Category: News

Whether you’re just starting out, looking for something new, or just seeing what’s out there, the Gamasutra Job Board is the place where game developers move ahead in their careers.

Gamasutra’s Job Board is the most diverse, most active, and most established board of its kind in the video game industry, serving companies of all sizes, from indie to triple-A.

Here are just some of the many, many positions being advertised right now. If you’re a recruiter looking for talent, you can also post jobs here.

Location: Austin, Texas

The Software Engineer is responsible for owning the implementation and support of features for games, the creation of games, and game services. This includes working with Art, Design, and Production to fully understand the requirements of each feature and working with a team of engineers to ensure a quality and timely delivery.

Location: Tokyo, Japan

Square Enix is looking for motivated and experienced artists, programmers, and technical artists to join its Research and Development department in its Advanced Technology Division. The department aims to bring together experts from the fields of rending, animation, physics, simulation, AI, networking, big data, VR, and sound to research state of the art game technology and contribute to multiple projects. 

Location: Woodland Hills, California

Infinity Ward is looking for two additional Engineers, one Senior and one Associate, to join its Game Code engineering team. They’re after people passionate about games with strong C++ and math skills. The Game Code engineering team tends to work closely with Designers and Animators to solve complex engineering problems.

Location: Los Gatos, California

Senior Producers at Cryptic Studios work closely with designers, artists and programmers to organize and drive the game development process. A Senior Producer’s number one priority within the development structure is to make sure the overall development and business goals are being driven towards and met. 

Looking to learn learn alternative approaches to emitting particles from game environment elements, characters and various other renderable objects utilizing shaders and compute and textures to drive and animate particle emission for GPU-based particle systems? 

Then you need to come to the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco next March because it’s going to be packed with practical, informative sessions, including a talk by veteran game dev Christina Coffin on just this subject.

In her Programming track talk “Beyond Emitters: Shader and Surface Driven GPU Particle FX Techniques” Coffin will share details on how particle emitting surfaces and shaders can transfer material attributes and other properties to various spawned particle types. Critically, her talk will cover technical implementation details, various optimizations, and workflow approaches.  

It promises to be a fantastic talk, though you may want to brush up on the fiddly bits of rendering pipelines (compute, shaders, etc) before you see it!

And if that’s not up your alley, no worries — we have lots more GDC 2018 announcements to make in the coming months! For more information about GDC 2018 visit the show’s official website, and subscribe to regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS.

Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent UBM Americas

At the request of the Electronic Software Association, the Federal Communications Commission has extended an existing waiver that temporarily makes video games exempt from the accessibility requirements set forth in the Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010.

This marks the third time video games have been given temporary exemption since 2012, but the FCC says it has granted this latest extension under the understanding that this latest waiver request will be its last. 

As explained by video game accessibility specialist Ian Hamilton, the area of CVAA that applies to games deals solely with communication. As such, the requirements don’t necessarily mean that games in general must become fully accessible. Rather, the CVAA requires any communication functionality like in-game chat and any UI used to navigate and operate communications functionality must be accessible to people of varying sight, motor, speech, cognitive, and hearing ability. Those stipulations are fully explained under section 14.21 here.

In the waiver request, the ESA argues that the extension is necessary since “the unique nature of video game software continues to create correspondingly unique technical challenges to applying Advanced Communications Services accessibility solutions.”

The FCC agreed to extend the waiver until December 31, 2018, meaning any game released after this date must be compliant, unless they can prove to the FCC that it would not be feasible for them to do so given the “effort and expense needed to achieve accessibility at that point in the development stage.” Games that are part way through development when the waiver expires will then be able to take its stage of development into account when considering that feasibility. 

While the FCC did agree to extend the waiver until December 31, 2018, it did note that a number of games like Splatoon 2 and Minecraft have introduced accessible communication options through either smartphone apps or text-to-speech tools. In its eyes, those features prove that the industry is making progress on the accessibility front and that the final one-year extension should then be sufficient. 

The ESA itself also notes that communication between video game developers and accessibility advocates have increased in the past year, something the FCC says further reinforces its decision.

The FCC says that the waiver extension period is to will allow game developers and companies additional time to “work on solutions designed to eliminate [advanced communications services] accessibility barriers, and for this purpose will continue engaging with the disability community.” 

The waiver in full, along with the full text of the CVAA legislation, can be read on the FCC’s website. 

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

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As game designers we’re striving to fill our games with interesting choices. One of the most powerful ways of achieving that is to make them meaningful: touching values, emotions, concepts that people care about. Some create elaborate fiction achieving gravity through the art of storytelling. But for many the holy grail lies in designing systems that lead to meaningful choices organically through gameplay.

Our own This War of Mine is praised for doing just that. Why are choices in this game so emotionally meaningful? You could say it’s the setting – civilians in wartime – and you’d be right to an extent. But such a blanket statement is not very useful when trying to improve the craft of game design. In this post I’d like to explore the conflict at the heart of many choices in This War of Mine – and see how it can be used in other contexts.

