Francisco Rivas

How long interviews are depends on the company and the situation. If the company is in your local area, you might be given a shorter interview because they know that they could always bring you back in if needed. On the other hand, if a company paid to fly you out to their studio, chances are you're going to be interviewing for a good portion of the day since it wouldn't be practical to bring you back out every couple of weeks. 3+ hour interviews are pretty common in the game industry. There usually isn't just one person grilling you for multiple hours. Most of the time, there are a series of interviews that each take an hour or less. The interviews are conducted by people on different teams within the company whose teams have different roles they're trying to fill. For example, a programmer could be interviewed by the gameplay teams for two different projects as well as the engine team. That would be 3 interviews right there, each of which could be anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour. On top of that, there is the standard HR pre-interview where they tell you how things are going to work and you fill out some preliminary paperwork. If all goes well, you may be given a last interview with some senior person of the company for them to get a feel for where you want your career to go. For my previous job at Microsoft, I flew out there twice. Each day was full of interviews. The schedule had me starting at 9am and finishing around 4ish. They have various product teams interview you for different positions at the company. The interviewers communicate between all the interviews so if one interviewer found an area that he thinks the next interviewer should delve deeper into, they will communicate that behind the scenes. So the interviews generally get progressively harder as the day goes by. The longer your day goes, the better you are doing. If you're still interviewing around 3pm, then chances are they're really interested. Same goes for pretty much any company. If you're not all that good, they'll finish the interview(s) pretty quick. If they're interested in you, they'll ask you more and more questions to get a better feel for the kind of skills you bring to the table. Francisco

There is no one BEST way. Different things work for different people. It also depends a little on what area of game development you want to get into. Open source projects can indeed get you noticed. It all depends on how much work you actually contributed to the effort and how you can demonstrate that to someone else. The main idea is to do SOMETHING that shows off your skill and talent. Don't rely solely on education because in the end, your piece of paper looks exactly the same as the person sitting next to you at graduation. Education is important to give you the skills you need in the game industry, but you need to take it a little further to distinguish yourself from the competition. Here are some tips for different areas of game development: Art - If you want to go for art, modding is one way to get things into your portfolio. Internships and hobby projects are others. There are many programmers out there that would love to work with an artist or two on a small project that you could all then use as a game demo and for experience. Design - Modding and scripting are good for designers. Well layed out levels that demonstrate understanding of the particular goals for the level story-wise and also an understanding of how to do it so you don't cripple performance are good showcases. I'm sure some of the designers/producers could chime in on this with more detail. Programming - Game demos, hobby projects, engines, tools. These are tangible demonstrations of your skill and knowledge. Being able to explain why you did things a certain way and how you could improve on them is also key.

This turned out to be longer than I thought... My first exposure to a video game on a PC was outside of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? and Oregon Trail was the shareware version of Wolfenstein 3D. A friend of mine gave me a floppy disk with a post-it note on it that talked about this fancy thing called "pkunzip" I thought "Wow, if by following these instructions, I can play this cool game, what if I follow better instructions? I could play better games!" So I started learning DOS and how to run a lot of different types of games back when you needed to have as much of that oh so elusive 640k of lower memory available or else your DOS game wouldn't run. I went to college at the University of Central Florida and studied Computer Science. I really wanted to learn 3D graphics but at the time there was only one class at the undergrad level that had anything to do with graphics. It was a basic introduction to virtual worlds and for the final project, I taught myself 2D DirectDraw. I wanted to learn more graphics so I convinced one of my professors to let me do an Independent Study in 3D graphics to finish my Bachelor's. That's where I taught myself D3D7 and made a very simple terrain demo with an airplane flying around. By this time, I knew I wanted to learn more about 3D graphics but I also knew I had a long way to go. I had decided that one way or another I was going to learn 3D graphics so I figured I might as well get a degree for it. So I enrolled in the Master's program at UCF since the graduate program had many more options when it came to 3D graphics. Because the Independent Study showed I was willing to go out of my way to learn something that interested me, I got an internship at Evans & Sutherland in Salt Lake City, UT the summer before I started grad school. They did hardware and software for flight simulators. I worked in their 3D graphics software group. This got me valuable experience that I would use later. While working on my Master's, I got a job at the local ATI office as an intern for a full year. I worked part time doing research in real-time image processing. I think what set me apart from other applicants was how I aquired my graphics knowledge (mainly by learning it on my own). My Master's Thesis was on hardware-based radiosity and ray tracing. During this time, I became a DirectX MVP, which is basically a person recognized by Microsoft as an expert in the particular technology and someone willing to share their knowledge with others. Upon graduation, I went to work for EA and eventually ended up at Microsoft on the DirectX team. I had been working on some unique rendering techniques I read about in research papers and put together a demo that showed everything off. This seems to be what helped me get in at Microsoft. I decided that I wanted to get back into making games directly, but not at an extremely large publisher, so here I am at Obsidian. I can say that I never want to go back to a large company again. Mid-sized companies fit me extremely well; you don't have the stress of a startup that never knows if their next pay check will clear, and you don't have the frustration of 7 layers of corporate management who haven't done any real work in over a decade. My advice for getting into the game industry: 1. Pick an area that you truly enjoy working in - It sucks to wake up every morning to go to a job you hate no matter what the paycheck is. 2. Get as much experience in that area as possible, be it through education, internships, hobby projects, or modding. 3. Do something to separate yourself from the competition - build an engine, write demos, put together a portfolio. 4. Be willing to learn and keep up with advancements in your field be it through conferences, trade publications, or hobby projects you do on your own time. 5. When you go to an interview, don't be arrogant - It's ok to answer "I don't know" to a question instead of trying to pull something out of your butt.