A new job
Six months ago I got laid off from Midwinter Entertainment, then a 5 year old game studio in the Seattle area, after our project was cancelled and our studio was shuttered.
I had been bracing for this as 2023 and 2024 were marked with mass layoffs in the game industry. At one point I had to move because my landlord was selling the house, and I had signed a new lease only a few weeks before I got laid off, I had to because had I lost my job and then my apartment, I wouldn't be able to sign a new lease without proof of income.
I settled into a routine. I'd apply for jobs refreshing gracklehq's feed, looking at Linkedin, and then wait for callbacks. In the meantime I tried starting a few game projects which sorta went nowhere.
For claiming unemployment I was tracking my job searches using google sheets, which helped troubleshoot what portions of my job search to improve. After about 10 or so failed first round interviews I realized I REALLY needed to improve my interview skills. I got lucky in that a friend of mine, who hires people all the time, sat down for a mock interview and I was able to fix a lot of my problems.
The resume I wrote at the start of unemployment was basically unchanged by the end. The file name I had was "Firstname Lastname Senior Systems Designer Resume" which is a mouthful, but when looking at file names at a glance it's easy to spot and says what it contains. However, at one point I experimented with removing "Systems" from the file name, and then I suddenly stopped hearing back. After I restored it, I started getting responses again. This is to say: Resume file names are very important.
For one job I went all out and illustrated an entire comic page as my cover letter. They sent me a form rejection. Whatever valve wants I don't have and probably never will.
Interviews were very unpredictable. The first round would either be with a recruiter or maybe it would be the head of the design department. Sometimes they are simple meet and greet style interviews and other times they're full blown sit down interviews with many questions, and there's basically no way to tell until I got the call. I would do lots of prep for interviews that were mainly "hey do you want to work for us?" type calls, and then once had to do a full interview on the phone in public and was really unprepared.
Interviews are vibes based. I don't think i can put that into usable advice. One thing my friend told me is to finish all of their questions so you can get to banter. I got one interviewer talking about his hobbies, and in another one I brought up an obscure Source engine game that someone else on the call recognized. Whether these interactions happen or not comes down to chance, but I tried to maximize the chances of someone throwing out a conversational hook by being honest and asking things like "what games are you playing" near the end.
Out of all my cohorts, the ones that got jobs quickest had the least experience, and those still out of work have the most experience. At least among designers. Programmers seemed to find jobs pretty fast if they had a lot of experience, but ones with little are picking new careers or are working on personal projects.
We had the incredible luck of all joining a private discord server right before the studio was shut down, this gave us a place to commiserate and share tips and job postings.
I really have no takeaways from this other than my last several AAA jobs helped me find a job, for once, but my lack of shipping an Unreal game probably held me back a little. Career wise it's hard to say. I feel like I haven't had the career trajectory to really determine my own fate other than staying in as a designer. It's sort of hard to plan ahead in this industry with any sort of reliability. Uhh anyway!