The first thing we need to consider is player motivation. We use different tools to make players progress through the game. Outside of presenting them with inherently fun to play with mechanisms (aka “the toy”) we usually have to deliver a structure for player motivation: levels to ascend, maps to explore, collectibles to collect, puzzles to solve, high score to beat, story to see through. There are many patterns, but they all amount to presenting the player with an outside goal to “beat the game”. An external motivation.

While all games provide that kind motivational structure, a lot go beyond that. We sometimes wrap systems and mechanics in rich fiction, building worlds players want to spend time in, immerse themselves in roles they find fascinating. Studies show that games which allow players to roleplay their “ideal self” are more motivating than others. It’s true beyond the obvious genre of role-playing games. An ideal self can be expressed in Mass Effect as well as in Team Fortress – through playstyles and characterisation afforded by game mechanics. This is an internal motivation, stemming from our own self-concept, not an external structure such as a reward system.

The goals from the external structure are achieved by making optimal choices as far as game mechanics go. Say you play a survival game: the optimal way to survive is to hoard as many items and develop your tools as quickly as possible to prepare for whatever challenge the game throws at you.

Coherence of the game narrative however is not about optimal choice. People stay true to fiction by sacrificing efficiency. For example, they walk around hub cities in MMO’s even though it’s clearly a waste of time from a game progression perspective. But it’s exactly the thing you have to do if your motivation calls for narrative coherence.

When these two motivations are combined to create tension, a conflict develops. It’s critical to underline that the conflict is between player motivations, not game layers. Conflict between layers – gameplay and narration – is called ludonarrative dissonance and is usually a bad thing. Nathan Drake The Raging Murderer can testify.

This War of Mine exploited the conflict of motivations to great extent. The “optimal” way to play the game was to gather as much resources as possible: it was a survival game, with resource management at its core. But fiction was loaded with moral dilemmas: do I steal med supplies from an elderly couple who can’t resist me? The gamist, goal-oriented motivation told you to steal. The narrative motivation told you not to. Most people hope they could take the moral high ground in terrible times and the game puts that self-concept to the test, generating a meaningful, difficult decision.

The same principle can be carried over to many other games and genres: Do you kill an innocent creature to get the best sword in the game? Do you destroy property of innocent bystanders to secure an optional objective? These choices lead to difficult choices for players because it’s their ideal self on the line, not abstract strategies that have value only within the magic circle of the game.

When gamist agenda can be coaxed into conflict with coherence of self-concept, the magic happens. Going with one leads to a suboptimal choice in the other. It’s a tradeoff with efficiency on one end and disillusionment about yourself on the other.

Of course, player motivation is not the whole story. After all even people agonising over stolen meds in This War of Mine are perfectly happy going on a killing spree in the latest Call of Duty. What gives?

The answer lies with the avatar. We enter the magic circle voluntarily, suspending some of constraints that govern our behaviour “in the real world”. Hence player character motivation becomes equally important for meaningful decisions. Our self-concept ceases to be solely about what we would like to do in a specific situation, but what we would like to do if we were the role we are impersonating.

If the game asks us to step into the shoes of a supersoldier, we’ll be perfectly happy to kill the “bad guys” by the dozen, that’s what supersoldiers do. But throw in a wrench, say, the (in)famous “No russian” level in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and you suddenly have people tiptoeing through a level without firing a single bullet, or missing on purpose. All because their self-concept extended to the role of a soldier does not include gunning down heaps of unarmed civilians. As a bonus, you get lots of controversy.

There are ways this can backfire though. Players engage with games to experience something positive – even if it’s cathartic positivity through tears. If you present the choice of efficiency vs. self-concept you better make sure no choice leads to an inferior gameplay experience. Dishonored, an otherwise excellent title, punished you narratively for playing with the tools it gave you. Abusing the beautiful, deep and satisfying combat system led to a game world state that was undesirable if your self-concept demanded you be “good”. This is a perfectly valid dilemma to have – you can’t be “good” by rampaging around slitting throats and making rats devour people. The problem was that the alternative – playing stealthily – could be argued as a comparatively less satisfying way to play. Hence the goal/narration dissonance led to an unsatisfactory experience instead of a meaningful choice.

While the conflict between self-concept and the gamist agenda is not fit for use in all games, I’d encourage you to keep it in the back of your head, especially if your’re aiming for meaninfgul choices and non-trivial subject matter of your game. After all, life is often about choosing between what is fun/efficient/easy and what is worthwhile. Games built on this tension can be truly something different.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Artur Ganszyniec (@garnek) and Marta Fijak (@YerisTR) for feedback on the piece. MTFBWY!

Feel free to reach out to me @qoubah

Game Developers Conference organizers are proud to continue their partnership with leading childcare provider KiddieCorp and offer GDC 2018 attendees access to an on-site children’s program.

So if you’re planning to bring kids with you when you attend GDC 2018 in San Francisco next March, please note that the advance deadline to register for the program is February 20th, 2018 — less than two months away!

