevertheless, people seem to think highly of it – it’s possible that you might get more use out of it than I have. It does have some more detailed and modern-sounding filters, but I just don’t seem to find as many results here.
• RemoteGamesJobs.com – A bit of a niche one maybe, but it only lists remote work (ie. where you don’t need to go into an office). It isn’t always clear whether ‘remote’ means WORLDWIDE or with a certain timezone range or particular country, but you can usually figure that out from the description (and if you’re not sure, just ask the recruiter)
• workwithindies.com – Specifically lists jobs to work with small indie developers. These are often smaller projects with lower budgets offering temporary contracts, but many of these vacancies won’t show up on the bigger, more professional sites. (Free advice: Be a bit sceptical of anyone offering you revenue share instead of actual money)
• LinkedIn – I loathe every minute I spend on LinkedIn, but it’s also – sadly – a key location for people advertising vacancies. It’s probably worth filling out your career profile and building up your network with people you work with, but I can only hope you don’t get sucked into the industry thought-leader posting mindset. I recommend ticking the box to let recruiters view your profile and contact you, but you should expect many of them to contact you about jobs that you’re totally unsuited for – it’s okay to just ignore them! Sometimes they’ll come to you with something perfect, and it can be a great feeling when you’ve been searching fruitlessly for weeks. But often they’ll be desperately trying to fill a spot on some awful start-up hoping to ride the bubble of the latest tech trend, which nobody else wants to go near (for good reason).
• Your own online portfolio – Depending on your field of work this could be a link to something like an Artstation or Github profile, or a personal website. The thing I want to emphasise is to think of it as a showcase – you want to show off some range, without it feeling bloated. Think about what pieces of work you want to show off here. Which pieces represent your best work? Which pieces are most appropriate for the kind of job you’re hoping to get?

Oh, and maybe set up a new email account to handle your professional correspondence? Depending on what your usual email address is, you might want something that sounds a bit more professional… but also it can be a good idea to keep your work-related correspondence in a separate account to your personal life, for the sake of security and privacy.

I’ll also throw in some further reading, if you’re interested:

Breaking Into the Games Industry by Brenda Romero & Ian Schreiber – This is probably the book you are looking for right now. I haven’t read it myself, and maybe it is becoming less relevant in the current state of the industry, but… perhaps give it a try!

The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist by Brendan Keogh – A detailed examination of how we define game development, and the people who do it. If your only knowledge of the games industry comes from reading magazines or watching youtubers, this could provide some important counterprogramming.

The GameDev Business Handbook by Mike Futter – Aimed at people who are interested in running their own company, but it provides a thorough overview of the business dynamics that will act upon your position within the industry, even if you don’t have a business-focused role yourself.

Japanmanship by James Kay – Covering one particular country within the wider issue of ‘relocation’, the book highlights differences and similarities in how the games industry operates in UK and Japan, and the experience of working overseas.

Writing for Games by Hannah Nicklin – Specifically focused on writing, but includes some good breakdowns of where writers fit into different sectors of game development as a whole, and advice for newcomers

1. Have A Backup Plan

It sounds discouraging, but I’m just trying to be realistic here – keep in mind that you might not get into games, and come up with alternative plans. Even if you do land a job in the industry, it’s probably a good idea to be thinking about what else you could do if you suddenly get laid off, or if you decide you’ve had enough of it. Think about what your transferrable skills are and do a little research into what other careers might interest you. Maybe work on a little part-time side job, just so you have a second career to fall back on? Put in a few shifts at the family business, if the option is available. Start building a little following as a Twitch streamer, perhaps?

There are (apparently) over 200 games-related higher education courses in the UK, producing around 3,000 graduates each year (according to some of the speakers I was listening to at Develop’s games education track) – not including all the adjacent not-games-specific courses like generic Computer Science or Art degrees. At the same time, the games industry hires about 300 graduates per year. If you’re a new graduate coming off one of these courses and looking for your first job… well, my inner statistician forbids me to describe it as a 10% chance, but you can see why a less precise person might say something like that. There are a lot of factors affecting your particular circumstances, but the general situation is that there are many more games graduates than there are entry-level vacancies – unless you have a very niche specialisation, the numbers are heavily against you.

ALSO: Right now, in 2025, we’re coming off the back of a series of huge layoffs – worldwide, something like 40,000 game developers have lost their job in the last few years. If you’re a new entrant, the good news is you won’t be competing with most of these laid-off developers – they’ll be applying for more senior roles, which would probably be out of your reach anyway – but some of them will be recent starters with just 1 or 2 years of experience, and those people represent serious competition for you. They’re in a similar kind of position as you, applying for Junior-level roles, but with an added dash of hands-on experience that studios will find reassuring.

AND ALSO: I don’t think this will be a permanent situation, but we’re also going through a period where lots of studios – lots of tech companies in general, really – are really pinching off a lot of their entry-level hiring and (as far as I can tell) trying to replace entry-level roles with AI agents. It seems short-sighted and inadvisable to me (basically, it would shut off the pipeline that produces future Seniors – bad new for the long-term health of the business) but I can’t really predict with confidence how this will pan out.

AAAND ALSO: This is a subject worthy of its own post, but I feel like the games industry in general is going through a period of decline. People’s gaming habits are becoming more and more concentrated on a few large titles (Roblox, Grand Theft Auto, etc etc) and I would assume that revenue is heading the same way, which is bad news for anyone who isn’t working on these few big prestige titles. The other side of this – less visible to outside observers – is that investment money is drying up and moving to other tech markets, which makes it harder to get games off the ground to begin with. Nobody wants to take the risk. From what I heard at Develop, publishers are expecting game developers to behave more like free-to-play mobile studios – get the game out as quickly and cheaply as possible, prove that it can make money, and then maybe they’ll invest some money to help scale it up and market it. That’s a huge shift from the traditional business model in games, and it seems like industry is struggling to adapt, although those aren’t the kind of meetings I get invited to so you should take these observations with a pinch of salt.

Those three last points are all particular to this moment in time, so if you’re reading this a few years after publication – or if you’re a high school student contemplating a game development degree and wondering what your prospects will be by the time you graduate – then these might not apply. But the point of bringing them up is just to emphasise: it’s tough out there. This is really the recurring message of this post – There are many factors that might prevent you getting a job that have nothing to do with you personally.

Bearing this in mind, my first piece of advice is to be pragmatic and flexible, and be psychologically prepared to get a different job instead. If you apply for a games job after that… being currently employed in a non-games job might possibly impress future interviewers, but more importantly it should mean you feel a little less desperate to find work, so you’ll (hopefully) feel less pressured to accept a bad job offer. Feeling able to walk away gives you a lot of power!

