AMA #1: Samantha Rose, Game Developer

Seb

Hi Samantha – thanks for the AMA! I’m keen to hear about your journey into the UI Development space – what made you choose this particular domain, and what would you suggest for others wanting to follow your path?

Livio

It’s 12:59pm PST on my end, might as well start the AMA if everyone’s ready. 😃

Seb

Oh, I jumped the gun 😃

Livio

nah it’s good

@samantha feel free to start with a little self intro

and then you can jump into Seb’s question

samantha

Hii~ I’m Samantha! I have a degree in game audio from Columbia College Chicago, I graduated in 2014. 2014 – 2016 I bummed around a bit and worked on a now defunct indie studio/game that i ran. I started doing freelance work in 2016 and did that until my current job at uGen that I started a few months ago.

I’m actually not a UI Developer! That’s the title I was hired under, but we’ve recently changed it to Unity Developer to reflect that I’m doing a lot more than UI.

We only just changed that title last week actually.

But I view myself as a versitile programmer, with a focus on tools and support. I view my role as facilitating my other team members and enabling them to do their best work as quickly as possible.

Parker

How did you connect with you current employers? Where’s the best place to meet employers for unity developers?

samantha

I went on a roughly 6 month job search before I ended up here. I found them through http://indeed.com

job searching it rough

I also reccomend http://orcahq.com

it aggrigates from the companies sites, so it doesn’t hit everyone, but it lists a lot

I checked indeed, the unity forums, and orca everyday

also the tigsource forums

Livio

Interesting, did you find any job sites that you recommend not using?

samantha

monster was just spam

indeed has a lot of garbage but it can still be useful, obviously since it’s where i found my job

i also interviewed for a few jobs off indeed

orca as well

the unity forums did not really bare any fruit

neither did tigsource

but they’re both easy to check

Ian P

What was working in the indie studio/game like? Were you in charge of the project?

samantha

Yeah, so I founded/ran a 4 person outfit

we were working on a project for ps4/xbox one/steam

Parker

what were your marketing strategies when you were running the 4 person outfit?

How do you market games when you are working in a small, indy studio?

samantha

Pray

Parker

haha

Brandon Anderson

What is your favorite game?

I ask the hard hitters

samantha

in all seriousness, twitter is important, a lot of forums can be helpful, tigsource, unity

anywhere you can find traction

unfortunately, it is not a sure thing

lean into your local community, if you have one

post a lot

it’s hard, indie is waaay harder than freelance/aaa

the financial stress is immense

I lived off of basically no money for 3 years

no more than $1000 a month

barely scraping by

the only real way to do it, is to start off with money

unless you can handle the barista job on the side to pay your bills and still have enough time to work on stuff

sorry to be a bummer!!

i don’t regret trying

Jeanenne Campbell

i’ve thought about going indie after i finish school. is it better to wait until i gain industry experience or is it best to just jump right in and go for it?

Parker

no good answer, thank you!

samantha

but i’m happy to have a stable well paying job now

i think it depends, jeanenne

Ian P

I think its good to set expectations for us as students, that was a great answer

samantha

mostly on money

esarkis

Nice to meet you, and thanks for being the first AMA here 😄 how did specializing in Unity play into your job search? Did you find that companies who were using Unity were more responsive than one’s who were using a different engine? Basically, do you feel specializing engine-wise closed doors or opened more?

samantha

re jeanenne: I think that connections and experience can help, but also the younger you are the less financial risk you tend to have. I don’t have kids, I don’t have any dependents. I’m 27. I have friends doing the indie thing with kids and morgage, it’s a lot more pressure. it’s not as big of a deal to fail when you’re already broke. that being said, if you spend a few years making money and save it right, you can take a low risk year or two to live off savings and make whatever you want and then dip back into the industry proper when you run out, or not if it’s successful, There are over 3000 games released to steam per year, most of them don’

t make any money

also i might have to occasionally dip out for a sec, I’m at work and coordinating with a few people about some stuff

Livio

that’s fine samantha, we’re almost at the 30-min mark anyway

samantha

re elisha: it’s neutral i think. no one is going to hire me for a ue4 job, but then no one is going to hire a ue4 person for unity. I think that it’s good to know a tool but important to understand how it differs from the rest of the tools out there. you want to be an expert in your tool but not so entrenched that you can’t learn something else.