You want to register early, because registration is handled on a first-come, first-served basis. It’s also possible to register on-site, but there is no guarantee KiddieCorp will be able to accommodate on-site registrations and doing so is not recommended.

The perennially popular KiddieCorp children’s program is for children ages 6 months through 12 years old and will be situated within the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California.

The KiddieCorp team charges an affordable hourly rate for their services and snacks and beverages will be provided, but meals do need to be supplied by parents each day.

Plus, the KiddieCorp team will engage your children with activities they want to attend, providing you with that critical peace of mind so you can attend your sessions and events worry-free. Activities include exciting themes, arts & crafts, group games, music & movement, board games, story time, dramatic play, etc.

KiddieCorp provides actvities appropriate for each age group, using safe and sturdy equipment. Children can make their own choices within KiddieCorp’s program.

To learn more about the service and register your child as a participant, head over to the KiddieCorp GDC 2018 children’s program registration page. Again, make sure to register early as availability is limited and handled on a first-come, first-served basis.

This partnership is of course just one of many ongoing GDC efforts aimed at making it easier for a broader variety of game industry professionals to attend and speak at the conference.

For more information on GDC 2018, visit the show’s official website, or subscribe to regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS.

Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent UBM Americas

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

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Hi.

My name is Stas, and I am a full-time indie developer for a two and half years by now (one could count this as a success already, with some reservations) from Ukraine.

What is this text?

I’ll try to describe shortly (well, you can see I lie to myself pretty often), what it’s like to be a self-taught indie developer without a hit (and chances to make one in nearest future). It is not that kind of story you can see in Indie Game: The Movie or Noclip documentaries or from the GDC scene (but if you are going to make games by yourself without experience in this industry, you should be prepared for a story like this). There is no happy end or any outcome at all, just my retrospective on the last years and two releases.

Who am I?

Before the jump into indie gamedev, I was a freelance programmer and worked on social and casino games, but on September 2015 I quit my job (or to be more specific, one project has been ended, and I didn’t look for another, I’m not sure if I brave enough to just quit), and decided to spend my savings to finish my own game started on gamesjam while ago.

With a team of 3 enthusiasts (artist, sound-designer and narrative designer), who liked my gamejam entry, we started to work to make a real game from it. The mistakes you can make during your first project is a separate big topic, so here is my summary for a first indie year:

• I spent half the year and money on making solo prototypes before I finally returned to the game we started with team;

• I spent the rest of the money, while we were trying to make the game on enthusiasm – others worked at their free time for the future revenue share. They worked hard, but I learned the hard way, in the most cases that’s not enough to finish even so small game as ours;

• More than 20 publishers said no to Tribal Pass;

• I almost signed with an investor on a $5k, but then just borrowed that money to keep all the revenue (I was too optimistic, but this decision saved me enough money to survive the year after release). I spent that money to pay my teammates, so they concentrated on our game at least at 20 hours per week, in exchange for that I kept the part of revenue we could share with investor;

• We went to the Early Access on Steam in July 2016, and it was a disaster. At that time our game was the mix of tactical runner and text quests, and we faced a lot of problems with that. Players didn’t get the texts, localisations were way too expensive, and every new quest took more time and money than new core gameplay features. We ran out of money, and I made the hardest decision – instead of struggling with further development without budget, I just cut all the mechanics which didn’t work (so I spent about $3k on quests and stuff which didn’t make it to the final game);

What happened next is a story of this text. So, at the moment I am the author of two games:

Now you see why I am at the bottom of gamedev and not at the top seller’s list. But just like a year ago, I’m sure my next game should be good for real.

I was thinking about text structure for some time (not very long) and decided to divide my story about the life after the first release into a few all-known periods. Let’s begin.

1 Denial

So, I have my first game released, but I’m in debt for $5k. As you know (if you don’t – you should review your business plan), you can get payment from steam for each month only at the end of the next one. To keep going, I sold my car and closed my debts without waiting for the results. Tribal Pass earned this amount of money during the first 1.5 months (a month in Early Access not included), and after that point, I could get only 33% of further income, as we settled this with our team of four people. At that period, the tail of sales almost reached the bottom, but I refused to give up. We added a bunch of localisations (thanks to volunteers, you are fantastic people!), made a Halloween update to take part in the sale, and sent the keys to almost 3k Youtubers through https://www.keymailer.co/ and direct emails.

At this point, I’ll go ahead a little bit and show you the sales of Tribal Pass during the whole year after release. You can see the daily amount of sold copies from July 2016 until August 2017:

A: Early Access release (10% discount). With almost no PR and marketing work, just posts at our social accounts and our confidence in the game we’re making. Some people bought it because of our friendship, some heard about it at DevGAMM and supported us, but still, it was a complete disaster and just ruined our expectations. We were so disappointed (and I was so broke), so I decided to cut expensive content and mechanics instead of adding more, and fix my loss at that level. After a few weeks in EA, I was sure Tribal Pass is doomed no matter what we do (because Sergey Galyonkin, owner of SteamSpy said the game has only one release, and I thought we already had our).

