What kinds of position can a game designer move into in the larger tech industry?

Student here, so disclaimer: Everything I say here is what I've heard from people in the industry, not my own experience. If anyone here is more directly related to it, they are a better source then I.


It all depends on the hiring manager. Some view "game development" as a software development job that relies a lot more heavily on the graphical side then on the backend logic side, in which case the skills transfer. In those cases it's like an applicant has experience building software in objective_c for iOS but your company builds software for Androids in Java - different skillset, but the knowledge is similar enough that you are retrainable.

Other people view it as a kiddy thing and don't respect it. They might not see it as software development and more using prebuilt tools and prebuilt graphics to build stuff. Kinda like having someone who uses excel all the time say "I can program, see, I use excel and program algorithms in it". Sure, it kinda is? but you're more using something one of us developed for you.

So how the game industry is viewed basically comes down to the hiring manager. At my current place, the owner has no place for games and whenever I mentioned my games in the interview he made it very clear they don't make games there.

That being said, the interview I had with the senior guy afterwards was fantastic in that the senior guy saw my resume mention game development and had me talk about what software development elements did I incorporate (server/client relationships, what language,s etc). He's a gamer, still plays HoN with his son and is way more in that world, while the owner is not.

So, to pull it back, how it's viewed really comes down to what that specific hiring manager views.

My advice wouldn't be to avoid the gaming industry, but not to pigeonhole yourself in non-software development parts of it if you want to keep the door open. If you are using Unity, don't do everything in the GUI, use C# when you do the coding. Write plugins for it on your own time. Do stuff so that, if in the future you want to change back, you aren't in the interview saying "I know how to use a level editor", you are saying "I wrote a script to make level generation more easy that goes through the files and....", or "I wrote a plugin on github in C# that lets you....". As long as you don't pigeonhole yourself into relying on editors and prebuilt software and show that you CAN do it all on a programming level, you just CHOOSE to use the editors for ease of use and saving company time, then you should be fine.

At that point it would just come down to finding the right interviewer who respects the gaming industry.

Also, once you have a software development job that isn't gaming, it won't be hard since you have proven to a previous company that you can do non-gaming development. If a resume says 2 gaming jobs and a SD job, you're a SD. If it says 3 gaming jobs, you're a gamer, if that makes sense.

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