OT - Career change advice - Game Designer

[deccan]

Originally posted by Lord Chane:
Okay, now I'm curious about your c.v. Care to share it?

Well, I'm guessing that your curiosity comes from wondering what kind of c.v. it took for me to get a developer to be interested in hiring me as a game designer. Keep in mind that this is a Malaysian company and qualifications and skills that can impress a Malaysian company would probably just cause someone from a U.S. company to yawn in disinterest.

My academic background is in media/journalism and I studied in Tours, France, which of course means that I speak French and did a couple of internships with French newspapers. This is unusual enough among Malaysians that most prospective employers treat my application as not being just another piece of paper in the slushpile just for that reason alone.

I've done brief stints as a press stringer for one of the larger national newspapers in Malaysia and as a writer for a Malaysian dot-com. After that, I spent about a year and a half in Africa as an English-French interpreter and I've been in the Solomon Islands for the past three years, helping to manage one of the larger logging companies. I've some interesting experiences and adventures to relate about working in those remote places, which you can read if you want to dig up my old Solomon Islands thread.

In my application letter, I've emphasized my experience in senior management, which I'd bet, relatively few of the other applicants have done. I'm guessing that they're probably inundated with applications from youngish people who are wildly enthusiastic about games, but are relatively immature and haven't worked in management before. Part of a game designer's job is to provide direction to programmers and artists after all.

Mostly however, I think I've managed to identify what precisely they are interested in. For example, I've managed to toss in references to Jin Yong's (Louis Cha) wuxia novels, which is an important source of ideas for many martial arts epics, mentioned stuff about designing scenarios, characters, items, add-on rules etc. for games like RuneQuest - Land of Ninja and Shadowrun since I was kid, and yes, I've even mentioned that my favorite strategy game of the moment is SEIV and pointed them to MM's website. And it probably helps that I have a website with some relatively interesting reading material on it, have written at least one science-fiction short story, and have decent computer skills (I've done some distance learning courses with the University of California Berkeley Extension in computer science in my spare time). Not enough to write a game certainly, but enough to know when I'm asking the impossible from programmers and enough I hope to be able to give some useful input in overall game design.

Hope that satisfies your curiosity. What's happening with our KOTH game anyway?

[deccan]

Originally posted by Erax:
Here's the article where I got the info : Lineage.

It's almost two years old, though. I have no idea what the scene is like today.

Thanks for the link Erax, I really appreciate it.