B: The game got out from the EA with 20% release discount. Thanks to positive reviews (or some other reasons I don’t know) it was featured on the main page and made its way to Popular releases section. I chose Friday as our release date, so there were no new games till Monday, and Tribal Pass was on the first page of popular releases till Wednesday, when it’s been pushed out by other games. This first week gave us about 50% of the whole year profits. A few weeks later Valve removed worldwide visibility round on start and destroyed reviews from non-steam buyers. I think there are reasonable steps for the industry, but without this help, we could never make our way to popular releases.

B1: 2 weeks after release, Tribal Pass has been pushed out from Popular New Releases, and our sales dropped to the bottom. And then we added Chinese localisation. After that China is among the three best countries by monthly revenue. About 10% of our profits this year comes from China – even with the fact they passed our first and most profitable weeks. So, try to make Chinese localisation before your release date.

C: Halloween sale. To get on the list, you game must be horror-themed or get some thematic update. It was the first and the last time we added content for some event. 50% discount, week of work – and low sales boost.

D:  Autumn sale – 66% discount, and a pleasant result, consider the fact we did nothing for it.

E: Christmas – 66% again (Valve recommended to keep the same discount for those two sales). Excellent  results, for some reasons without the drop at the end of the event.

F: Weeklong deal (75%). You can make discounts every two months, and February was recommended by other indies as a good month without big releases, and sales were really good. As you can see, after a Christmas sale our numbers dropped at zero, and just before this peak, they rose a little bit. That was an incident when we’d been forced to change our title from “The Tribe” to “Tribal Pass’, I wrote articles for several resources about that. So, the news about your game raise the sales, PR and marketing guys didn’t lie about that.

G: Another weeklong deal – 85% and expected result. Sales peak bigger than previous discounts, but with a lower price, it gave us just about the same revenue.

H: Summer sale – 90%. We reached the minimal possible price in almost all regions. Another expected result and zero sold copies for a few weeks after discount.

Between the peaks: It seems, 20-30 copies daily are pretty much okay for the $5 game. And that’s true if anyone would be interested in Tribal Pass for the full price. In our case, the most of those sales are with 75-90% discounts through Steam coupons program. In September 2017 I lowered the price to $2 to make it equal with Android port (which gave me almost nothing). Amount of sales and positive reviews increased, but revenue went down. So at the end of October, I returned its initial price of $5.

Anyway, just after release I didn’t know those numbers and thought we still can make Tribal Pass more successful despise slow start.

2 Anger

At some point, I understood that even the possibility to pay off my debts with the revenue of the first release was lucky enough, and profits are not going to support me during the development of next relatively big game. I did some math and decided I need to ship few small games during next two years, so regardless of their success, together they could make some passive income enough to live and create something significant and meaningful.

First two months after Tribal Pass release, I was making different prototypes to pick some concept good for quick solo development. I tried arcade flying shooter, horror-strategy about the little girl trying to escape from the continually morphing planet with the help of drones army, but all of that was too big. In the end, I came to a top-down shooter, because I made something juicy and fun from the first steps in this genre. Extra Credits has a good episode about that ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvCri1tqIxQ ):

The idea of doing myself as much work as possible became my general point for this game – to keep all the future income. I already did programming, game design and PR for Tribal Pass, so I decided to add a visual part to this list (moving ahead, I failed it and hired a freelancer). My girlfriend took musical part, and it killed two birds with one stone – she tried game industry after traditional musician field, and I got music cheaper than the average market price from someone I can trust. Problem with texts and localisation I solved radically  – I challenged myself not to use a single word in a whole game.

At the same time with prototyping, I took a few courses of Blender modelling, but later it turned out (all of a sudden) that the ability to make a model does not means I can come up with an exciting design. So I met freelance 3D-artist – https://twitter.com/AleksandrPalmov. My part in creative process narrowed down to making sketches with mechanics functionality and corrections – he did all the work.

3 Bargaining

Work on JASEM started pretty optimistically – I decided to keep the development process open and tweet some work gifs few times per week. And even the first gifs with explosions and shooting got more attention than any tweet about Tribal Pass. With every tweet, I learned how to operate with hashtags and timing, and got more than 500 followers in a few months without dirty tricks like follow back and other ways to get a non-target audience. So, what I learned about twitter over this year:

• Even if you have no stunning visual style, you can attract people with entertaining action. In that case, there is no point to share static pictures, but action-packed gifs and videos are your friends;

• http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/BundyKim/20160707/276365/Marketing_in_Motion_A_Year_of_Making_Gifs.php this is an excellent article about making proper gifs;

• You can always use hashtags  #gamedev, #indiedev, #indiegame – you’ll be retweeted by many bots, almost no one actually read them, but someone can accidentally see your tweet thanks to them.

• #screenshotsaturday – I use it only (surprise) on Saturdays. Some people use it no matter what day it is, but I think it’s not very good. Some people and websites are picking the best stuff of Saturday tweets, and I don’t want to overwhelm them with extra work of reviewing all week.