2. Interviewers Are Sometimes Bad At It

Interviewing a candidate for a job is a particular skill in itself. It bears very little relation to the core day-to-day work of game development, and unless the interviewer has had some good training there is every possibility that they will be bad at it. Depending on the company, and on the interviewer’s personal circumstances, they might just be figuring the whole process out using their own intuition. Larger studios usually have well-developed training programs for this sort of thing – such as interview frameworks they need to follow – so they’ll probably be more consistent, but there’s still an element of skill and insight that will depend on the interviewer. Smaller studios are probably a bit more ‘natural’ which can be good or bad news for you – it’s harder to predict what to expect, is my point.

I used to find being interviewed very stressful when I was starting out. I think one of the most helpful things for me came a few years into my career, when I started conducting interviews myself. I did a lot of research, got advice from people, read through different lists of standard questions, and generally pieced together my own approach – most of this was during my time at a small start-up, so we didn’t have an existing framework to fall back on. The problem is, having spent some time developing my own personal approach to conducting job interviews, it’s made me much more critical of other people’s technique. I do sometimes find myself sitting in job interviews thinking “Wow, the whole premise of that last question seems really illogical – I wonder if they genuinely believe that, or if they’re just pretending to be stupid to see if I agree?” (Something I’ve learned over the years: They are almost never pretending)

My go-to example: Many years ago I interviewed at a studio where the design representative asked me What is the one game you really want to make? I sat in silence for a moment thinking What kind of person only wants to make one game? and then said something along the lines of “I wouldn’t want to limit myself to just one game – I’ve got a lot of ideas and it wouldn’t make sense to try and smoosh everything together”. At the end of the interview he circled back to this point and said that every other designer at the studio had one game that they really wanted to make, and if I didn’t feel that way then maybe it’s a sign I wasn’t cut out to be a game designer.

This seemed like an insane thing to say at the time, and it has only become more and more ridiculous to me the longer I’ve worked in games – eg. If all your designers want to make one game, do they all want to make the same game? Does it happen to be the game they’re currently working on? And if not, does this mean you have a team of resentful designers who would rather be doing something else? And if everyone has lucked out and your team ARE working on the one game they want to make, what are you going to do once it’s finished? Quit and go home? Make it again? Move on to a new project they don’t want to make? Game development is a creative business and obviously there’s a lot of taste and inspiration required for every project, but it’s also a team effort and (in my opinion) there’s also a lot to be said for having an open mind and a workmanlike attitude towards showing up and doing your best with whatever you’re asked to work on. If you want a long career in games, I think learning to find things that interest you within any given project is an important aspect of the work.

Over time I’ve come to appreciate the argument that this kind of question isn’t supposed to be taken literally. I could have just pulled together a few ideas and described a game, but I would have felt like a liar – it would not have been the one game I really want to make, as per the question. This then starts to feel like a neurodiversity issue – if the question you ask with your mouth is not the same question your brain is seeking an answer to, it alienates candidates who take questions at face value; like you’re penalising them for communicating too clearly. I don’t think it really improves the situation – it feels like we’re left weighing up whether it’s a bad-but-sincere question, or a good question which was phrased badly – but maybe it offers a more sympathetic perspective on why bad questions arise. As it turns out, people sometimes let words tumble out their mouths without stopping to consider what the words mean.

In terms of “advice for getting into the industry”… well sure, there’s something to be said for just playing along with bad questions and telling the interviewer what you think they want to hear. In a crucial moment you may be faced with a gatekeeper with some absurd opinions, and if you hold true to your beliefs and tell them when you disagree, it could cost you the job. Maybe that sounds unfair, but I feel like that’s just an everyday example of what it means to live in the world. Sometimes people grow up to be stupid or petty, and sometimes those people also get into positions of authority. If getting the job is the most important outcome for you, then obviously there is a strategic wisdom in degrading yourself by saying stupid stuff and staying in the race, rather than being authentic and nobly eliminating yourself. Having said that, you should also consider what it tells you about the workplace you’re trying to enter – if this is a company where bozos like this get promoted into lead roles, do you want to have to deal with it on a daily basis? I would hope that you are in a situation where you feel comfortable walking away (but I wouldn’t judge you if you did not).

On another occasion, after being hired for a job, I was told that the interviewer was impressed by an anecdote I shared about telling a group of co-workers that I thought some of their assumptions were wrong. Sometimes, highlighting that you’re happy to stick out and disagree with the rest of the team is (wisely) taken as a positive thing. It all just depends on the attitude of the interviewer you get on the day, and you need to make peace with the fact that you don’t control that.

I tend to assume that interviewers will do a bit of background research on candidates, go in with a prepared list of questions and have some covert logic in mind to define what they’re looking for in your answers. At the same time, I’ve definitely been interviewed on occasion by people who clearly did not prepare at all – you can sense that they’re so busy with work right now that they can’t afford to waste time doing prep work on each candidate. This always feels like a warning sign to me – building a good team is part of the job, and will probably have more long-term impact than whatever they would have been doing instead, so anyone who views interview prep as a bothersome imposition maybe doesn’t understand their own job, let alone the one they’re interviewing you for.

Part of the interview is about understanding your technical skills and whether you are fundamentally capable of doing the work, but perhaps more important is to get to know you as a person and whether you would be a good fit within the team. A smart manager will be looking for new skills and perspectives to expand their team’s toolset, while a… less-smart manager might just be looking to fill a particular hole on the current project. It’s up to you to figure out what kind of person is interviewing you.

There are a lot of grey areas! Looking at it from an economics perspective, there’s a lot of information asymmetry problems bubbling in the pot. It’s a difficult task to navigate, and when you look at it objectively it’s not surprising if someone who maybe only conducts a few interviews per year might simply be bad at it. Ultimately what I’m saying here is, again: There are many factors that might prevent you getting a job that have nothing to do with you personally.

In my opinion you need to extend a certain amount of tolerance for your interviewers to be a bit weird or incompetent. This can be terrible news for you as a person looking for a job, and I can sympathise with that – believe me, I know how it feels. But for the sake of your own mental wellbeing, I think the healthy response is to accept that life is messy and imperfect sometimes. I’m going to quietly hope that you can exercise your sense of compassion, understand that your interviewer is a human being with their own flaws, and accept that they might just be bad at their job. (Unless you were interviewed by an AI agent, which probably means there’s an executive at the company who is bad at their job.)

