#game dev interviews

The shorter answer is “diplomatically but honestly”. The longer answer “with a good answer you’ve prepared and practiced ahead of time”. 

In order to understand what kind of answer you want to give, it helps to understand what question the interviewer is actually asking. The interviewer isn’t actually asking why you left your last job, the interviewer is looking for reasons why they shouldn’t hire you. They want to make sure that, should you be hired, you aren’t going to cause trouble for the company. The specific dealbreakers that the interviewer is looking for with this question are usually outright lying, trash talking your former employer, or an angry/bad attitude. 

I shouldn’t have to tell you why lying is a dealbreaker - I don’t think anybody wants to work with a liar. Big lies like why a candidate left a former job at an interview are often found out pretty quickly - the game industry is pretty small. It isn’t difficult to find somebody in the grapevine who is a candidate’s former coworker, and nobody likes working with a jerk. If a candidate answers this question with an eyebrow-raising answer in an interview, we can often do a quick reference check to see if they were telling the truth. 

If a candidate trash talks one former employer, then the interviewer can immediately imagine the candidate eventually leaving the interviewing company and trash talking them as well. Nobody likes having their dirty laundry aired, especially if the candidate isn’t necessarily a good one. If the candidate has a bad attitude at the interview about this, it’s easy to imagine them having a bad attitude while working with the team. Nobody wants to put up with that.

Your best bet is to have an answer prepared - a diplomatic, but honest one. The least eyebrow-raising answer is “I was part of a larger layoff”, since that speaks to circumstances and not necessarily personal performance. Inability to work with somebody can be described as a “bad fit” - you were looking for X, while they were looking for Y, so you found it better to mutually part ways. If the prior job loss is due to performance reasons, you should make careful preparations about how you want to discuss it. You can say something like “In retrospect, I realize that my skillset wasn’t suited to the former role. That led to friction on the team and ultimately to my dismissal. I’ve since learned and grown significantly and believe that I am a much better fit today for this position”.

Don’t just think about how you’d answer the question - prepare for it beforehand with someone you trust to give honest feedback. Take their feedback to heart and improve your answer. Make sure that you’re ready to give it when asked - the delivery is almost as important as the content. If you come across as nervous while giving your answer, it may not seem genuine to the interviewer. You know they’ll ask, so practice it.

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A degree from a well known university? Internship experience? Completed projects? Projects that have won awards?

I’m a junior in college and I’m not sure what to expect or if I have enough experience to get a job in the industry. (Sorry if I come off a bit unprofessional, I don’t personally know anyone in the industry to ask and you seem like you could give me an honest answer.)

I can’t speak for all hiring managers, but as someone who regularly evaluates design candidates I must say - game design degrees don’t actually matter that much to me. They might impress recruiters, but hiring managers like me have rejected just as many candidates with game design degrees (if not more) as without after they fail to pass our design tests or design interviews. 

Instead, what I usually look for when hiring for a design role is the same general qualities I look for when I hire for any role:

You know how to do the thing

You have experience doing the thing

You can do the thing on a budget

You can work with a team doing the thing

Let’s break this down for a game design candidate.

You know how to do the thing

This is a two-step process. First, you need to be able to create fun and engaging game content. This is something you could have learned in school or on your own time... maybe you created levels, wrote quests, ran a tabletop RPG campaign, have relevant work experience in other fields, and so on. Second, you need to be able to walk the lines of “what if I changed this or that?” and consider what those effects would be. Third, you need to be able to discuss and defend why these choices were made and who they were made for when talking with a collaborator. 

You’re most likely going to be given a design test to assess your ability to do the thing. This will often be either a take home test or interview questions for you to answer, but the general goal is the same - assess whether you have the design chops to work within the given boundaries and still come up with something fun and considers the important details.

You have experience doing the thing

This can be mods, this can be game jam content, this can be school projects, this can be professional work. I want to know that your ability to do the thing isn’t completely theoretical. A good candidate must demonstrate experience in the field and that doesn’t end at the resume - if it’s on your CV, you should be able to discuss the work you did and the decisions you made in depth. I want to know if your past experience is relevant to the job I’m hiring for and I want to know that you are knowledgeable about those parts of it. I want to know that you considered the options and reflected on what you could have done better if you had to do it over again. 