• And the real treasures (if you use unity, but I believe other engines have their analogues as well). Retweet from official Unity account gives you at least 20k impressions. One can argue about promoting your game for other developers, but aren’t we gamers as well? I buy indie games, so I’m also can be a target audience for fellow developers.

  • #madewithunity – you can use it at any day, but every Friday, real folks from Unity pick the stuff they like and retweet it

  • #unitytips – every Tuesday Unity retweets the best tips and lifehacks about their engine

Besides working on JASEM, I published the article about the development of my first game, and that gave me a lot of new contacts and opportunities. I was flattered with an invitation to be a speaker at the game conference in Moldova (for me it was the first time of not only being a speaker but the first game conference of my life at all). I shared with other developers my first release experience and all mistakes I made to prevent someone from repeating them. Also, I met a lot of awesome people (including the artist who remotely worked with me on Tribal Pass for two years)

With all that I thought I already got my place and reputation in the game industry and all is going to be fine.

4 Depression

But then I left gamedev for almost half a year for personal reasons. Without details, I can say one thing: if you have money for a year, you should be able to ship the game in six months. And if you are really lucky maybe you’ll finish it before the money is gone.

After this long pause I returned to the development and felt how much I changed: Humor I wanted to use became silly and irrelevant, a visual style I made became disgusting, and gameplay was no more fun. Even idea of working on shooter made me sick, but there were no chances to make something else with money left. That was the time I decided to outsource 3D-models, changing visuals inspired me to get over it and continue work.

If you still trying to count my share from Tribal Pass revenue and understand how could I hire someone – please don’t. In spring 2017 I was bankrupt and was able to finish my second game only because of financial help from a good friend.

I released JASEM in October 2017, and it was a complete disaster, even in comparison with Tribal Pass. But two disasters together are almost enough to live and work on the third game.

5 Acceptance

Maybe you think I’m sitting in the corner in depression, regretting my whole indie-experiment and dreaming about work at a big company. That’s not true – despite the fact my hourly rate was bigger than I get from two games for an average day, big salary doesn’t compare to me with my growth and challenges I got being indie. I made a countless amount of mistakes, but each one of them was my own decision, and I am ready for any consequences while I’m in charge of those decisions. Last few months I’m living in harmony with myself, making my third game and trying to return all the help I got from other people.

A few months ago Rami Ismail and Mike Bithell urged the game industry to see the stories of losers like me. I wasn’t sure I have something to say back then, and until now didn’t know is there any sense in my article. But now I know – I wrote it not to complain about my life (well, maybe a little bit), but for other developers, who face the same results of their first release, they could not go through the same steps of internal struggle as I did. So, all this text should have been squeezed to next points:

• Your first game will not be a hit;

• And the second one;

• And perhaps the third one too;

• And that’s okay, you found out who Jonathan Blow and Edmund McMillen are not in the first year of their life in the game industry;

• Some people made a hit on the first attempt, but if you are not one of them – that doesn’t mean there is no place for you in gamedev;

• The reasons for our failures are not our colleagues, not new Valve politics, not press ignoring you or people with negative reviews. Every failure is a consequence of our decisions, and you are the only one responsible for that;

• Our successes often consists of work of people who helped us and sometimes luck;

• Even recoupment (and I’m not talking about profit) could take months or years, and only you can decide is it worth the risks;

• Always finish things if you put a lot of work in them already. If you are tired from a long development, you can adjust your plans and release the game with minimal additional work, and it could bring few hours of fun for players (or maybe it can’t, but it still worth trying);

• Fix your losses – if you already spent few months/thousand dollars on the game and players/testers didn’t love it, you probably can’t make it better just throwing more money and time in it. Just cut unfinished things, set the minimum you can release, do it and make the next game better.

• Don’t sacrifice your sleeping time, food or relationships for your game – it’s easier to make a new better game than fix gastric ulcer or find a new partner.

That’s all I have to say for now. I hope I didn’t motivate you to drop gamedev (if so, read some success story until it’s too late). Make good games(or at least try to make them good), be nice with your players and other developers and don’t give up!

If you are interested how my indie gamedev adventures continue, you can follow me somewhere:

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

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Every week I get several emails and calls at Dutch Game Garden from people who are looking for a job or internship, or who need career advice. This is one of the reasons why we host a monthly Network Lunch. However, I felt the advice we give is useful for more people than visitors to our events. If you’re looking for a job or internship in the Dutch game industry, there are several ways to increase your chances of success. In this article, I’ll provide you with some tips and advice to help you on your way – of course, many of these tips are applicable to other countries as well.

This is part 1 in a series of how to find a job in the Dutch game industry. Later this week, I’ll publish part 2, where I focus on the application process and interview. 

Build games to expand your knowledge & skills

First of all, if you want to work in the game industry it is helpful to have an idea how games are made, even if you don’t have a technical background yourself. Especially for people looking for a marketing, PR, or other business position it is useful to have some insight in the development process of a game. There are many video tutorials and courses you can find online that teach you how to make a simple game.

