Earl Eugenio

So sorry to hear about layoffs at Modern Wolf, with 6 staff members being affected. The news broke last night, with my former CA colleague George Willard posting the news, as well as providing information about those also laid off to support re-hiring as quickly as possible. You can find that here: https://lnkd.in/eEXWSgNQ To those impacted by these layoffs, please find a comprehensive list of resources, below: 🥇First, Discipline Games Jobs Resources: Over the past weeks I have created 9 (at time of writing) Games Jobs Resources to find jobs in a wide range of disciplines: 🎨 Art, Animation, VFX and UI: This resource contains around 1,200 jobs worldwide across all links. Link: https://lnkd.in/eu2bjadW ⚙ Engineering and Programming This resource lists just over 1,900 jobs worldwide across all links. It also talks about interview tips and questions to practice. Link: https://lnkd.in/etPj22BE 🕹 Quality Assurance: This resource lists over 450 QA jobs worldwide. This post also talks about the craft of QA and contains tips and interview practice. Link: https://lnkd.in/dwwVjZuc 📑 Game Production: This resource lists around 400 jobs worldwide. It also contains info about game production as a whole and GDC talks. Link: https://lnkd.in/gxDvFM-Z 📢 Marketing & Community: This resource lists around 400 jobs worldwide. It also gives an intro into game marketing and community management. Link: https://lnkd.in/e5MuViug 🎶 Audio and Sound Design: This resource lists around 190 jobs worldwide. Link: https://lnkd.in/eSkPSsWf 📠 Studio Support, HR, Recruitment and BizDev: This resource lists around 290 jobs worldwide. Link: https://lnkd.in/ePG57_7v ⚙ IT, Helpdesk and DevOps: This resource lists around 140 jobs worldwide. Link: https://lnkd.in/e8ZsuiZh 🎮 Game Design: This resource lists around 480 jobs worldwide. https://lnkd.in/dCv_hQXv 🥈 Second, the Ultimate list of Video Games Career Resources: This should be your one-stop shop for all information. My dear friend Amir Satvat maintains these documents, he is a legend for doing this - please check them out: https://amirsatvat.com/ 🥉 Third, If you have worked in publishing, please message me. I am looking for quite a few roles right now! ⬅ 🎖 Finally, do not give up. Ever. No matter how dark things may look right now, I KNOW you will get through this, you have got this! 👊 Remember you are not alone. If you need help, advice, or even an ear to listen, we're here for you. Always! ➡ A request to my community, please can I ask you to repost this post to your colleagues and friends, so that we can get as many into jobs as possible! And please comment if you or your studio are currently hiring - let's help each other! Much love ❤️ #layoffs #gamesindustry #jobsingames #modernwolf

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Hey Greenhouse Software, why have you changed your UI and user flows (moving elements from place to place) without having an onboarding or tutorial? Your change has impacted my current recruiting flow. I have doubled the number of clicks than with the old UI. I am less efficient than before. I am open to discussing this with your product/UX people to provide input.

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When it comes to #videogame testing, Functional Quality Assurance (FQA) and Localization Quality Assurance (LQA) are often treated as separate entities. But is that the best approach? Our experts say, "Not quite!" Our new blog post can help level up your game testing.

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🌟 Own Your Identity: You Are What You Say You Are 🌟 You are not an "aspiring" engineer. You are not an "aspiring" artist. You are not an "aspiring" game designer. You are that as soon as you say you are. 🔍 Why This Matters: Recruiters are looking for individuals who are confident and ready to step into their roles. They don't want to hire someone who is "aspiring" for a position; they want someone who believes in their own skills and potential. 🚀 Steps to Embrace Your Identity: Affirm Your Role: Why: Self-affirmation builds confidence and helps you internalize your professional identity. How: Start by confidently declaring, "I am an engineer," "I am an artist," or "I am a game designer." Embrace this identity fully. Update Your LinkedIn Title: Why: Your LinkedIn title is often the first thing recruiters see. It should reflect confidence and readiness. How: Remove the word "aspiring" from your LinkedIn title. Update it to reflect your professional identity. For example, change "Aspiring Software Engineer" to "Software Engineer." Showcase Your Skills: Why: Demonstrating your skills and achievements builds credibility and reinforces your professional identity. How: Highlight your projects, experiences, and accomplishments on your LinkedIn profile and resume. Use concrete examples to showcase your expertise and readiness. 🔑 The Power of Self-Identification: By confidently identifying as a professional in your field, you project assurance and competence. This shift in mindset can make a significant difference in how you are perceived by recruiters and potential employers. Remember, you are what you say you are. Embrace your professional identity with confidence. How will you update your LinkedIn profile to reflect this change? Share your thoughts and empower others to own their identities! 🌟 #CareerGrowth #ProfessionalIdentity #Confidence #LinkedInTips #SelfEmpowerment

