Ask Me Anything
This page is where you get to ask me anything.
I’d gladly take your questions about designing games especially, so if you’ve ever wondered how to go about getting into the games industry, or what being a designer on a project entails, here’s your chance to ask someone who knows.
Other questions are, of course, most welcome too. Just use the comments field below and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.
Hey Odious!
I got hooked on your first part of letter to an aspiring designer. I am about to step onto similar path, looking into getting into QA from where I hope I can work my way up. Would it be too much to ask from you to tell in short how your path looked after what is described in your letter article?
Regards,
Anton.
Absolutely. Basically, I was doing QA of more than one kind, and eventually wound up at a company that didn’t know as much as I did about localization. This happened twice, in fact. The first company was happy with my work in setting up the localization pipeline as I’d learned elsewhere, after which they went bankrupt. The second company fared better though, and after I’d basically saved their asses on the localization front I was given a chance to write a few game concepts and mechanics designs (where I shamelessly had to steal formatting and even some methods – nobody had trained me to do design after all).
They liked the end result and hired me as a designer. Had that not happened I probably would have ended up as a producer of sorts, because of the administrative work I’d done. The trick is to not try to get out of QA by doing more and better QA work. If anything, you should try to identify and fix systemic issues within the QA department, or even better other departments. Find the job that nobody is doing (but that somebody should be), and then do it – while also doing what you’re actually paid to do. That will get you noticed for sure. Especially if you end up fixing procedural errors that affect more than one project. That’ll end up saving them hundreds of thousands of moneys, which is always appreciated.
Just be careful when fixing other people’s processes. Sometimes they don’t take kindly to having their failures brought to light. Your manager, however lovable, may end up proving to be a neurotic, precious little princess… so be careful… and be prepared to accept having some credit stolen on your way up. It happens.