If you prefer working in a team, consider participating in game jams like the yearly Global Game Jam or local game jams in your area. A game jam is a great way to get a first taste of what working in a game development team is like. After participating, you’ll have another game to add to your portfolio, you have some experience working with a team under pressure, and you will have expanded your professional network by meeting new people – many of whom might be professional game developers that could help you get a job someday. Some game jam teams even end up starting a company together. Either way, it’s a great way to meet other developers.

Research the game industry

All too often I have interviews with internship candidates that don’t seem to know any games made in the Netherlands and have never heard of websites like Polygon or Kotaku. It’s astounding to hear – after all, knowing the latest developments is an easy way to have an edge over other candidates in a creative industry that is incredibly competitive. The Dutch Games Monitor research showed there are more game students graduating than there are jobs in the industry. A lot of people share your dream of having a job in the game industry, so you must stand out to make that dream come true.

To increase your chances of employment, you need to know what’s going on: which games are popular, which games are made in your country, which studios are behind them, the latest developments in the industry and discussions surrounding it. Don’t wait for useful information to reach you – try to actively search for it and inform yourself. Follow the news, both local and international, and try to read websites for players, but also industry websites like Gamasutra and Gamesindustry.biz. There are countless calls and opportunities out there that might be useful for you. Know who key persons in the game industry are, and follow them on social media – it will give you additional insight into the industry. Another way to stay up to date is to join local Slack, Discord and Facebook groups where game developers share news and showcase their work. It’s easy to connect casually and ask for feedback.

Expand your game industry network

One of the major things you can do to get to know more people in the game industry, is attending events. This is incredibly important, because it gives you the opportunity to meet experienced developers and potential employers, as well as present yourself and your work. The game industry is not a field where having a degree alone will get you anywhere – competition is tough, and you’ll have to spent time on your skills, portfolio, and network to increase your chances of employment. There are many game industry events where you get the chance to talk to developers. In the Netherlands we have the Dutch Game Garden Network Lunch, INDIGO, Control Conference, Indievelopment, DGA Days, game developer meetups, and many more. It’s likely there is an event in your country as well.

An excuse I often hear is “I don’t have any money to attend events” – of course this is understandable, conferences are expensive. However, there are multiple events in the Netherlands and abroad that give you student discounts, or that are completely free to attend. If you are not willing to spend some bucks, you can always choose to volunteer. In that case, you work during one part of the event, and you can spend the rest to attend for free. There are also grants for students and minorities to attend events like the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, the largest gathering of game developers worldwide: again, this comes down to following the news and seizing opportunities. Be proactive – a passive mindset will get you nowhere.

Where to find jobs in the game industry

Your network is especially important when it comes to finding jobs in the game industry. Of course, there are dedicated job websites like Gamejobs.eu and job sections on websites like Gamasutra and Gamesindustry.biz, but many game studios look for potential candidates in their own network first before posting a job online. This is why knowing people personally gives you an advantage: they can probably tell you whether any positions will open up soon. Referrals are a big percentage of hires, so it pays off to make new friends.

Of course, there are things you can do yourself. Find companies you’re interested in and keep an eye on their Facebook page and the jobs page on their website. In case there’s none, you can also write an open application to be considered for future openings. Don’t be afraid to connect with recruiters on LinkedIn as well: it’s basically their job to find candidates like you.

Present yourself

In order to leave a good first impression, you will have to work on your own ‘brand’. That may sound unappealing, but it’s important: you need to know what you focus on, and properly represent yourself in your portfolio and on social media. If you were the one hiring new people, what would you want to see in potential candidates? Try to show those things on your online profiles. Even if you are in a casual environment like Twitter or Facebook, be aware that you’re still representing yourself, and potential employers will see your posts.

It’s helpful to define your job goals. What kind of company do you want to work for, what are your skills, and what do you enjoy? Prepare an elevator pitch for yourself: explain what makes you special in 45 seconds. Make a list of your accomplishments: you may not have worked on a successful game yet, but maybe you published a game on itch.io, led a student team, organized an event, or were a board member of your study association. That kind of experience matters! It gives the employer an indication of your soft skills, or ‘people skills’, which is incredibly important when you join a team. Personality is key. It’s helpful for employers to know what experience you have working in teams and what role you take. Think about the things mentioned above before applying somewhere.

This is part 1 in a series of how to find a job in the Dutch game industry. Later this week, I’ll publish part 2, where I focus on the application process and interview. 

I recommend these game industry resources to beginners

Special thanks to my colleagues Christel van Grinsven & Romy Halfweeg for their contributions to this article.

The end of the year is nearly here, and today Game Developers Conference organizers want to quickly let you know about one of the great talks taking place at GDC 2018 in March!

This session, part of the GDC 2018 Educators Summit, will see Carnegie Mellon’s Jessica Hammer and Broken Rules’ Martin Pichlmair explaining how you can more effectively critique games and game projects. 

Their talk “Improving Critique of Game Projects with Expert and Peer Feedback” presents best practices, common challenges, and successful formats around providing critique. In addition to providing material on expert-led critique, Jessica Hammer and Martin Pichlmair will share two experimental approaches for improving peer feedback on game projects.