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I dont feel like I should need to state this here - but please never call me on any phone number attached with my name unless I have personally told you to call me within a reasonable timeframe - like we've talked in the past 30 days about you calling me. Also don't cold email me. I never read them or listen to those voicemails - I auto delete. I've received a ridiculous number of cold calls / emails about work things recently. Its weird because folks also address me like we've met and talked. Don't call. Don't leave a voicemail. Dont cold email me. Dont give my number or email to your colleague. You can reach me here. You can message me here. You can make a pitch here. Its overwhelming to see comms in personal channels or blowing up my work email from folks I've never talked to. I am very active in the community and have lots of avenues for comms - but using something very personal feels bad. I cant tell what's phishing and what's services and what feels predatory versus safe. Edit: I should state the email bit does not apply to folks looking for guidance, mentorship, advice, or to reach out to talk personal, non service/paid/contract/recruiting QA. You should still never call me. Only my dad and the bank call me.

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UX Writing Tip: Simple is best and easy for players to navigate in gaming. Remember high school essays? I do... If you want to see how far you've become as a writer, you realize how great you are know 😎 The one thing I remember was adding in similes, metaphors and other fancy literary tricks to make our point stand out. I had the hardest time trying to use those tools to make my essay about how Hamlet is a peculiar dude with probable mommy issues. But that just shows how "lazy" you are if you write it like that. BUT it got me thinking about UX writing, especially in gaming. In UX, we keep it simple. We're not telling players to "utilize any digit of their choosing to vertically ascend the visual interface," but just, "swipe up to move." Honestly imagine telling players something long and confusing... We don't want that! Not even close! If you overcomplicate instructions, tutorials, interactions and other things the player will feel overwhelmed and unsure what to do. No, we want the players to feel confident in every move they do. So when we tell players to "Swipe up to move" this works because it's clear what to do and how to do it. --- I'm Julie, a UX writer for mobile games. I love sharing stories about my life and insights into UX writing. Let's connect and work together! #ux #uxwriting #uxwriter #freelance #mobilegames #gamedeveloper

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Games industry DESPERATELY needs to unionize. Since December my LinkedIn feed has been a sea of people looking for work because they've been laid off, due to the "business strategy" of laying people off when you want to look more profitable in Q1 of the next year, or just "trimming the fat"/ "improving efficiency". I won't say my experience was exactly like this necessarily, but I was recently laid off in January, though I haven't marked myself as looking for work due to many reasons, partly being the lack of jobs, all the bots and spam on this website, and the crushing damage to my self-confidence. Either way, NO ONE should be made to feel this way. I've even heard of people getting laid off mid parental leave, or while they're on vacation with limited internet access, THIS IS DESPICABLE. What's worse is in this industry we all experience imposter syndrome, and anytime this happens you can't help but think we're terrible at our jobs, if only you'd worked harder, spent more of your own time improving your skills, you would be essential enough to the company to keep on, but they still could let you go, so it doesn't even matter. CEOs or in general the entire C-suite of people should be held accountable and publicly shamed. If your business strategy is to hire as much talent as possible, realize you can't keep on all that talent, and then lay them off, then you are incompetent, and should not be given a pat on the back for at least giving severance, when you're just following the lowest requirements of the law. The people who you've laid off are people who have built your company and kept the lights on. You can't just use the excuse, "that's just the way the industry is", that's a weak excuse. There are industries that experience frequent lay offs but have a union and support, such as some plants in the auto industry, and the workers have fought hard for years so that they would have those benefits and salary top-ups. Of course that's not always the case and things could be better, but we shouldn't just sigh and be like "it is what it is", and keep trying to work within the system when the system is broken. I'm just mad right now, for myself, but mostly for my friends, and people I don't even know that work in this industry, because I know these devs are hard working people that are constantly learning and trying to improve, and they are now doubting all their skills and feeling like they're not good enough. As for the people who make these mass lay off decisions a regular occurrence, I would like to say something that may even hurt my career and job opportunities, but deserves to be said, and which many devs would like to say or even scream, Fuck you.