You can do the thing on a budget

Nobody gets unlimited time or resources to make things perfect, game devs included. We have schedules to meet, and that’s something you must be able to demonstrate as well. This will likely be asked about at the interview portion - you may be asked about decisions that you made because of resource constraints (especially deadlines). If you had more time, would you have done things differently? What kind of decisions did you make because you didn’t have the resources available and why did you make them? Make sure you have some good answers prepped for this.

You can work with a team doing the thing

I cannot emphasize this point enough - communication skills are a top requirement for designers because good designers must translate the ideas in their heads to documents and to other people who don’t have psychic mind-reading powers. Designers must be able to convey the details and the inner workings of their proposals to others with minimal ambiguity so that the engineers and artists can work to make those ideas a reality. Not only does a good candidate have to come up with fun ideas, but they have to be able to express and explain those ideas to non-designers.

This mean we’re looking for you to demonstrate that you’ve worked with a team before and how you’ve overcome communication problems and disagreements with other team members before. Friction between people is inevitable because we are not all members of the same hive mind; there will be collisions and they will need to be overcome. I will reject any candidates that don’t seem like they can work with the existing team.

Takeaways

I hope that this gives you some idea of the hiring process. Our goal is to find the best candidate that can meet the qualifications and you want to be that candidate. An ideal candidate will tackle our design tests or questions in a timely fashion, hold a solid conversation about the decisions they made in past work, and be able to communicate their ideas clearly to others. These are the qualities I look for in a designer I want to hire. Any design candidate should do their best to convey that they have all of these qualities in their resumes, tests, and interview responses.

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The FANTa Project is being rebooted. [What is the FANTa project?]

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Recommended Reading: [A Gamer’s Primer to Practically Dealing with Job Loss]

Yes, I have been fired before. It is definitely different from being laid off. And yes, I do have advice for those who were fired, rather than laid off. Losing my job due to a layoff is much more generalized than being fired; it wasn’t something that I did to deserve losing my job and I was not the only person who was let go.  Being fired means that my job loss is because of something specific to me, that there was some thing(s) I either did or didn’t do that warranted my dismissal. While the direct effects of being fired are the same as being laid off (dealing with job loss, trying to find a new job), I suggest treating being fired differently when interviewing with potential employers. 

Imagine you’re a hiring manager trying to hire somebody to do a job for you. You’re trying to hire somebody who can work with your team and do the job. If a job candidate was fired by a former employer, it means that this candidate had some sort of problem with their employer that could not be resolved. That’s a yellow flag - proceed with caution. It isn’t necessarily a deal breaker but it isn’t positive either - especially when you have many other candidates to look through. As a hiring manager, you would want some reassurances that the problems the candidate had with the former employer won’t be repeated at your company. In order to be reassured, you’re going to want to know why the candidate was fired and why that problem (and any similar ones) won’t also happen to your company if you hire the candidate.

With this in mind, it is wise to prepare for these things as a job-seeker. At any job interview, the chances are very good that you’ll be asked about why you parted ways with former employers. You should always prepare answers for such questions, but especially for firings. Hopefully the cause wasn’t something work-related, but even if it was you would need to show how you have addressed the problem and moved past it. If you can, secure some positive references from the job you were fired from. This will help reassure a potential employer that your work is good. Ask friends to do mock interviews with you so you can practice your responses and see how they feel about your explanation, especially from the perspective of someone who doesn’t know you. You want to provide an honest answer, but you also want to spin it as something that you have taken steps to improve. 

Having been fired is not an ideal situation for a job seeker because it indicates there was a problem specific to you as a worker that both warranted dismissal and could not be worked out. You can think of it as temporary damage that will become permanent if you don’t address it properly when asked (and it will be asked). If you’re prepared for it, you can mitigate the damage. If you’re not, you’re self-sabotaging before you even start the interview. I implore you, if you are looking for work and were fired from a past job (especially a recent job), prepare answers for questions about the firing. It might not be a pleasant task to undertake, but it is far less pleasant to lose a job offer because you didn’t.

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Generally, if you aren’t mass distributing a fan game and using it only for a portfolio piece to show a select group of people, then it should not cause any legal problems. If I am hiring a person to do work for my project, I am looking for demonstrable skill doing the kind of tasks that I need somebody to complete for me. This means that any work you’ve previously done serves only to demonstrate your ability. Fan work (including fan art) in a portfolio is totally fine to demonstrate skills.