3. What Game Studios (Typically) Want

Generally speaking I think game studios want a new hire who can be dropped into a role and start work immediately, with minimal training time. For many studios I think their ideal would be if they could just walk into a shop and pick out a ready-made candidate who is already working for them in that exact role – which of course is a weird and circular kind of logic. Obviously you are not already doing the job, or else you would not be applying to do it. If you’re looking for some kind of ‘cheat code’ advice to make a winning application, my broad suggestions would be:

1. Find out what a person in this role actually does all day
2. Learn how to do it all
3. Communicate that you can do all that stuff in your application and interviews

It’s obvious stuff really, but it’s not a simple task – the specific tools and types of software you would need to use can vary between projects, and could be totally different from studio to studio. If you don’t know someone on the inside, it can be difficult to find out! Maybe the most direct route would be if you could catch someone from the team at an event – like a recruitment fair, or a games expo – and try just explaining that you’re interested in getting a job and would they mind giving you a quick list of what tools and processes they use.

Here are some rough categories of skills and attributes that hiring managers are looking for:

• Every role will have some core proficiencies which will probably be spelled out in the job description (eg. programmers will probably need to understand C#/C++; level designers need to understand how to use the appropriate tools, and show some understanding of level design principles)
  • Note that your other, non-core proficiencies are not worthless, but their value may be diminished if it isn’t relevant to the role in question (eg. level design skills when you’re applying for a concept art role)
  • Some non-essential skills are actually very valuable and interesting – perhaps not required for this role right now, but you could be hired with an eye to develop you into some sort of specialist (eg. a game designer with machine learning experience)
• Common office software, version control and project management tools, to facilitate this kind of collaborative work (eg. Perforce/Git, Jira, documentation tools like Confluence and Miro, Microsoft Office/Google docs, technical roles may include automated CI/CD tools like Jenkins to generate builds and run tests and stuff)
• An understanding of certain formal workplace procedures (eg. understanding Agile development, or how to give and take criticism in a mature, professional manner – sometimes a difficult hurdle for juniors)
• General knowledge of games – particular in the specific genre/market that relate to this project – and of the games industry more generally (eg. an understanding of what players generally like and dislike, which games might be considered your competitors, etc)
• Basic human decency, an agreeable personality, etc (NB. the games industry is full of nerdy introverts; you don’t need to be charismatic and sociable to get a job, but it helps – especially when it comes to career growth, promotions, etc)
• ‘Passion’ – One of the worst things for interviewers to bring up in an interview if you ask me, and yet it comes up time and again (see previous section). How does one quantify passion? How is it proven? What kind of passion would really benefit this specific role? I’ve been interviewed many times for economy design jobs and I am often asked whether I’m passionate about the subject of the game (eg. beach volleyball, medieval history, roguelike extraction shooters, etc etc) and yet I have never been asked about my passion for the actual work I would be doing (building spreadsheets, running a responsive live service, managing and mentoring junior designers, etc). You won’t always be asked about this, but you should be prepared for it.

If you’re applying for a role that requires relocation and visa support, this obviously introduces a lot of additional friction. You might be able to simplify things by making yourself eligible for employment, or moving there in advance. Be aware that even just applying for a job would violate the terms of most tourist visas and could cause serious legal problems, but depending on your specific situation there might be some perfectly legal options available. (More on this topic in section 5, below)

I should also say that not every studio is as lazy and cynical as I might make them sound here. There are studios out there with recruitment programs aimed at newcomers who need some training – apprenticeship schemes, or work placement partnerships with local universities and things. These are quite rare, so you shouldn’t just assume that there’s one near you, but it’s worth looking around and seeing what’s out there. If there is a games studio near you, maybe try reaching out to their HR team and asking about whether they might take you on in some sort of fixed-term work placement arrangement? Depending on the circumstances – the size of the studio, their location (ie. the level of difficulty they face in hiring people normally) and what state their current project is in, they might like the idea of having a junior come in for a few months to help chew through some basic tasks. If you’re a current student, you might even be able to squeeze this into a summer placement or something.

If you manage to get in like this: Do the job (obviously) but also observe your co-workers, ask them about their work, and generally try to absorb as much information as you can. Learn about other disciplines, if you have time – you might never do their job, but game development is a team effort and it will help if you understand how all the pieces fit together. You might only have a few weeks or months to do this, but this sort of experience could give you a huge advantage when applying for a permanent role in future.

4. Your Experience Will Vary Depending On The Role You’re Interested In

Videogames are complex multimedia software experiences that can require a diverse range of talents to make – programmers, artists audio engineers and testers, and then sprinkle in some writers, designers, product managers and producers to taste. Depending on how high-tech they are, it may require motion capture performances and voice acting, and if it involves pre-recorded videos then those will need practical skills like costume making, lighting, and set dressing. If you want to earn money from them, you may also require a lot of modern marketing and product analysis skills, and perhaps accountants and lawyers. If you’re trying to run a studio, you will also need specialists to help manage people, handle business development, and if you have a physical office you will need people to to deal with basic IT provision, security, cleaning, and perhaps catering. Suffice to say there are a lot of different roles available within the games industry, although not every team will require every role.

I don’t want to get bogged down in writing a list of typical development roles. Here is a list someone else wrote – it doesn’t dig very deep into different specialisation areas, although if you’re a newcomer then you probably aren’t qualified for a very specialist role. My point is just that, if you do anything technical or artistic, there is probably a suitable role for you somewhere… although not necessarily close to where you live.

My point here is that the kind of detailed, practical advice you would need to help break into the industry will depend on what kind of role you’re looking for, and my advice is to follow this post up by looking for something more specific to you. Better yet: see if you can find anyone you know who works in this kind of role (major bonus points if they work at the particular studio you are applying to) and ask them about what sorts of skills a person in this role would need.

I think most people try to break in as programmers, artists or designers, and in all of these cases I think it’s a good idea to have a portfolio of some sort. You should give some thought to what you put into your portfolio – don’t just drop in every single thing you happen to have made, but think about what kind of role you’re targeting and what kind of skills you want to highlight. I’m told it’s very common for first-time art applicants to take a scattergun approach – to send in a portfolio with a 3D model, a 2D character portrait, a nice landscape study, some UI design work and so on, and hope that the hiring manager will see something in there that they like enough to fill a hole – but it’s more likely that they will be hiring for one specific specialisation, and they would prefer to see a range of work in that particular format. And be selective – don’t just throw in every 3D model you’ve ever made, for example.

