Games Development Jobs

Of all the games development roles the job of games designer is probably the hardest one to apply for, especially if your artistic or coding skills are minimal. Games design jobs are also hard to pin down as a job description as you might find yourself asked to perform a multitude of different tasks from creation of design documents through to mapping out of levels to “scripting” the flow of a game.
Here are some general tips on things you can do to snag a games designer position:-

Create a Design Document : Consider creating a formal document explaining a game design of your own invention. This is hard to judge as you need to be in depth yet also keep the actual length of the document to a minimum so that who reviews your work when considering an interview doesn’t have to wade through pages of information. Create the document in a standard word processor (Microsoft Word format is probably best) and be sure to include plenty of diagrams, even if they are only simple ones created using rectangles, circles and arrows. By all means design a very simple game, but be sure to describe how the game will play, what the player has to do and how it they win or lose. Most important of all, stuff in as many original features as you can.

Improve an Existing Game : It’s probably best not to choose a game developed by the company you are applying to, but there is some worth in critiquing an existing game, pointing out areas in which it could be improved and suggesting ways in which improvements could be made. Your own full game design as detailed above is always preferable to this however.

Create a Level Map : There are many PC games which come with level editors, for example Quake. Try mapping out an interesting level using the editor for one of these games. The more well known the game is the better, as it means whoever looks at your work is more likely to actually try your level out if the game used to run it is easily available to them.

Code Your Game Design : Obviously this will require some programming experience, but you don’t necessarily need to learn something like C++ or Java. Shockwave and Flash are both good tools for creating simple (and not so simple) games in. There are also several PC based games creation packages available and versions of BASIC (e.g. Dark BASIC) which even allow 3D games to be created.

Scripting : This is another coding related skill, and is another one that is hard to demonstrate if you haven’t worked in the games industry before. This is not the act of creating a script for the in game characters dialogue (although sometimes this task does fall to the games designer to do) but in creating the flow of the game. This skill is best described by an example. Say the player has just entered a room for the first time. A script will be triggered that tells the game which enemies it should create and where in the world they should be, what pickups to spawn and things of that nature.