As well as a form of art and entertainment, games are about business. Whether you want to work at a game studio, start your own business or make games as a hobby, recognizing the dynamic landscape of the videogame industry is critical to finding your place. This course will introduce you to game production, project management, teamwork skills, and how to position your game ideas and yourself in the broader marketplace. By the end of the course, you will be able to develop an impactful portfolio of game work to get noticed and/or develop an effective business plan to bring your game to market.
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Del curso dictado por Michigan State University
Business of Games and Entrepreneurship
601 calificaciones
Michigan State University
601 calificaciones
Curso 3 de 5 en SpecializationGame Design and Development
De la lección
Pitching Your Game and Yourself
It may seem a bit cliché, but the idea that perception is reality is perhaps doubly important in games. This doesn't mean that style rules over substance, but that they ultimately both have to exist. That can be a hard thing to hear, that how you present something (including yourself) is as important as what you are saying. This is why in this module we want you to think about presenting yourself or your game and how to best position it or you to get a job or interest people in your project. We're not asking you to write this time, so get ready to pitch!
Conoce a los instructores
Casey O'DonnellAssociate Professor
Media and Information
[MUSIC]
So now you've sent out your resume with an awesome cover letter and
you're gonna have this opportunity to possibly interview.
So let's talk about interviewing, because it's not easy or trivial.
So, the interview process really varies from company to company and
they are gonna be different, so you should expect that.
But typically, you're gonna have some kind of initial screening interview.
Maybe that's over the phone, maybe it's at an event,
like I've mentioned already at the game to the Opera's conference.
One of the major emphasis is, is for large companies is recruitment, right?
And so they're gonna do those initial things, maybe it's over Skype,
maybe Google HangOut.
These aren't typically all that technical, right, they're not a technical interview.
And the other thing to keep in mind is, even that's not a guarantee,
it just depends on who happens to show up, all right?
And you're not always gonna get an interview, don't have expectations,
all right?
The last thing you wanna do is send that angry email.
Oh, I sent you my resume and cover letter a week ago, and
I haven't heard anything from you.
I hate to say it but game companies are kind of worst offenders at being
black holes for resumes and cover letters.
Unless you know somebody, right?
Which is why going back to the previous
video where we talk about the importance of human connection.
But you don't always have that.
And there are plenty of people that get jobs based strictly on their cover letter.
You don't have to know people.
It's just a way to get a real human's e-mail address rather than
HR at game company dot com.
So after that, it's possible, right?
If you've done well, that you'll have an on-site interview.
But again, it's not guaranteed.
Now, hopefully if the game company is kind of worth their salt, if you do have
that initial screening interview, you'll hear something one way or the other.
But let's talk about preparing for the interview,
because some people go into them without a whole lot of preparation and
that's probably the worst idea you've ever had.
Because interviewing, just like presentation, is a skill, all right?
And some people are naturally better at it than others.
We've talked about that already, right?
This is about self-presentation.
The interview is as much a part of this story that you're trying to tell
about yourself.
Now that doesn't mean you need to rehearse or
come off as sort of having canned responses.
But you need to do it.
And the truth is that, like anything, practice really does make it better.
So one of the ways you can prepare is, right, look up.
Go to Google and say what are the top 40 interview questions and
read through them and think in your head, well, how would I answer that?
Because you wanna have ready made stories, right?
That you can easily talk about,
that demonstrate situations where you've done something.
You wanna be able to tell stories.
You don't wanna have them rehearsed, but you wanna have them in your head.
You wanna have thought about it ahead of time.
Because the last thing you wanna do is show up and
get this question that you've never had before and you've never thought about.
Which isn't to say that you should get there and somebody asks a question and
you bounce it right back, right?
Be thoughtful, right?
It's not about having a canned response,
but having an honest response that at least you've thought about ahead of time.
And it helps you prevent things like the ums and the ahs and uhs and the.
Right, those things that just subtract from telling that good story about you.
All right, so tell a story about that class project where you did
something awesome.
All right, or this thing you did on a Coursera or
the time that you did something that sort of you impressed yourself, right?
You wanna have those stories.
So for you maybe it's a job assignment that
maybe you weren't that crazy about at the beginning but then you got into it.
And you really have this impact that you didn't think you'd have and
it impressed your boss, I tell those stories.
And particularly if that boss is somebody who's a reference for you, right?
Because it becomes a connection back.
Somebody can say, oh so and so talked about this thing that they did and
that encourages your boss.
And be like, oh yeah, that was a really super project that they worked on.
The expectations were really low, but they totally overdelivered, right?
That's exciting, that's what you want, that's what helps you get a job.
So there are are other ways to prepare as well,right?
Look the company up online, right?
You need to know stuff about the company, you need to know what they're working on.
You may not know what they're actively working on, but
know what they've worked on before in the past.
Hopefully they've got some stuff about what they're working on right now.
Another thing is go to glassdoor.com, right?
It's a great resource, it'll tell you things about the company.
Now, sometimes you have negative reports about companies,
sometimes you have positive reports.
But getting a sense of what that company is and
who the people that work there are, is really important.
And so, sometimes people will even post information about
the interview questions or the sample things that they asked you to do.
That's a huge benefit to you, right?
Knowing in advance the kinds of things that you're gonna get asked, or
maybe the kinds of test that they have.
But most importantly it's gonna tell you about the company and
what it's like to work there, because that's what you're trying to figure out.
Is this a place that you wanna spend 40 to 60 to 80 hours a week.
Another way to prepare, right?
Is go practice interviews, right?
Anywhere, with a friend, if you're a student, go on campus, right?
If you're a working professional, talk to a friend, go out, take him to lunch and
be like, can you interview me?
Right?
If you have a significant other, ask them to do it, right?
Again, it's not about sounding canned, it's not about overpreparing,
it's about being comfortable.
Because you don't wanna sound rehearsed.
But that practice will help you feel more comfortable, you'll feel prepared, right?
It will lower your nerves.
So things that I do, what do I do?
Well, popular interview questions.
What do people ask?
Right? That's what I'm gonna go do, right?
Now, maybe you write down an answer, right?
Maybe that helps you think through.
But again, you're not reading from a script, this is just helping you
think about it and knowing how you might answer a question.
And it helps you with brainstorming, right?
Because the truth is maybe you forget about a lot of those stories or
you haven't had a chance to really think about them or explore them.
So let's talk about preparing for the technical portion, because the reality is,
this is gonna hit every person who applies for a game job.
Perhaps it's an art task, maybe it's a design challenge,
maybe it's a programming problem, maybe it's a scripting lesson, right?
It doesn't matter, right?
Those are things that are gonna come up and
it's gonna be difficult to prepare for.
Because you have no idea what they're going to ask or
the kind of detail they're gonna want, right?
And so for programmers, there are lots of examples and you'll even find examples for
game companies, right?
So those do exist, but
it's a lot harder when you're talking about design challenges.
A lot of our students that wanna be game designers will get
really interesting questions and they have design constraints.
And it says, here make a game about x, you have 24
hours to come up with the best possible system to do this thing.
Or maybe you have to actually make a level in an editor, right?
Be prepared for those things, they're out there.
There is a resource for programmers in particular,
right, called Cracking the Coding Interview.
And it's a good sample of the the kinds of things that people get asked.
But remember, in some ways it's kind of a game, all right.
They're asking you to demonstrate proficiency.
To be able to not just answer the question, but
understand why they're asking the question.
Okay, with that, we have one more recommendation and
I'll talk about it in the next video.
[MUSIC]
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