For designers: Being able to show any kind of game project, or even a mod for an existing game can be worthwhile. I’d say there’s a big bonus in showing FINISHED projects, even if they’re quite small – demonstrating that you can work within an appropriate scope and see something through to the end is (usually) more valuable than the specific clever design choices you made along the way. That said, the decisions can be important too – if the central pillar of your portfolio is a generic clone of a currently-popular genre, it suggests you may be technically competent but not a very creative thinker. Make something in Roblox. Make a custom game mode for Halo. Buy a cheap copy of Neverwinter Nights and made a little campaign module. Make a Warcraft III mod. Make a game in Godot, Game Maker, or if you’re more technically skilled just buy some things from the asset store and make a little game in Unreal Engine. I can’t speak for everyone, but I would be entertain physical game design work – a homemade character class for Dungeons & Dragons, or rules for a game using a standard deck of playing card – although you might not get far if you don’t have ANY digital game design work you can point at.

My other big tip is just to play a variety of games and have some opinions to share about them. Nobody expects you to have made many games at the start of your career, but I think you need to be able to show some kind of vision – some sort of critical judgement, even if the interviewer doesn’t agree with you. Speaking for myself, I wouldn’t care whether you like or dislike any particular game – the thing I’m judging is your explanation why you feel that way. Does this sound like a considered opinion? Is it a critical analysis of the game’s content, or perhaps a reaction to the practicalities of how the game was produced or released? Is it a sensual reaction to the feel of playing the game – the pulsing rhythms of Rez or the razor’s edge thrill of a competitive FPS? Or are you perhaps trying to tell me what you think I want to hear, or regurgitating talking points you picked up from some reactionary Youtuber?

My other, other big tip is to develop some interests outside of games. Anything. Just so you can project a sense that you are a rounded human being with more than one interest. For designers in particular, it’s helpful to have a varied mix of interests – not just for the sake of landing a job, but for the sake of your creative function. For more on this topic, try reading Demystifying Creativity.

I can’t really speak to the programmer experience, but one thing I might say here is that I’ve heard stories about recent graduates coming into interviews who rely on AI agents to write their code for them, and I think it raises the possibility that you don’t actually know what your code is doing. Maybe when you’re a student trying to get your solo coursework finished on time it feels fine to cut corners and just get the thing working no matter how, but on a typical game project it’s important that your code is efficient and follows some logical structure that meshes with what the team are expecting. If you are going to use these kinds of tools, I think you should at least pair it up with some examples of your own work where you demonstrate a good understanding of the principles. You may be asked to stand at a whiteboard and solve a handwritten coding problem during the interview process, and nobody is going to be impressed if you whip your phone out and ask Claude for the answer.

I’ve never worked as a QA tester in games, but I have worked as a QA tester outside of games, and I can tell you that salaries and working conditions on the outside are generally a lot better. Many people assume that QA testers just get paid to play games all day, but it’s often long, tedious work with low pay, and I feel like the industry as a whole tends to churn through junior testers while giving them little support. If you want to make testing your long-term career, I think it’s a good idea to start outside of games and find a role that helps you get some qualifications (eg. ISTQB certification) – it will make you a better tester, and open up more options if you decide to leave the games industry in the future. If you see testing as a foot in the door that might lead to a job in design or production, then… it might work?… many people have done that successfully over the years… but please understand that there are many times more people who have tried to do this and just got chewed up and burned out before they escaped the QA pool. Historically a lot of studios have exploited this kind of hope and enthusiasm to impose terrible working conditions on juniors; take care of yourself.

If you’re interested in becoming a community manager, the advice I can offer is limited – the idea of a job where I have to interact with random strangers all day sounds very unpleasant to me. Spend time studying how existing CMs communicate with their audience (eg. start playing a couple of different live games and pay attention to their social media feeds and forums) and get to grips with the technical aspects of whatever the current popular social media sites and chat platforms are. Do some research into interesting things people do using Discord channel bots, or what the current trends on Twitch are, for example.

If you want to be producer, buy twelve cats and try to train them to walk in formation.

5. On Relocation

During the Covid pandemic, most (I assume??) studios starting working from home. Over the last few years, they have been generally shifting back to in-office work – or at least a hybrid arrangement where you’re expected to be in the office for a few days each week. As a result, the geographical link between where you live and where you can work is slowly reasserting itself – you need to live close enough to get to the office, or at least be in a position to do this for a few days per week (eg. perhaps you have a kindly relative with a spare room who lives near the office, and you could go stay with them for a few days each week)

(Before I continue, I should mention that there are still a number of studios out there who are open to fully-remote work. You often need to be in the same country, or at least in a country where they have some sort of legal structure in place to hire permanent employees, but I’m just saying… these options do still exist. There are fewer remote work opportunities than there were a few years ago, but… for now… they are still out there – check out Remote Game Jobs for a focused list.)

Depending on your situation, you may feel more or less acutely aware of regional inequalities in the country where you live. No country is evenly-distributed, and the UK is no exception – there are a few major hubs like Guildford, Leamington Spa, London, Dundee or Brighton where games studios seem to cluster, and then there are some large ‘opportunity deserts’ where there’s very little work to be found. Most big cities have a few studios – Leeds, Manchester, Sheffield, Nottingham and Derby serve quite well as a sort of distributed web of potential employment (with relatively affordable housing!) – but a place like Leamington is a goldmine for job opportunities.

To belabour the point: If you live in Northumberland and you’re wanting to break into the games industry, you’ve basically got a few big studios in Newcastle/Gateshead (CCP, Ubisoft, Sumo, and others) and some smaller places in Sunderland and Middlesbrough (mostly indie studios set up by graduates from the local universities) and maybe you could commute up to Edinburgh (home of Rockstar North, and others). There’s nothing to stop you applying for jobs down south (or around Dundee – a similar distance in the other direction), but you may end up paying £200 to make a 6-hour round trip on the train, just to attend a 45-minute interview where the interviewer decides that they liked everything you said, but they didn’t like your vibes.

Meanwhile, if you live somewhere like Croydon (where you can easily catch trains into London or out to the satellite towns of Surrey) – you’ve got many more potential employers on your doorstep. In theory your actual job applications would be no different, but you’re facing much less friction when it comes to getting to interviews, and lower financial barriers when it comes to accepting the job and settling in. If you’re a recent graduate trying to kickstart your career, then having parents who live in London is a superpower.

If you have games studios near where you live now, it’s probably worth focusing on them at first – and for your first job, I wouldn’t be too picky about how you feel about their games. But if you can’t find a job nearby, or a remote-working gig, you will need to think about relocating for work.

The further you’re able to move, the more options you have. The obvious downside is that moving usually implies some extra costs (initially, at least) and potential extra difficulties if things don’t work out. Basically, that’s all there is to it. I’m a big advocate for making long distance moves while you’re young and (probably) have few big responsibilities in your life – it opens up a lot of career opportunities, and gives you a chance to get out and see more of the world – but there are a lot of personal factors that can limit your ability to do so.