Unless you’re applying for an artist role, most prospective employers won’t actually ask to see your work. For designers and programmers, it is far more likely that you’ll be given a test to complete as an assessment of your skills. As long as you can discuss and defend the decisions you made while building your game in an interview setting, that’s often sufficient for a hiring manager like me to decide whether to hire you. Any interview candidate will be interviewed by senior developers in the field, it is highly unlikely that somebody without the necessary skills would be able to fool experts in those fields.

You’re far more likely to incur the wrath of the IP owner if you actually distribute the infringing content/game onto the internet. Remember, the purpose of copyright law is to protect the IP owner from people using their content without permission. They only really do that if they see you abusing it. The fewer people who know about your project, the less likely it is you will be discovered. The higher the profile of the fan project, the more likely it is the IP owner will discover it and take legal action. As long as you keep it under your hat and don’t distribute it, you’ll probably be fine.

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The FANTa Project is being rebooted. [What is the FANTa project?]

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If you are interviewing in the states for a development position, I suggest jeans and a t-shirt. What is on the T-shirt is your own discretion, but I suggest choosing something appropriate and tasteful. There’s a bit of a joke in the industry - if you show up to an interview all dressed up in business attire, you’re showing how inexperienced you are. It is highly likely that your interviewers will be wearing some combination of t-shirts, jeans, shorts, sneakers, sandals, etc. For most of my career, many external people assumed I was a university student because of how I dressed at the office. You can, of course, wear whatever you want. I’ve never heard of an interview candidate being rejected because they dressed up or down. I’m just saying that I’ve been in a lot of interviews and my standard interview attire (no matter which side of the table I’m on) is jeans and a t-shirt.

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The FANTa Project is being rebooted. [What is the FANTa project?]

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Sure. Although I’ve written about the hiring process before, I don’t think I’ve ever actually detailed the overall process from start to finish before so this will be a good one to add to the archives.

Step 0: Sending Out Applications

No dev studio will hire you if they don’t know you exist. You need to submit your resume/CV for a job opening first. This is usually handled via a web submission, at a convention, or at the behest of a recruiter that finds and contacts you. Unfortunately for a lot of candidates, this is where the process ends. If the studio’s recruiters don’t think your resume has the right set of keywords or experience, you’ll probably never hear from them.

Step 1: The Callback

If your resume is interesting to the recruiter, chances are they will call you to get an idea of what you’re looking for. Recruiters aren’t particularly technically versed, so this is more of a gauge of interest - are you interested in possibly working for their studio? Are you local or willing to relocate? Is this kind of role what you’re looking for? The recruiters has more information about the role and the studio culture if you are interested, so this is a good time to ask questions about life at the studio in general.

Step 2: The Two Step

Most hiring studios have one or both of these steps after the initial recruiter callback. Assuming that you were interested at step 1, you will generally do either one or both of these steps at this point. These two steps can occur in either order. Sometimes they occur concurrently online, using some sort of code-oriented screen-sharing app like Codility. In those situations, you’re often both looking at the same code document in real time as you both answer questions *and* write code. 

Step 2A: The Test

You’ll be given a programming (or, in the case of a designer, a design) test, usually with a time limit. Some studios have a very hard time limit (e.g. email us when you’re ready to start and we’ll give you exactly two hours to finish), others have soft limits (take your time but try to have it back within two weeks). Take the test, do your best, check your answers. For programming tests, I heavily suggest actually writing, compiling, testing, and reviewing your code for bugs before submitting. You won’t get a chance to submit any fixes or improvements you find later, so you want to submit your very best work the first time.

Step 2B: The Phone/Video Interview

Somebody from the studio will call you, except this time it will be at least one senior team member of your discipline who, should you be hired, is likely to become your boss, and possibly others as well. You will be asked about your resume and your technical or design skills. For programmers, there will probably be general questions about math, programming, your past projects and experiences, and so on. For designers, there may be theoretical design questions, questions about your past projects and things you’ve done, etc. I suggest preparing a “cheat sheet” for this - something with a quick reference for answers to common questions, work accomplishments you want to highlight, things you want to talk about, or even math formulas/programming principles you have trouble remembering. This way, if you get flustered or nervous, you can look back at the cheat sheet as your anchor to remind you of your preparations.

