Friday 13 April 2012

An introduction to the Game Industry

To discuss specialist job roles in the game industry for brief given, I decided to look directly at current job roles and find as much different jobs asking for specific people. My dad (yes him again) does not buy as much magazine as he used to but he still buys either games tm or Edge magazine. Edge are very slick, neat and abstract in how they lay out and structure their pages. They review games in a very strict manor and offer more pages to the more popular games. They feature old time games or series or franchises and discuss them in depth and they interview industry professionals. A very good feature they have is more towards the end of the magazine, displaying advertisements from universities within the UK looking for students or companies looking for certain professions to recruit into their team which is all game related. Edge even have special one off issues each year where they have a special section or separate magazine which they go around the UK and the world asking and interviewing specialists on what they do, what is required and business and industry in general. Perfect, and perhaps a good read for all my fellow colleagues on this course!

Though with simple advertisements they still do not explain what these job roles require in their recruits as they want you to visit their website and research further. So upon visiting the Edge website only, who give news on the gaming biz, they have a killer section on finding jobs specific to your chosen field. You can also join up, leave your CV with them and even get emails when new jobs come in (the link is provided below). I found this probably last year and it keeps you up to date on what jobs are going and what companies are looking for. It is good to see jobs available in the midlands as I would be happy to stay in Leicester and commute to my job if it was necessary and I was pleased with my job. So the categories and the explanations within pretty much answer the brief but I will look at a few so I don’t look lazy, but I have studied ones I am interested in for myself. They even have career advice articles lower down the page.

So Edge got it going on! They have split jobs into 2 discipline groups, design and development (which applies to me) and Business. So business contains sub categories, to name a few, managerial, development executives, finance, sales, media, marketing, you get the picture. Design and development contain testers, interface, animation, audio, programming containing most jobs, and art in second place. It gives a brief idea of what is required the most in the industry already but looking into available art jobs, we see even more specific roles. These can be 2D artists, graphic designers, technical, environment, character, weapon artists, directors and it goes on. So without being really specific and making a large blog entry about my understanding, I think it is fair to say studying this website looking through jobs then looking for interviews and videos of specialists explaining how they do their role and how it is important to the whole picture, we can find it within ourselves to relate our own skills and find the answers we are looking for.

I notice how some job roles require you to develop further before taking them on. There can be ‘junior’ roles, where you have pretty much left uni and are fresh, then ‘senior’ or ‘lead’ or ‘director’ roles, where you have at least 5 years experience (let’s say 3 at uni then 2 as a junior or whatever else) and a couple of completed AAA games under your belt. Sounds tough to be honest but upon getting that first job, it is all about learning mixing with professionals that help speed up your workload and understanding of software and processes rather than doing what you can in an effort to meet deadlines, please tutors and pass to graduate at uni.

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