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Mini Gear Grinder... not a crazy one, just a mini one... Candidates: when replying to Posts that have jobs listed, multiple companies / Games Studios, etc. within them. A comment of "I am interested" does not do you much good. A comment of "I am interested in the following role at XYZ company" is however helpful. Seeing so many of these & I love that you're interested in the roles posted, but which ones? Help the Recruiter or the people out that are putting the resources in front of you & let them know what you're interested in. ⚙ The job? Which one, we have 5+ listed. ⚙ The company? Which one, as some of these posts list 5+ organizations. ⚙ The person posting? Let's keep it PC / PG here people, I'm not advocating for weirdness 😝 I'm referring to a conversation or asking for help where you need it potentially. Don't be creepy, please do not be creepy! ⚙ The products they make? Etc., etc. Identify a bit deeper... Help them help you! 😁 Keep fighting the good fight everyone! Enjoy the weekend & wishing you best out there! #'s for the #'s #TheMattBarney #OneLove #TheMeatballs #GearGrinder #VideoGames #PirateRecruitersUniteUnderOneBanner

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Most times I chat with professionals from the games industry about my work, they're like: "Hey, you'd be really good for marketing" (obviously) "Hey, your approach to reviewing games would make you great for QA" "Sounds like you're pretty good at localization since you translate your work for internal and international audiences" I'd probably be good with any. Not even a humble brag - I'm versatile and flexible by design. I once had to research all the reviews for a certain type of app and learned how to build a review scraper in Python, just so I didn't have to work my buttcheeks off by doing it manually. But how do you tell people: "Hey, I can adapt and do whatever the heck you want" without them trying to shove more work down your throat just because you have the capacity to?

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Another big publisher set to fire 600 employees. This post is intended to support those who were recently laid off. Please share it within your community and tag studios and recruiters who are actively hiring. "We'll hear troubling news from the offices of Zynga, Gearbox, 2K, and even Rockstar—a far cry from earlier statements about layoffs from Take-Two's CEO." To combat, I am adding 5 resources below for all impacted professionals : 1) Our flagship Full-stack game programming bootcamp worth $11,000. We're giving course content out on 100% scholarship for anyone who's willing to transition into game programming or upskill in programming. (Mail: community@outscal.com) 2) Join our Discord Community and help professionals who are asking questions related to portfolio building, job seeking, interviews, and broadly their next career step. We have added help roles for programming, Unity, Unreal, DSA, Careers. Pick these roles and only get notified when someone asks questions related to your expertise. 3) Your team is hiring? Here's a list of 900+ professionals who were laid off recently: https://bit.ly/49Ah2vT Do them a favor by sharing this list with your 1st degree connections who're hiring. 4) We now have 14368 gamedev jobs from all over the world. https://lnkd.in/gerWUkc5 5) Become a volunteer: If you're a senior professional, you can mentor these professionals, conduct mock interviews, assess their portfolios and give feedback on what would work for them and what wouldn't. Join by adding your name here: https://lnkd.in/gwPhHen4 Get more out of Game Dev community on LinkedIn 🍄 Amir Satvat is back on LinkedIn with the OG list of resources. 💼 Caitlin Cooke is the fastest source of fresh jobs in the industry (yes, remote jobs too) 🎤 Follow Jordan Mazer for greatest tips and pointers around game jobs & interviews. 🔥 Hailey's feed will keep you updated with everything that's happening in the gaming world. 🔝 Connect with Arin Goldsmith and be part of her amazing #SocialSunday initiative. #games #gamedev #jobs #layoffs

