Is there a secret to getting a video game designer job? Is it attending the right unity game design schools? Are you hobnobbing at game industry networking events? Camping outside the offices of your favorite video game company? Are you getting incriminating blackmail photos of the Creative Director from the holiday Christmas Party?
Well, any of those methods might work, but if you want a more reliable path to getting a unity game design job, first ask yourself a tough question – do you want a career in game design? Are you willing to work – on your own time – to make your game designer dreams come true? Will you put in the blood, sweat, and tears to stand out from the crowd and make an impression with a game industry manager?
If you can honestly answer “yes,” then continue reading.
Because, speaking from the other side of the hiring desk, I’ll tell you exactly what gets my attention. And isn’t how well-formatted your resume is or how sparkling the prose of your cover letter. A professional resume and good letter are just assumed if you want to play this game. The real way you get a video game designer job is by showing me you are good at designing games.
Write a unity game design document
Take a game you love (and preferably one I know) and write up a unity game design doc for it. Pretend you are proposing something for an update or downloadable content. Document either a level or scenario.
Don’t write the game designer equivalent of War and Peace – you are not getting paid by the pound. The thicker your design document, the less useful it’s going to be. I’m looking for concise – but accurate – documentation of what you’re envisioning as the game designer. You’ll want to include a summary sentence and then an outline of what you’re proposing. You want to talk about things like essential game mechanics, key locations and starting points, enemies and monsters, points of interest, and enemy placement. You might want to include some information about characters, dialogue style, and background. Do this in something I can digest – say, two to four pages, and a professional level of quality, and I’ll be highly motivated to put you on my team.
If you get a job as a video game designer, you’re going to spend a lot of time writing. If you can’t write a useful design document – you’ll have your work cut out for you in the game industry. You don’t need to be Shakespeare, but you need to be able to communicate an idea clearly and relatively free of eye-melting grammar and spelling mistakes. If the idea of writing lots of unity game design docs fills you with dread, take a hard look at your future career as a game designer.
Design game level or mod
Take an established unity game design like Epic’s Unreal and build a level I can play. Demonstrate you have an understanding of guiding a player through an exciting play space, taking them from a beginning to end. Don’t design a giant maze – I’m not a lab rat. Don’t create a vast open plain. I’ve already visited Kansas. I interest to see you understand how the player interacts with the environment and the game systems. And if you’re a smart game designer, you’ll build in an engine my company uses in game development (for a company like BioWare, portfolios require a submission using the Aurora toolset).
So, you might even take that level and mod it. Impress me with your ingenuity in re-inventing an existing game. Depending on what you do, you’ll tell me a lot about the kind of video game designer you are. Do you care more about atmosphere and aesthetics? Innovative gameplay? There’s no right or wrong answer here – I want to see your work.
Make your own unity game design
The best calling card for a unity game design job is to make a game. Watch how fast I run to HR if that’s what’s in your portfolio. And it is probably not as difficult as you think. Investing now in technical skills makes you vastly more marketable as a game designer (even if you’re not the ultimate professional expert). Adobe’s Flash puts powerful tools to create video games in the hands of almost anyone. A more technically inclined prospective game designer might try their hand with the Unity engine or learn programming languages like Python, Perl, or even C++. Heck, there are also game building engines like Gamemaker that are practically point-and-click.