[MUD-Dev] JOB: How to get into Game Design / Game content

[Richard Aihoshi aka Jonric]

At 01:25 PM 29/05/01 -0400, "Dave Rickey" <daver at mythicentertainment.com> 
wrote:

>-----Original Message-----
> From: Richard Aihoshi aka Jonric <jonric at vaultnetwork.com>
>> At 06:39 PM 23/05/01 -0700, Taylor wrote:

>>>  Any advice on how to get my foot in the door? Are there any
>>>  skills that I should be trying to get a crash course in? Any
>>>  advice for a wannabe game creator?

>> I wouldn't recommend it as a wide-open route into game development,
>> but off the top of my head, I can recall several instances of
>> people moving into the industry from webmastering and writing about
>> games.  I suspect there's a common thread here in that these
>> people's activities helped them to be noticed and known, which
>> provides an advantage compared to just a resume.

> Yeah, it's actually fairly tricky, but it can be done.  There are at
> least a half dozen I can think of who have made the transition, I
> actually did it twice (and I think I may have been the first).

The first one I remember was Mike McCart who was hired by Ensemble
after running a fansite.  In addition, other hires from websites that
I can think of include one person from Lum the Mad, one from Baldur's
Gate Chronicles, one from Avault, one from the Evercrest comic strip,
and three from the Vault Network - four if I count Dave twice.  I
suspect there are quite a few more, not enough to make it a likely
career path, but not completely isolated examples either.

> It's definitely a visibility thing, having a webmaster-editorialist
> position for a major fansite makes you stand out from the crowd, you
> become someone the dev team knows by name (or at least by pseudonym)
> rather than one of the faceless mass.  However, it can work against
> you as well, Scott Jennings (aka Lum the Mad), in spite of a
> demonstrated grasp of the genre and experience in enterprise-level
> database programming, was not able to make the transition because of
> the baggage that came along with his website (I've had and will
> probably continue to have similar issues, since I tend to be a bit
> more outspoken than is strictly tactful).

In industry in general, most entry-, low- and even mid-level hiring
decisions are based on seemingly small things. By the time you get to
the final few candidates, their qualifications and abilities are
pretty much even overall since people who don't measure up have
already been eliminated from consideration, or if there is one
candidate who really stands out, there's effectively no decision to
make.

My feeling would be that visibility is one of the small things that
isn't likely to be a major factor in terms of getting to the final
candidate stage, but if you do make it that far, it can take on much
greater importance.

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