Here is one of the advices I give to people trying to break into the industry: make sure you constantly meet people in real life.
Instead of staying at home preparing and sending résumés to dozens of applications, it is far better to spend two hours per day outside, perhaps at the gym or at a local course on something entirely unrelated to games.
This approach offers three crucial advantages:
1. Maintain Human Energy
You keep your energy levels high because you are meeting and talking with real humans, not just staring at a screen. Waiting for a response to an online application is passive and draining; engaging with the world is active and vital.
2. Design for Reality
When you meet people outside your professional bubble, you gain invaluable insight into their context. I often use these interactions to think about game design.
For example, I currently attend a Catalan language course twice a week. The class is full of nurses and public service workers who are there primarily to get a better contract, not necessarily to master the language. I notice they are tired, easily bored, and don’t want too much complication. Their lives are already full, balancing jobs and children.
How would I entertain someone like them? Not with a complex console game, right? They need a simple casual game, but it has to load fast and get straight into the gameplay. This helps me stay in touch with reality. It forces me to design for the actual, busy human being, not the idealized, endless-time “gamer.”
3. Unlock Lateral Opportunities
You significantly increase your chance of finding job opportunities in lateral sectors by meeting people who have nothing to do with the virtual bubble you’ve created in your online networks.
I honestly have the feeling that nowadays, it is often easier to find a job by going to the gym than by applying on LinkedIn.