Depending on the situation the studio might offer some relocation assistance. The value of this assistance will vary a lot depending on the situation, but for an entry-level position it could be a few thousand dollars to cover the cost of travel and shipping some things over, and a month of rental accommodation at the company’s expense while you find your own place. If you aren’t bringing much stuff with you, some employers will agree to let you use some of the money as a settling-in grant – a little cash bonus to buy some furniture, clothes, or other things after you arrive, as an alternative to shipping stuff around the world with you. Relocation assistance is a helping hand, but it won’t fundamentally change the economics of living an expensive city like London or Los Angeles – you need to know what the cost of living will be like before you agree on a salary.

An alternative to moving would be to simply start making games and build up your own business. This is a perfectly reasonable goal, but it is extremely difficult to do it successfully, and since we’re talking about finding your first job in the industry I might suggest that it’s worth getting a job and spending a few years working in an established studio before you try going your own way – get a handle on the standard practices people follow, so you don’t waste time making mistakes and figuring it all out on your own. But hey, part of this train of thought is that you might not have enough good job options available around you? In which case, my advice would be to try reaching out to other indie developers – maybe your local scene have in-person meet-ups, or else just online – and try learning the ropes from them.

If you want to work in another country, you will probably need some sort of employment visa. Your employer will need to do some extra paperwork to sponsor your visa, and it adds a little extra friction – I think, generally speaking, they’d prefer to hire a candidate that doesn’t need a visa. But don’t rule yourself out just because of that! If you’re willing to make the move, you should apply anyway and just tell them upfront that you will need a visa – if they decide they want you, they may well do it.

Depending on your situation, you might not need visa sponsorship? If you have a parent or grandparent from that country then you might be able to apply for citizenship, and there are some countries (eg. Canada) where you might realistically apply for self-sponsored permanent residency. There are far too many variables here to give any specific advice, so you’re going to have to do your own research and see what options are open to you.

Moving to another country can be risky, especially if your employment is tied to a visa sponsorship. It’s worth taking a moment to highlight this: If you land a job in another country and then quit – or get fired or laid off – and losing your job invalidates the terms of your visa, then you will probably need to leave the country within 1-3 months (again, the exact details vary a lot). Some countries will give you a chance to find a new job and reinstate your visa without much fuss, while others will insist that you leave the country and start a whole new visa application from scratch if you take up a new job offer. These kinds of situations usually give a lot of extra leverage to your employer – the whole new life you’ve built in their country is in their hands. Your employer understands this. In some cases they might give you some preferential treatment – knowing that it would be much more difficult to get you back if they let you go – but, particularly for junior roles, they might use this leverage to push you into poorer working conditions (eg. asking you to work unpaid overtime, denying you promotions, or worse). Working in the games industry can be precarious at the best of times, but migrant workers are in an even riskier position.

Also worth saying: Generally speaking, you don’t necessarily need to go to university to get into games. But if you are planning to emigrate then you might need a degree in order to qualify for a visa – and if you can get a Masters degree or a PhD, even better. As ever, the details depend on what country you’re looking at.

If you can go to a new country and apply for jobs while you’re physically there, that might help your chances. This is usually illegal if you you’re visiting on a tourist visa (or a visa waiver scheme, like most UK passport holders visiting the US would be) but there may be legal routes available – as per the visa discussion above.

It’s also worth considering that, while it would be illegal to go to a job interview without a suitable visa… I’m not a lawyer, but I don’t think there’s a law against meeting a friend for a coffee and a chat… and if your friend works as a hiring manager at a games studio, and the coffee shop just happens to be a short walk away from their office?… I doubt that these incidental details would constitute a crime. However I would advise you to not to tell people about this friendly catch-up, particular if you are talking to a cop or an immigration officer, just in case they get confused and mistake it for a job interview.

There’s not a lot of point in dwelling on Brexit in 2025, but in case you weren’t there (or weren’t paying attention) at the time: In January 2020 the UK formally left the EU, and as a result we lost our right to work in EU countries. That’s not to say it’s impossible to get a job in Europe, but just that it became a lot harder – it requires an employment visa (ie. extra costs and paperwork, which companies don’t like) whereas previously you could basically just fly over and look for a job as easily if you were in the UK. The pool of available job opportunities for British graduates has been severely diminished as a result of Brexit, and you might want to remember that when thinking about who to vote for.

If you qualify for an EU-member state passport – the requirements vary by country, but it’s usually a question of where your parents or grandparents were born – you might want to consider applying for dual nationality and restoring your Freedom of Movement privileges. If you’re worried about having to learn a new language: Some studios primarily work in the local language, but many of them use English as a lingua franca. In my experience it mostly depends on the culture of the country where they are based – eg. French studios usually work in French, but I get the impression that German studios often work in English. Barcelona and Warsaw appear to be developing as major game development hubs at the moment, and I think many of those studios work in English.

If you want some perspective on working abroad: My first job in games took me from the UK to India. It was fun and interesting, paid more (on balance) than I would have earned in the UK, and also put me in a position to go on some quick, cheap, slightly-lower-than-usual-carbon-emission holidays around Asia. There was a few of us migrant workers in the office helping each other get by – a bit like Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, but with better food. I made some good friends! I had some great times. It was one of the best decisions I’ve made in my life.

There were challenges too – the relentless heat and complex web of government bureaucracy, but also the sheer distance between me, and my friends and family back home. I was living there for a little over two years, and I would fly home for a few weeks every six months. I got to feeling like my life was divided into two separate spheres – like I would pack my ‘normal life’ up in a box when I left the UK, go spend six months in my little rental apartment while I focused on work and maintained my social life via email, and then fly back home, unpack my life and air it out for a few weeks. I’d open Christmas presents and go to birthday parties, squeeze in some quick weekend visits to friends around the UK, and then pack it all up again for another six months. I felt a bit like one of those cicadas that spend years living underground, then emerge for a few months to fly around in an orgiastic swarm.

In some ways it felt like my ‘normal life’ was on hold during those two years – like I was sacrificing two years worth of stuff I could have been doing back home by taking this step to fly away and build the foundations of a career. But that too is a matter of perspective – the whole idea that my life’s centre of gravity was back in the UK just reflects my attitude towards my friends, and how I conceptually define what ‘my life’ is exactly. There’s a perfectly healthy alternative attitude where you might simply move to a new place and settle down and start a new life there – after all, you’re probably going to move away from your hometown sooner or later, so why not settle in this new place? – or where you don’t psychologically anchor your life to any particular location and simply ‘live’ in your body, wherever you happen to be.

Anyway. That’s all just one person’s experience, but if you’re thinking about emigrating for work then perhaps it can give you a sense of what to prepare for.

