Hello, I an a recent graduate of game design and was curious how you would go about applying for your first level design job? I understand “how to”, I have a portfolio ready and stuff. But I am curious how to go about finding indie projects or companies willing to hire new “unexperienced” level designers. Where do I look? thanks all
Hey @Robot9t9
Congratulations on your studies. Unfortunately, this isn’t really the right place for that type of question. This part of the Unreal Engine forums is dedicated to discussing and getting help and answers to programming and scripting questions, which can get very technical with the engine itself.
This question is better suited to maybe posting on a suitable subreddit i believe there’s a game design subreddit which might be good there and there’s also some career focused game dev communities on discord reddit and elsewhere which may be more suitable for this.
The market is unfortunately pretty tough at the moment for the game dev industry, and the role of game designer is an incredibly difficult role to find a job for, from what I have heard. Very few game designers are required in any studio and they hold such significant influence on the core strategy of the product itself.
Wish you the best of luck in finding a cool opportunity.
if the majority of your experience is with Unreal Engine then you just needed to scroll down a little bit more to post:
https://forums.unrealengine.com/tags/c/community/got-skills-looking-for-talent/56/unreal-engine
if you able to work in any engine, a general game design education should be engine agnostic, then you can try looking in even the Unity Forum (I think they were being moved), or r/GameDev (though Reddit has a thing against self promotion which is an if the mod believes you are self promoting thing, and also …Reddit… and the problem environment IT IS)
basically any forum where game dev people congregate you “should” be able to post links to a portfolio (except Reddit which is a 50/50 if a mod will smite you down).
if you are looking for full time employment I have some bad-ish news: a specific Game Design roll is often times an “Ideas guy roll” meaning that you will probably end up starting a lot lower (the joke is “a general Game Design degree gets you a better chance going into QA”). Although if you have a good eye for “level design”, that is often a good stopgap that doesn’t put you into 3-4 years of QA (not everyone can follow in the foot steps of Miyazaki).
there is the other option to try to make and release a game, No, I do not mean on Steam or EGS, or even for money, I mean on like Itch.io even if it is just a demo. this can help in a variety of ways: it can be used as a gauge of interest into your ideas (because Unreal doesn’t have a web-player you will get less traction, but should still get some), it can be used to as a “I have the courage to be shot down by the general public”, and if it gets good reactions then you can use it as a request for help to make something bigger.
try out some Game Jams 2 to 3 days is not a lot, and is even worse with one person, but even if you take the prompt, and don’t actually submit the thing, but just work through what you would do.
Do not send in pitches to game studios unless they specifically request it, in 99% of cases they are required to not open it, and throw it away: if someone sees your idea, and likes it enough they could claim it as their own and run with it, not only are you out of the job doubly so, but also you would have to hope you have dated documents that you came up with it first even to be the court of publica opinion on your side.
the only thing you should ever have to pay for to get a job: the schooling/certificates, relocation, and transportation. anything else and start asking a LOT of question.
if you only have experience with Unreal, and want to pursue the Indie side then do a little investigation into Unity, or Godot (for smaller projects these can often be easier to go through the pipeline on). make sure you know your vectors, and trig stuff these are engine agnostic, and will help anywhere in the industry.
The economy is ■■■. There are no “Game Design” roles. especially for newcomers, ESPECIALLY if youre using ai at all. Heres how this works, youre supposed to have a ■■■■■■ full time job that you hate, and then you make videogames on the side for fun. think of it more like a side hussle. if you want to design and make your own game, you should start with something SMALL (think flappy bird or cube runner). You want to build your portfolio with games like that on different platforms to prove you know how to use different platforms (ios, VR, etc).
You can find freelance gigs online, they are usually part time contracts not full time employment and the scene is extremely competitive right now because the supply far exceeds the demand for developers.
Your best bet to get your feet wet, and have consistant work, is find a project that lets you work for Royalty, that way you have something on your porfolio that you made, and even if its unsuccessful, you still have a job and have income.
Oh and to add to this, there is a section here on the forums called Got Skills? Looking for Talent? Thats where you can find your first rev share job.