Any advice for job searching for a university graduate?

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2 comments, last by GeneralJist 2 years, 8 months ago

After finishing my course I was a little lost of what to do (naturally) and I think the sort of work I would like to be doing is working on games / products that allow me to work productivly and creativly. I have a huge affinity for 2D games since that seems to be my forte. I have a bit of an odd situation where I'm currently moving around a lot so finding an entry level job on site is a bit difficult and therefore my only options seem to be remote positions.

I believe my quallifications, experience and portfolio put me in a good position. I've had experience working on many different platforms (except consoles thus far) and have worked on AAA games that are now published. I left university with a first class honours and a whole swathe of software projects / games on my portfolio.

I didn't really enjoy my time with the AAA products as they didn't make me feel productive in any way. This could possibly be because I was porting these products to other platforms and didn't really have an impact on any creative process. It is also really slow since I'm looking at code-complete projects that I need to essentially bodge to work on a new platform.

The ideal situation would be to work on a personal game and be able to attain funding for it, but that is not realistically achievable in the sort term. So I think the sort of role I'm looking for is a remote position as one of a few programmers working on a funded indie game.

So my question is, does anyone have advice on either finding a team such as this or whether I'm realistic in finding something like this coming fresh out of university?

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I would say

  1. If working on a personal project is ideal, try spending a lot of free time on a personal project to see how much you actually enjoy it and how far you can get.
  2. Look at subreddits like gameDevClassifieds and INAT as well as other websites hiring for the games industry and apply for everything you might be interested in to gain experience applying for jobs and to gauge the market for actual opportunities. Maybe look at AAA positions as well to get some experience that is likely welcome at an indie as well, since you already have experience with AAA games. You will likely find AAA openings on company websites.
  3. Calculate how long you can go without earning any money and set that (or rather some time before that to not starve) as a deadline for when you fall back on a plan B. Perhaps the plan B should be to apply for regular software development jobs if you have general developer skills.

Take what I said with a grain of salt since I'm not in the industry, although I would say these general guidelines apply to most competitive industries.

SafeSuperior said:
The ideal situation would be to work on a personal game and be able to attain funding for it, but that is not realistically achievable in the sort term

Forget about funding. Work on a personal game. OR work on a team game. Your portfolio needs personal and team games both.

SafeSuperior said:
I have a bit of an odd situation where I'm currently moving around a lot so finding an entry level job on site is a bit difficult and therefore my only options seem to be remote positions.

It would be better to stop moving around and settle in a place near (within daily commuting distance from) numerous game companies. Do you know about gamedevmap.com? Also, wikipedia has a comprehensive list of video game developers.

-- Tom Sloper -- sloperama.com

Look on work with indies and remote game jobs.

If your ideal is to make your own game, than do it. Scope small enough so you won't need funding.

Remote is also easier to find now because of covid.

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