6. On Networking & Connections

Bad news, introverts: Having friends is extremely helpful.

I’m notoriously bad at talking to strangers, so for this section I’m just going to direct you towards Darius Kazemi’s guide to networking. It’s comprehensive, although it’s also 20 years old – there’s probably more to be said about modern social media. I, however, am not the man to say it.

The one big point I want to make on this topic is that you should primarily network with your peers. If you approach this with the expectation that you will show up to some industry events, schmooze with important senior figures and simply dazzle them with your raw talent until they offer you a job, then you are setting yourself up for disappointment.

Focus on people who are in a similar position as you. In this first stage of your career it might feel like you’re all rivals fighting over scraps, but give it time. Build a community. Help each other out – share links to job listings, encourage each other, practice giving and receiving criticism of each others’ projects, and try collaborating on an indie game if you can’t find work. Rise together. Celebrate each other’s successes. If you’re singularly focused on landing a job then this might feel like a waste of time, but in the short term it should be very beneficial for your mental health, and in the long term… who knows where it might lead?

Many of my jobs have come through just happening to know someone in the right place at the right time. That’s not to say the whole industry is just closed circles of friends giving each other jobs (although that definitely does happen sometimes) but having a network of contacts provides some potentially huge advantages:

1. Knowing when a vacancy is coming up, before it is advertised. Sometimes you can get your resume in front of a hiring manager before they write the job description. In the ideal scenario, you might come across as such a perfect candidate that they don’t even bother to advertise the role, and simply hire you immediately – saving a lot of time and effort for everyone.
2. Insider knowledge on the project. If you have a source of information on the inside, it’s probably written into their contract that they shouldn’t discuss it with outsiders like you. Nevertheless… human beings have been known to sometimes bend these rules, and this can give you a huge edge over your competition. The job description might describe the project in broad terms like “We are developing the next generation of co-op puzzle FPS” but if you have a friend on the inside they might give you some more specific details like “It’s a sort of multiplayer version of Knightmare but set in a bright, zany fantasy world because our art director is a big Rick & Morty fan” – which would give you some much more specific touchpoints around which to orient your portfolio, or pitch yourself in an interview. This kind of thing gives you an unfair advantage over other applicants, and I strongly suggest that you take advantage of it.
3. A personal recommendation from someone they already trust. Part of the purpose of interviews is to try and cut through the fog and determine whether you can be trusted to do the job or not, and if you have a mutual acquaintance in the middle – like a former coworker (or coursemate) who is already working there – then it can shortcut you over the credibility gap. If we assume that your insider friend has all the secret knowledge of what the project requires and also what you are capable of, and they’re willing to stake some of their social capital on vouching that you’d be a good fit, then that can give you a huge boost. That said, don’t just assume that this will be an instant win button for you – you still need to show up and demonstrate that you’re a serious candidate.

7. On AI

The short version is that I think you should learn about AI tools, but my current feeling is that you should avoid using them. Games are creative works, and every time you bring generative AI into the process you’re inevitably making your game a bit more derivative and stale – that’s just how this technology works. I’m all in favour of using tools to work more efficiently – I spend half my working day writing complicated spreadsheets to model and balance games for me – but most of the use cases people lay out for generative AI are about automating the creative process more than the production process, which seems to me like the wrong avenue to take.

Nevertheless, in the current business climate studios may want you to sound receptive to AI – I get the impression that many big businesses are committing themselves to using AI tools in order to secure investment money, and the downstream effect is that employees are sometimes required to use AI tools just to make the organisation appear serious about it, even if doing so is actually making work slower and harder for the team. This approach may seem very irrational if you think of a company as a group of people who build products together, but it might make more sense if you think of a company as a performative scheme to secure investment capital.

I think there are interesting uses for machine learning, but a lot of the examples on my mind relate to analysing live data streams and giving the machine limited control over some tuning variables. Working on a live game involves lots of rote data analysis, and some of these processes could be automated and sped up to the point where interesting new functionality becomes possible. It could even lead to new gameplay features, potentially? But – here, now, in the year 2025 – when you hear someone talking about AI tools in game development, they usually mean it in the sense that you’ll write a prompt and click a button and generate some slop. It sucks.

As a job applicant, you should be aware that many recruiters and HR teams are starting to use AI agents to help summarise and filter your applications. On some level I can sympathise with their situation – because of all the recent layoffs and the small number of job vacancies on offer, they’re generally getting a LOT more applications than usual, and hiring teams are rarely given the necessary resources to properly sift through them all. The thing on my mind is that… (bearing in mind that I haven’t seen these tools in action, so maybe I’m being unfair here…) if you ask an AI to summarise a candidate’s application, I would expect some amount of the analysis to be hallucinated – instead of accurately summarising of your profile, it might just generate what a summary of your profile could be expected to sound like, regardless of whether it’s true or not. Judging from other implementations of AI, you could be an ideal candidate and the AI agent might simply make up some disqualifying information about you. That’s bad news for you, but it’s also a self-inflicted problem for the studio – they risk throwing away great candidates before they reach the interview rounds.

This brings us back to the mantra: There are many factors that might prevent you getting a job that have nothing to do with you personally. I think this use of AI is particularly frustrating because it seems like the hiring teams involved have consciously chosen to degrade their information sources at a time when clarity is at its most valuable, but who am I to argue with a million breathlessly enthusiastic LinkedIn posts by AI start-up founders?

8. The Application Treadmill

Apply to anything that feels appropriate for you. Apply for multiple things at once. Think about what kind of jobs you’re willing to do, how far you’re willing to move to get them, and what kind of salary you would want; set your personal parameters, and then apply to anything that falls inside them. Many of these places will reject you; many more will ignore you completely. It’s fine. Keep going. It’s a stupid, messy process and you’re probably doing everything you should be doing, in a situation where there are many factors outside your control.

Do some research into salaries. They will vary from city to city because of local market conditions (eg. house prices) and they’ll vary even more from country to country (eg. due to different tax systems) – your best option probably involves reaching out to someone who works in this city (or ideally, at that particular studio) and see if they’ll give you a sense of what would be expected. Different companies have different attitudes towards salary information – usually they’ll have certain bands for each level of seniority, and they’ll hope to sign you up for as little as possible within the appropriate band. There’s a natural tension between asking for a lower salary and hoping it improves your chances of being hired, or asking for a larger salary so you get more money if you do get hired. I don’t have any advice for how to value yourself, except that you should understand what kind of number is TOO low, and what kind of number is TOO high.