I can go for a bit longer 😃

Parker

how much time do you recommend people who want to get the the field (or specifically become a unity developer)

spend coding or working in Unity a day?

from a student perspective

Jeanenne Campbell

Thanks for answering my previous question! what was the interview process like to get hired for your current job?

esarkis

If you end up having time after answering Parker and Jeanenne: what would you tell yourself if you could send a message to yourself at the beginning of your academic experience to give yourself a leg up?

Livio

(guessing she’s talking to coworkers about stuff right now, but as she said earlier will be back soon)

samantha

I’m back!

re parker: I’m not sure time is as important as variety. just make things, try to make things with other people, make things by yourself, make things with art, make things with blocks, finish some things, don’t finish others. all of it will help you learn things and is important. also try to learn some good c# habits

and patterns

re jeanenne: I did a short phone interview, then a programming test, then an interview with the whole team (19 of us!)

they called me back in 20 minutes to offer me the job

re elisha: scope small. scope small. scope small. scope small. scope small. scope small.

Parker

when you’re done answering @esarkis question, what were some things you did for the programming test?

what did they test you on?

samantha

your first games probably aren’t going to be good so don’t spend 2 years on it.

they had me build a dynamic grid of buttons in ugui

good programming tests (a lot of them are bad) aren’t meant to be super hard

they should demonstrate how you think and code and organize

Livio

Is ugui the built in Unity UI system or is it something else

samantha

sometimes they’ll give you bullshit fizzbuzz and dumb problems that don’t test anything but how well you prepaired for an interview

there are whole books on programming interviews

yeah! ugui is unitys gui system

Livio

^ A lot of Unity’s built-in systems go by different names. Sometimes the community calls it something different from what the docs say, lol.

sometimes it’s legacy, sometimes it’s codenames from beta that stuck

samantha

also i think someone asked me what my fav games are and I missed it: halo:ce, antichamber, dota 2, path of exile, the beginners guide, and probably more stuff i forgot

zuomingshi

To add to the interview prep Q, “Cracking the Coding Interview” is considered a classic when it comes to coding interview prep, helped me quite a bit when I interviewed for my developer position at Microsoft.

samantha

i also own that book

esarkis

Thanks for answering @samantha !

Livio

let us know when you’ve run out of time Samantha, this has been great so far 😄

samantha

I should probably get back ot work!!

Parker

thanks for the A’s to our Q’s 😃

samantha

I’ve got a few links i was going to drop in here, stuff that I think is great or helpful

http://catlikecoding.com/unity/tutorials/
http://tinysubversions.com/2009/04/writing-a-resume-for-a-game-company/index.html
http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/contents.html

Livio

ah tinysubversions is known to have great advice

samantha

some unity stuff that I use allllll the time

https://github.com/thefuntastic/Unity3d-Finite-State-Machine
https://github.com/Claytonious/Frictionless
http://dotween.demigiant.com/

hope some of this was helpful!! feel free to poke me on twitter if you ever had any other questions and I’ll try to get back to you

Livio

Thank you so much Samantha for taking time out of your day for us!

Jeanenne Campbell

Thank you for answering our questions! It was very helpful 😃

samantha

Of course! have a good one y’all!

Livio

Ok everyone, the next AMA will be on Friday night. 😮 Yes, I was serious when I said we were planning a ton of these, so we’re kinda going rapid-fire with them. See the post below for info on when it lands in your timezone:
http://www.igda.org/blogpost/1148835/290936/AMA-2-Eric-Cagle-Game-Designer