Plus, considerations for selecting and implementing appropriate critique methods will be discussed. While originating from education, the presented techniques are applicable to a wide range of design areas, from game design to visual arts; make time to check it out, and you’ll walk away with skills you can use in your own work! 

Plus, we have plenty more GDC 2018 announcements to make in the coming months. For more information about GDC 2018 visit the show’s official website, and subscribe to regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS.

Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent UBM Americas

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

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[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This installment includes a look at indie standout Donut County, the potential dystopia behind HQ Trivia, and lots more besides.

Well, this is the penultimate round-up of the year, with a smattering of ‘best games of the year’ lists included (sorry I didn’t get to all of them – there’s so many!) As I just noted on Twitter, Super Mario Odyssey is my personal game of the year – being warm, welcoming, polished, and non-judgmental about length of play time.

But there were so many more games to love – many of which I didn’t get to because I was busy compiling these lists, ironically. Still, I’d rather you all had information than I finished another game – which is how my brain works, luckily for your ability to read lots of cool stuff in one place. Happy holidays!

Until next time…
– Simon, curator.]

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Best of 2017: Gamasutra’s top games, devs, events and trends (Staff / Gamasutra – ARTICLE)
“[SIMON’S NOTE: lots of useful lists from the game development website I’ve written for since 1998 (!) – though I didn’t have time to do a list this year – and still help to oversee. As article notes: Gamasutra contributors also each wrote up a personal list of their top games, and you can read them here: Kris Graft, Katherine Cross, Alex Wawro, Alissa McAloon, Chris Kerr, Phill Cameron, Bryant Francis, and Brandon Sheffield.]”

No Man’s Sky Players Had Their First War And It Killed An Entire Civilization (Gita Jackon / Kotaku – ARTICLE)
“No Man’s Sky fans can’t exactly play with each other, but they still like to come together to celebrate their communities. Somehow, a new player-created holiday became a story about conflict, betrayal and the disappearance of an entire civilization.”

The best video game levels of 2017 (Various / AV Club – ARTICLE)
“You’ve already heard from us about our favorite games, but we also wanted to dig deeper and applaud some of the most memorable sequences that helped make 2017 such a tremendous year. After all, every game contains multitudes of moments and decisions, and even a mediocre release can occasionally come together into something transcendent.”

Magic Leap: Founder of Secretive Start-Up Unveils Mixed-Reality Goggles (Brian Crecente / Glixel – ARTICLE)
“The last time the company spoke publicly in any great detail was about a year ago, when it invited Wired magazine to its South Florida headquarters to see the tech in action, but not to write about what the hardware looked like. Earlier this month, Glixel received a similar invitation. [SIMON’S NOTE: An extremely in-depth look at the tech from Brian Crecente – basically, it’s Hololens with somewhat bigger field of view. Which is… fine?]”

The AIAS Game Maker’s Notebook – Neil Druckmann (Ted Price / AIAS / Libsyn – PODCAST)
“Neil Druckmann from Naughty Dog sits down with Insomniac Games’ Ted Price to discuss trailer reactions, The Last of Us, narrative vs gameplay, and the drive to create something meaningful. Neil Druckmann is the creative director for The Last of Us, Uncharted 4, and the upcoming sequel, The Last of Us Part II.”

‘Donut County’ is a love letter to LA (Jessica Conditt / Engadget – ARTICLE)
“From 2002 to 2014, Dunkin’ Donuts didn’t exist in Los Angeles. Hell, during that time there was just one Dunkin’ store in all of California, at a military base on the state’s southern tip… In fact, it was one of the first things independent game developer Ben Esposito noticed when he made the move from New York to LA.”

Saving the History of Video Games (Waypoint / YouTube – VIDEO)
“Waypoint meets Frank Cifaldi, the founder of the Video Game History Foundation. The history of video games are in danger of disappearing. Not just the games itself, but the packaging, the culture, and the experience of the players. We join Frank on his quest to save these relics.”

Women In Video Game Development in 2017: A Snapshot (Lucy O’Brien / IGN – ARTICLE)
“Several months ago, I asked 55 female and non-binary game development professionals from around the globe about the moment the light bulb switched on for them, the moment they thought video games are for me.  Each answer was unique.”

Indie Games You Missed in 2017 (HeavyEyed / YouTube – VIDEO)
“It’s that time of year again! Let’s go over some indie games you missed in 2017. Thank you all for this amazing year, I can’t wait to see what 2018 has in store.”

HQ Trivia Is a Harbinger of Dystopia (Ian Bogost / The Atlantic – ARTICLE)
“That all sounds great. So why do I feel such dread when I play? It’s not the terror of losing, or even that of being embarrassed for answering questions wrong in front of my family and friends. It’s the dread that the app represents some awful, plausible future not yet realized, but just over the horizon: one where expertise isn’t measured by knowledge, but by instinct tripped out on illusion.”