Job descriptions are usually idealistic. It’s very common to hire candidates who don’t match every requirement – one way of looking at it is that the people writing the job description are ‘aiming high’ and hoping to find a GREAT candidate, but under the right conditions they’d probably settle for someone who is merely GOOD; another factor could be that they overestimated what the role actually requires (and perhaps scared off some otherwise perfectly good candidates – as discussed above, the people writing these things are human and sometimes they are bad at their own job).

You shouldn’t assume that you absolutely need to tick every box on the list of required skills and experience, but at the same time… that list exists for a reason. You should take it seriously as a sign of the general shape of what’s required – you might not tick every box, but you should aim to tick most of them, at least. See how many requirements you definitely meet, and then look into the ones you almost meet and think about whether there’s something you can do to nudge yourself over the line. And remember – meeting the requirements will not help you if you do not communicate this in your cover letter and interviews. Be ready to talk about yourself in the interview, highlighting how your past experiences have prepared you for this particular position.

If you’re applying for different types of role, tailor your CV and resume as appropriate. I tweak my cover letter a little for each individual application, but I keep copies of each one and usually I’m just picking a suitable match from the archive and changing a few lines – it can take a little time to write the originals, but the shorter edits can be done in just a few minutes.

In my experience, having a third-party recruiter involved is usually a net positive. You might sometimes find they want to put you forward for a job you don’t like the sound of, but you can just say ‘No’. As I understand it, they usually get paid a commission in proportion to your agreed salary, so it’s in their interest for you to get paid as much as possible. On more than one occasion, recruiters have landed me jobs with higher salaries than I was expecting – they usually have a much better idea of how much is TOO much than you do, because they’re out there this every day for a living.

Always remember: There are many factors that might prevent you getting a job that have nothing to do with you personally. Rejection sucks, and (depending on your circumstances) you may have perfectly valid reasons to feel sad and frustrated when it happens, but you should not assume it was simply because you were not good enough. Do something to clear your mind if that helps – go for a walk, hang with a friend, stroke a cat, or whatever – then pick yourself up and get back to it.

You will rarely get useful feedback following a rejection, so I recommend finding other people to review your CV / portfolio / cover letter, or talk about your interview experience. Try looking into mentoring organisations like Limit Break, if you can find one that fits your circumstances. And do feel free to ask for feedback after a rejection, if you have the chance – they may well fob you off with some generic reply that sympathises with your situation while saying nothing about your application specifically (a little epistolary trick that denies you any cause to disagree with their decision – and another sign that their workplace culture is perhaps not ideal) but sometimes they slip up and accidentally say something helpful.

9. Advice For When You’ve Landed That First Job

I’m really just distilling my attitude towards life here, but I think you should be open-hearted, but wary. I do advise you to be a little cynical and sceptical of some of the messaging you receive from your new employers, but I also think it’s good for you (and everyone around you) if you work proactively, and project some positivity in your interactions.

Your co-workers are often facing difficult situations just as you are, and you should support them where possible. Quite what that means will vary from person to person – eg. whether they want peace and quiet to focus on their tasks, or clear communication between different collaborators. But at the same time, you should be aware that some of your colleagues might not have your best interests at heart – you may sometimes find yourself working with people who try to take advantage of you. If someone keeps passing on messages on behalf of other people, reach out to the other people from time to time and verify that the messages are accurate. If someone keeps asking you to ignore official procedures, find someone more senior with whom you can discuss the situation. If things start going seriously badly, keep a record of what happened and when – and save it somewhere private, so the company doesn’t control your access to it. (And maybe try to write your records in a way that doesn’t divulge project details that are under NDA?)

Your employers on the other hand are perhaps less deserving of your trust. I’m not saying you should work against them – you are a part of their organisation and, to some extent, their wins are your wins. I just think you should take their supportive gestures with a pinch of salt. I think the amount of support that companies are willing to offer their employees varies according to the current circumstances. When times are good they might offer things like fun company events, subsidised perks like therapy sessions, support for remote work, or DEI initiatives; but when times are bad these things might suddenly evaporate, or even be used against you. I’m not saying you shouldn’t engage with these things, but just that – in my opinion – you should maintain some boundaries between your private and professional life. One example that comes to mind: If you are planning to get pregnant in the next year or so, maybe you don’t need to tell HR about it in advance? Most of the time that kind of information might just be a fun thing to discuss while chatting over lunch… but in some situations, it could make the difference between whether you get laid off or not, and you probably wouldn’t realise you were in one of those situations until it’s too late.

There’s an old adage that HR is not your friend, but that’s not to say that you should view them as some sort of enemy. I think the way to think of it is that they exist to protect the company from problems relating to employees. You may experience the pointy end of that if they decide that you are the problem, but until that day there is also a lot of scope for the kind of nice, friendly things they will tell you about when you first join. It really depends on the situation. I’ve gone to HR lots of times for help with small issues – particularly when I was working overseas and needed to deal with visa paperwork – but I think there’s a certain threshold where problems become serious enough that your first stop should be to take some independent legal advice. If you’re in a messy situation where you have a serious complaint with a co-worker, I recommend getting a solid understanding of your legal position before you take formal action at work.

Anyway, back to talking about bosses: Worldwide, we’ve seen about 40,000 game developers laid off in the last few years, sometimes from teams that had been very successful. It seems like a big overcorrection from the Covid-era investment boom, and I think many of these developers will (eventually) end up being re-hired at a higher cost over the next few years – causing a lot of stress and pain and wasting money in the process. The thing to remember is that these things can happen, sometimes in situations that make no sense – even if all the signs within your studio are looking good, there could (to invent a hypothetical example) be some issue at a parent company that suddenly rolls downhill and demands that your managers make significant layoffs, or shutter the whole studio. When the chips are down, management will view their relationship with you as being strictly business; my advice is that you should do the same. Enjoy the parties, but don’t get too sucked in by cosy, friendly vibes – ultimately, your relationship to your employer is defined by your contract. Always remember that free pizza represents a very cheap form of compensation for unpaid overtime. Your workplace is not a summer camp (unless you work at a summer camp).

My number one legal tip is don’t write things down. Mainly the focus here is on emails and chat messages that are sent through company servers (eg. through your work email account, or in-house chat server) but it also applies to your private emails, handwritten notes, and so on. And when I say “things” I specifically mean anything that might one day be of interest to a lawyer working against you. Don’t share information that you shouldn’t be sharing. Don’t make jokes that could be considered abusive, even when you’re in a private chat with a work buddy who feels the same way (also – quite aside from the legal issues – please just don’t do this, it’s not a good way to live). Be very careful about which files you copy off your work laptop – your actions may be logged in some way, and if you accidentally copy something work-related, you could be violating your NDA. Don’t lay out your secret plans to undermine the terms of your contract, or do serious crimes outside of work. Even if you go back and delete the messages or emails later, there is probably still a record of them on the server, and if the company’s lawyers decide to rake through their database and see what they’ve got on you, it will mean you’ve basically handed them a box of ammo to use against you. It sounds a bit dark and threatening, but really all I’m saying here is that you should be professional in your communication – don’t write anything down that you might regret being read out in a courtroom someday.