Step 3: The On-Site Interview

Assuming that you pass Step 2, congratulations - you’re in the final running for getting hired. Usually less than 10% of candidates make it to this point - this is the final step of the determination process. The studio will bring you in to the studio for a long interview (typically several hours), where you will typically meet with multiple groups of team members. If Step 2 did not include a written test, chances are good that you’ll have to take one at this point. Even if you did take a written test before, some studios will make you take a second test at this point as well. You will almost certainly be asked a lot of whiteboard style questions in these sessions. This will be a long time there, so prepare accordingly. This session is a marathon, not a sprint. I suggest bringing a notepad with your cheat sheet in it, as well as writing down the interviewers’ names and things you wanted to ask about. All of the groups will ask at the end if you have questions for them. You should! If you aren’t sure what to ask about, ask them about what it’s like to work at the studio and what kind of things you would need to do in order to succeed there.

Some people like to write a thank-you note to the studio after this step. It’s the polite thing to do, though it doesn’t really do anything to tip the scales. Once a design candidate sent the team cookies in hopes of getting a response. Unfortunately for him, the cookies were placed in the programmer pit where they were promptly devoured and the design team that interviewed him never knew it happened. That said, the design team had already made their decision by that point anyway, so the cookies wouldn’t have made any difference anyhow.

Step 4: The Offer

At this point, if they like you they will make an offer. The tests are done and you’ve passed all of their challenges. Congratulations. Now it’s your turn. This is where the negotiation of terms happens. They want you and will give you a job if you accept it. Job offers are only good for a few days at most, you have to decide whether you want to accept it, negotiate the terms, or reject it. If you are nervous about it, it is very unlikely that they will rescind the offer if you decide to negotiate, since they’ve already spent hundreds, possibly thousands of dollars getting to this point in the process. If the offer is lower than you need for the cost of living of the area (a major consideration in places like California), you can ask for higher pay. Some developers care more about spending time with family, so they stipulate certain work-from-home days, or early mornings and early afternoons to go pick up kids at school. This will be your best opportunity to do this kind of thing for a while, so you should take advantage of it while you can.

Step 5: Work

After you sign and accept the offer, you’ll fill out a bunch of forms and paperwork, possibly move out to the studio’s location, and start working there. Congratulations on getting the job!

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It is never the case for programmers or designers that we want “free work” or that it’s there to test high stress performance. It might be true for some places hiring artists, but I am not an artist and I have only been extremely tangentially involved with hiring artists so I have very little art-hiring process experience to draw from. 

First off, let’s just get one thing out of the way - we never use design or programming test submissions as “free work”. There’s no point to it - the tests themselves are usually broad general exams designed to gauge the candidate’s breadth and depth of knowledge in their field by giving them more open-ended questions so we can see how they think, organize, prioritize, etc. We won’t take their submission and drop it into our project, that would just cause a lot more problems than it solved.

The positions we’re actually hiring for have to work within a lot more constraints and requirements than what happens in the tests. Programmers need to adhere to coding standards and learn how the code they write will fit into the larger whole that is the project’s codebase. Designers need to use proprietary tools and the project’s guiding design principles, as well as direction from their leads, in order to create content for the game itself. This is why it usually takes weeks to bring a new hire up to speed and become productive - they have to learn how all of the things work and fit together. You can’t expect that a test taken over a weekend or two without any of that context to be at all useful in a production environment.

The thing about engineering/design tests is that the amount of time it takes a candidate to complete the test tells us a lot about the candidate’s experience level. [As I wrote about in a previous post], senior devs can usually get things done a lot faster than mid-level or junior devs because we’ve done things like that before, so we know the pitfalls, we know the problems, we know the sort of structure a solution would need. A mid-level or junior dev would probably need to spend more time researching and testing things out. It also shows in the organization and quality of the work - is it kind of slapped together haphazardly or is it well-planned from start to finish? Think about a field you’re an expert in and consider how you can determine if somebody you don’t know is good, bad, or just inexperienced with that field. That’s what we’re doing with the tests.

As for the “high stress situation” thing, that’s also not something gauged by the test. The in-person interview is far far better for seeing how a candidate performs in high stress situations than the take-home test.

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If you are applying for a non-producer position (i.e. programming, design, or art), the chances are very good that you’ll be asked to take a test at some point during the candidacy process in order to prove that you have what it takes. I’ve personally taken both programming and design tests before. Usually, these exams are given ahead of time but occasionally a programming test will happen at an on-site interview. The main purpose of an exam isn’t to determine whether you get hired, but to serve as a way to weed out the unqualified. This is mostly to save the time of the developers from taking time away from development to spend it at an interview with a bad candidate.