Yeah, make sure your grammar is good!

Pandemic Studios shut down in 2009 :huh:

in an interview with Todd he said you'll need some very good credentials (which you appear to have)

BUT

he said the big BIG kicker in determining who to hire is their solo work. It's not enough to Beth. to just have a bunch of programs or mini-games you made in college, they'd want you to actually, on your own time, without guidance by a teacher or other mentor, to create something (preferably using their software)

Ex: if your an artist wanting to go to Bethesda, you can't just hand in all the stuff you did in college, they'd want you to create some impressive artwork on your own.

your best bet is to design a basic RPG or other game using their current engine (the one they did for Oblivion and Fallout 3) or alternatively make a very popular mod for either of those games that impresses Beth.

My advice is to do what Todd did, and also finish college. What Todd did which was referenced in the GI vids was he went to college for the wrong reasons but afterwards he went to a smaller gaming company worked on a couple games and then came back to Beth after Arena was finished and he got hired and the rest is history.

In simple terms finish College, get hired by a smaller gaming company, if you can come up with some mods for some of Beths games and within those mods create unique characters with in depth stories. After a game or two that you've written at the smaller gaming company send a resume to Beth telling them that you want a job and that you would be a great Asset to the company. Make sure you aren't demanding the job and be nice, respond to questions with Yes Sir or No Sir or something similar. Also show them the mods that you've created with the unique characters explaining their backstories and how you can add that element to future Beth games.

Um... No. Don't trust him on this. Creativity has nothing to do with going through trying times. The only thing that might make someone say that is the fact that trying times are just one of the many ways to experience the world. The more you experience, the more material you have to dump into your vat of creation, and the better your work will (probably) be.

Sorry. Couldn't let that pass. :whistling:

My idea was just to come on these forums and write the most creative and interesting ideas I could think of to show that I understand gaming, what gamers like, and express a lot of new ideas to show I am capable of auto generation, and then sit back and hope someone at Bethesda noticed me. You can go back through my posts and see for yourself. I think it was a good idea ... however, so far, not even an honorable mention, hahahaha. And when I wrote some questions to Bethedsa in the "Meet the Devs" forums, none of my questions ever got answered, no matter how off the wall, inane, or on point they were. Other people can write such ridiculous things and the Devs just eat up everything they say. I don't get it.

I'm invisible, as always. The ghost in the machine .... (sighs)

why in hell would you want to work for bethesda if you like playing their games. thats just nuts.

What the hell is Morrowinf?

Mmm. Rather be with Obsidian. I'd be too tempted to strangle Todd, and strangling your boss is typically looked down in society for some unknown reason :/.

maybe im just looking at this differently, but why would anyone want to work for a company that makes the games they enjoy playing. you are constantly surrounded by spoilers, if your working on something like topography or making the dungeons there is nothing that is unknown to you before you play the game. it just seems like an awful idea to know everything about the game before you even play it. i would work for a sports game company or one of those adventure games that svck so badly.

An Irish gaming college? I go to uni in Ireland and I'm pretty sure no such thing exists unless you're doing a PLC or something in an IT.

Don't mean to put down game design degrees or anything, but I don't know of any proper NUIs here that actually offer that sort of degree, which would be something you'd want for yunno... a decent job.

There's no such word as "aswell"

We don't normally allow people to "play grammar cop", but since the subject itself is about writing, I guess it's an exception. Even if English is your second language, if you want to work on an English language game then it's best to get as good as you can at writing in that language. There are, of course, other language versions of games - but I don't think you can get many Gaelic games.


You might consider studying abroad if there are no suitable courses where you are. Todd has actually spoken pretty highly of the game-related degrees recently, saying that they've improved a lot over the past few years. A lot of the devs at Bethesda did straightforward programming or fine art degrees, and quite a few of them went to Carnegie Mellon, which has well-regarded technology and arts courses.

One thing you'd need to consider is that game design is a very competitive industry - for every vacancy, there are dozens or even hundreds of applicants. You'd be working long hours under considerable stress, and you'd almost certainly earn more doing anything else because there's such a queue to get in it keeps the wages low across the industry. I've known people take pay cuts to transfer into the gaming industry - because they really, really, really wanted to work there. You have to want to do it more than anything else.

You don't just send in a CV and hope - that's true of any job - you have to network like mad and build up contacts. Go along to expos and trade shows and any way in that you can - volunteer on a stand to get in the door if that helps. Demonstrate that you really know games - read books on game design and practice modding and making your own rudimentary games. Quest design and level design are not the same thing - understand the difference between them, and understand the difference between different types of quest design. A lot of people start as interns, so that's a route in. Though a lot of people start off as QA testers and then move across into other departments, there's also a career path in software testing, so don't just view that as "a foot in the door" - there's already a queue to get that foot in that door, and it's a skilled job. It's absolutely not "playing games for a living", much as I might tease certain people that it is. You don't get to keep your character!

Really, just remember that for every person applying who's a pretty good modder, there are five more applying with good related degrees, a huge portfolio of work they've spent 12 hours a day on, a little black book full of industry contacts and experience in a related field. All of that is just a matter of putting the time in.

Oh, and you'd need to move to America, of course - unless you want in on the marketing/distribution side and then you could apply to Zenimax Europe.

Be a good java programmer?

I was actually wondering about this the other day...working in the gaming industry is currently what I truly wish to follow and obviously working at companies such as Beth, Bioware, Rockstar etc...would be a dream come true. But obviously I think about ther career choices, all related to technologies (IT for example), and you say it's easier to make money on other areas and I was thinking what other areas, tech related, are good career choices from an economcal point of view so to speak ?

To the Construction Set! :user:

I prefer the more unconventional method.

"Jack of all trades, master of none, though oftentimes better than master of one"

A bit more difficult to pull off, but well worth the effort.

I'm currently studying on university to become game developer, Artist/(Level) Designer. I can say that specialization is key to success, that is what
people from industry say. If you want to be designer, it is good to know little more about coding, art and what other people do.

But if you want to be good at doing 3D art, Concept art, Coding AI, Coding Physics or other coding stuff. It is important that you
are expert what you do.

So being Jack of all trades is possible but it takes so much, that workload you are doing is eating you alive.

Yeah, it is important that if you do specalize in one thing, you don't limit yourself to just that. It is expected for a CG artist to have good drawing skills, for example.

Indeed. But being great artist and coder at same time is something that is extremely hard to achieve.

Unless you think your coding is a work of art, or embed some cryptic code into your art. XD

This subject would conjure endless debate on my classroom.

Yeah, I've seen some fancy code generated graphics used in games which look quite nice, someone might consider those as art.

Um. That is because it is almost exactly the same skill (Or at base the same skill). All you have done is changed medium.

You can be fairly sure that a good painter would get to grips with oil pastels fairly quickly.

True, or at least my own experience confirms this.

I do a lot digital painting every day on school and on my own time I do miniature painting. Which is not exactly same thing, but I've
seen as my digital art skills improve, so does my painting skills.

I was thinking about enrolling in UAT's game design program. Do you guys think that this will really help me in any significant way, if I do well in the course work obviously?

Nope. Oil and oil pastels work totally differently. For that matter, so do oils, acrylics, and watercolors, despite all being paint. They require very different techniques to do well.