That said, one of my top productivity tips is to write everything down. I usually end each day by writing an annotated To Do list for tomorrow, and a log of everything I did that day (or that happened around me – like if a big decision was made during a meeting, I’d like to record who made it and what the arguments were). I find it extremely useful – the To Do list helps me get back up to speed immediately at the start of each day, and the logs help me remember lots of small details over the long term (eg. thinking of a typical design problem… if a new feature means that one of your old features isn’t working the way it used to, you can check your notes and read a little summary of what the intentions were for both features at the times when they were made, and think about whether you should redesign the old feature in a way that stays true to its aims while taking the new feature into account.) You never know what you may need to recall in future, and if you can spare a moment to write a few bullet points down then you can safely forget everything when you go home, and get on with the rest of your life.

To complicate the matter further, it’s also good practice to get things in writing. If someone asks you to do something unusual, try to make sure you’ve got a record of it – something with a timestamp and their name on it ideally, like an email or a Jira ticket. If you’ve asked someone else to do something important, send it in writing – so they can’t ‘forget’ about it and deny you ever asked them. Create papertrails, in case something goes wrong and you need to provide evidence of what you did, or why. As a junior, you probably wouldn’t be doing anything important enough to cause serious problems, but it doesn’t hurt to start thinking in these terms now – try to find ways to do this without sounding passive-aggressive to your co-workers.

10. Make Stuff

I know that this is a post about getting a job, but – relating to my first point – maybe it’s worth thinking about why you want to work in the games industry. If you really love games and have a head full of ideas and want to make games of your own, you can just… do it. You don’t need anyone’s permission. You can start today!

It’s hard! It involves lots of different skillsets, and I would guess that you might only possess one or two to any great depth. You probably have some ideas in your head that you could partially make yourself, but you feel like you need a little team around you to do the things you can’t do. That’s a very normal situation! But it’s also only one perspective on things – as if you have a final, commercial-grade product in mind, and you’re thinking about the complete journey to get there and feeling overwhelmed.

Try adjusting your expectations. Instead of thinking about a complete, finished game, think about what parts of the game you could make on your own. This could just mean lots of artwork, small playable tech demos, or even just making glossy pitch decks for games you don’t expect to actually make. Look through some asset libraries for free things you could build your ideas around. Download some tools you can’t use and make some low-quality placeholder assets, if you prefer – it can be fun, and it might be enough to get your core idea off the ground. Look for an open-source project or a game with some mod tools you can use as a base, and then splice in whatever it is you want to create.

I used to feel very sceptical about my early solo projects. I felt like nobody was going to care about a little scrolling shoot-’em-up I made in Game Maker, so why bother? – wouldn’t it be better a better use of my time to do some programming tutorials or learn to use Unreal Editor? But now that I’ve been on the other side of the table, I do look at applicants’ work with an open mind. Professional game development is often very small-scale and specialised, and it’s unrealistic to expect everyone to have all the skills needed to follow a particular blueprint – as long as you’re showing off a relevant skill, I don’t really mind what format it comes in.

My best work usually comes in the form of complicated spreadsheets. If I was considering you as a candidate for an economy design role, the single best thing to have in your portfolio would be a well-made Excel file – something that shows you can work with complex calculations, has the rough shape of a realistic game economy, is structured to be intuitive to edit, outputs well-structured blocks of data for export, and perhaps demonstrates a sense of humour. That’s a very niche example, but most roles are quite niche in scope (at least, at large studios).

Putting aside the value of adding to your portfolio, making stuff is just good to do. It’s key to refining your craft and sense of taste, sharpening your practical skills, and other personal benefits:

• Finding a compromise between your ambition, ability, and how much time you’re willing to spend on a thing will develop your sense of scope and project management
• Dabbling in other skills – eg. composing some music and sourcing sound effects for an otherwise-silent game you’ve been working on – will help broaden your skillset and perhaps inspire you in unexpected ways
• Collaborating with other people could lead to a long-lasting relationship, or at the very least just give you someone to talk to while you slowly go mad working on this thing
• Releasing a finished game gives you a cool thing to put in your portfolio, but also might somehow make you some money (eg. through putting it out it for sale yourself, or showing it to an indie publisher and getting some funding to support a more professional release)
• Making things can be fun (NB. this is not guaranteed) and can help take your mind off how hopeless a long period of unemployment can feel

Sign up for some gamejams, like Ludum Dare, or one of the 20 billion running on itch.io. Try replicating something from a game you like and make a little tech demo you can experiment with. Try making something you HAVEN’T seen in a game before and submit it to the Experimental Games Showcase. Make a mod and release it through ModDB. Make some in-game content and release it through the Steam workshop system. Livestream yourself working on your project on Twitch and take suggestions from chat. Record an album inspired by a game you like and release it on Bandcamp. Start a podcast where you offer post-match analysis of competitive eSports and discuss what this tells you about the state of the meta. Start a podcast where you offer post-stream analysis of random people playing nice, casual singleplayer games on Twitch, and discuss what this tells you about the state of the meta. Paint a picture. Grow some vegetables. Call a friend you haven’t seen in a while and ask if they want to hang out. Live.

You can be creative and live a fulfilling live outside of work; in many ways you will have more creative potential outside of professional game development, since working in the industry usually means signing agreements that give your employers ownership rights over anything you do, and every major decision you make needs to be considered through a lens of profitability because it would be irresponsible not to when you have a team of people relying on you to get paid at the end of the month. It kinda sucks to be working in an unfulfilling job just for the money and then going home and trying to squeeze some creativity out of your evenings, but it can also be a curse when you finally land a job you care about, only to find that the tasks and projects you are assigned to are things that you hate.

A job in the games industry is a job, and…. well okay yes, sometimes it’s a lot of fun, and it’s a good opportunity to get a broader understanding of the whole game production process, or the business side of working with a publisher or development partners and so on, but…. there are going to be good days and bad days just like any other job, and probably less money and less job security than in many of the alternative careers you might be considering. It’s probably more fulfilling to have a stable life surrounded by friends and (perhaps) family than to find yourself looking for a new job and relocating to a new city every few years. And there are many other contexts in which you could make games (or be creative in the general sense), without needing to sign any contracts or adhere to NDAs.

Always remember: Funk is making something out of nothing.