Revisiting Anamanaguchi’s ‘Capsule Silence XXIV,’ Music Gaming’s Most Revolutionary Misadventure (Zane Warman / Billboard – ARTICLE)
“Taken at face value, Capsule Silence’s creation packs a story of shadowy, blue-chip gaming developers who exploited a growing band’s money, talents and identities, cheapening them by presenting the wider world with a bloated, corporate rendering of their art. [SIMON’S NOTE: this was one of the weirdest things in a long time – great to see a deconstruction of it.]”

Creating ‘Burgle Bros’: The Fantasy of the Heist (Tim Fowers / GDC / YouTube – VIDEO)
“In this 2017 GDC talk from the Board Game Design Day, Fowers Games’ Tim Fowers discusses how games are ultimately a test of character and how he used rogue-like mechanics to drive players to critical choices that create emotion and tell unique emergent stories in Burgle Bros.”

Are lootboxes the slot machines of video gaming? (Adam Goodall / The Spinoff – ARTICLE)
“Lootboxes have embedded themselves in the gaming industry – and audiences are not happy about it. Adam Goodall talks to a free-to-play developer and a public health expert about why lootboxes were inevitable, and how we can change the direction they’re taking the industry.”

Mom, ‘Final Fantasy’ and the Language of Gaming (Rami Ismail / Glixel – ARTICLE)
“I grinned, and halfway through my amusement I suddenly realised that while my mother could read up on the games news, there was another language that my mother did not speak: the language of games. For all her enthusiasm and knowledge of the medium, she had never once held a controller, or booted up a video game.”

The best games you might have missed in 2017 (Clayton Purdom / AV Club – ARTICLE)
“In 2017, “indie games” (I’ll stop using the quotation marks) are a commodity, almost a genre unto themselves. All three major consoles have touted themselves as the true home for independent developers, sometimes creating massive marketing campaigns around games made by smaller, non-traditional teams.”

Memory Matters: A special RAM edition of Dirty Coding Tricks (Brandon Sheffield / Gamasutra – ARTICLE)
“Memory constraints are a thing of the past, right? Turns out they’re not. Not only do many off-the-shelf engines manage memory poorly, many platforms still have some rather aggressive memory requirements. Then there are disc and cartridge-based size limitations on top of that.”

A month on the road: My indie developer road trip (Blake Hester / Polygon – ARTICLE)
“”What the hell does this have to do with video games,” I asked myself. I was staring up at Provo Canyon in the middle of Utah, jaw dropped at the scale of it all. There was no cellphone reception, no technology and certainly no video game in sight. [SIMON’S NOTE: this is a CRAZILY big road trip article talking to indies, and is wonderfully humanizing about the people behind the games – take the time to read.]”

Horizon Zero Dawn Documentary (Noclip / YouTube – VIDEO)
“How does a studio known for linear first person shooters design one of the most well regarded open world games of the generation on their first attempt? Noclip travels to Amsterdam to talk to Guerrilla about their epic journey bringing Horizon Zero Dawn to PlayStation 4.”

Is Secretive Virtual Reality Startup Magic Leap Dreaming Up the Future of Music?(Marc Hogan / Pitchfork – ARTICLE)
“Our tech overlords have come to a realization: The internet is as ambient as the air we breathe. Confined first to computer screens, then phones, tablets, and watches, online information may soon be seamlessly embedded into our lives like never before. [SIMON’S NOTE: The Sigur Ros project is strictly not a game, but lots of interactive elements, of course.]”

How a counterfeit NES console opened up the Russian games market (Alex Calvin / Eurogamer – ARTICLE)
“Back in the 90s, if you had mentioned the names Nintendo and Sega to a kid in America, Japan or Europe, their face would have likely lit up… But if you said these words to a child in Russia, they’d have looked at you blankly. These companies were not present in the region at the time. Say ‘Dendy’, however, and you’d invoke that same kind of magic.”

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[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at tinyletter.com/vgdeepcuts – we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to vgdeepcuts@simoncarless.com. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra & an advisor to indie publisher No More Robots, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]

Cellar Door Games has published the early design notes for its game Rogue Legacy, though these might not be like some of the other design documents out there. Creative designer Teddy Lee warns that the set of early design notes shared to the developer’s blog today aren’t “your standard design notes,” nor are they really even legible. 

But, thanks to the detailed breakdown accompanying every roughly handwritten page, the collection of early Rogue Legacy ideas provides fellow game developers with a look at how the action-platformer evolved from its earliest concept to eventual release. 

For example, Lee explains that the game was originally called Rogue Castle and, at first, was planned to include an experience point system that was eventually dropped for being too downright confusing. 

Another page explores gameplay progression, and how the procedurally generated game would introduce features as players progressed and eventually died within the roguelike’s halls.

The other notes offer similar insights into the early game, with Lee dutifully translating the handwritten scrawl and explaining why certain features were changed or left behind through development 

The correct order of the notes themselves have been lost to time, but the nine pages themselves and Lee’s very informative explanation of each can be found on the Cellar Door Games blog.