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Don't want to bum you out but I know I'm not the only one who has noticed the same layoff cycle on LinkedIn over and over. I can tell your future... 1. Studio is shut down, all the devs become active on LinkedIn maybe for the first time in years and do their looking for work posts. People reach out with connections and support emojis. 2. The outpouring of thanks to the wonderful gamedev community. Amir Satvat and other full time LinkedIn influencers are tagged. 3. Nothing comes of all the LinkedIn support. Devs post frustration posts about how hard it is to be laid off and the injustice of the game industry. Many people will later delete these posts when they start to realize studios still aren't hiring them. 4. The reality step. Months pass and prominent veterans are still unemployed, let alone those "juniors" with a mere 5 years experience. At this point, people either give up and disappear, get a job and disappear (rare), or become a chronic disillusioned LinkedIn user. This last one either requires wearing a mask or ranting about capitalism more and more. 5. The laid off devs watch this cycle repeat for a whole swath of suffering people every couple weeks/days. And that's the step I've been on for a few months. But hey I've been working hard on my family and my solo projects. Magehunter coming soon, and AAA Simulator devlogs will be in production even sooner! Make art for yourself and those you love. Don't make my mistake - look for happiness outside this Microsoft product called LinkedIn.

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I have been seeing a lot of negative postings lately about the job market, and I wanted to offer some insight to those seeking a new position. 1. It is a numbers game. It is literally like pulling the handle on a slot machine. The more pulls of the handle, the more likely you will eventually get a "hit" (a response to your resume.) Some people will get a new position immediately. Some people will have to wait a while longer. (Just like watching the person next to you at a casino getting a winning slot pull, and you are a $100 in before hitting a bonus game.) 2. You are going to get more rejections than inquiries. This is part of the process. Unless you have the "3 key skills" that are currently hot, this is how it is going to work. 3. No matter when you apply for a position, and no matter your profession, there are always going to be about "3 key skills" that are currently in demand. Technology and industry trends change roughly every six months. If you happen to have the right words on your resume, you are going to get some traction. Most people need time to catch their skills up to the ever changing market. This isn't a negative reflection on you, this is how it works. Your skills are always going to be slightly behind what is hot in the market right now. Particularly in the technology sector -- that new coding language, paradigm, API, is the bright shining object that gets someone's attention. If you have been working for a company for a while, there is a very good chance you are using an older tech. Companies don't change tech stacks overnight. 4. It is easy to become discouraged, but I have a philosophy that I found that works. When I see a job posting, even if I am not a 100% fit, I apply anyways. I always say to myself, "When in doubt, apply." Rejections are free and easily discarded. But you just never know what might be on your resume that will make you stand out to a particular hiring manager. 5. Always be learning. Your Linked In profile is your business card. If you are currently not employed, take a course, and get it posted to your profile. You always want to be viewed in the light of a constant learner. 6. Job searching is a process. You cannot speed it up. There are no shortcuts. Sometimes the market is "tight" and there are not a lot of opportunities available. This is not a reflection on you. It is reality. The job market is much like the real estate market. Sometimes it is a buyer's market (in favor of the employee). Sometimes it is a seller's market. (In favor of the employer.) It varies depending on the economic circumstances of the time. 7. Diversify your skillset. You have core skills that are needed for your profession. Develop tangential skills that will differentiate you. 8. Apply! Set goals for yourself. Something like, "I will apply to x companies each day." It isn't as though you are sending out paper resumes with stamps and killing trees. Persistence, and tenacity are your best allies. I hope this helps.

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Complaining won't get you hired. Sending hundreds of applications without a reply sucks, I get it. And job hunting in game development is tough in 2024. But hear me out: No one hires out of pity. People hire because you show value. Instead of complaining about the market, focus on creating value for others: • Share common best practices • Contribute to professional topics • Create useful solutions or courses • Make a tutorial on a complex issue Or go a step further: prepare a list of recommendations for the company you want to join and send it with your CV (and also share it publicly). How so, you might ask? Do something for others for FREE? Yes, absolutely. It's called "content marketing." You create value upfront, become more recognizable, and gain a reputation. And then you get hired easily because you provided value upfront. If you're willing to spend hundreds of hours on interviews, spend some time creating value for others. It'll pay off in the long run.

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This one is gonna go down in history as the Chicken Churn! Yesterday we got a colorful inbound message on Intercom from a tester, they were really worked up at a game that made a chicken noise when they didn’t accept a rematch with another player in a PvP game, and they noped right out of a paid playtest! (what an insight!!) Curiosity, bias to action, intuition or whatever you want to call it kicked in and I decided to check out the recording 👀 My own biases of who that player was were totally off, and their reaction in the video didn’t really match up to the message. But sure enough they had asked the community team to be removed from the test. After watching the video I was stunned at how natural that churn point felt, obviously we made the call to pay the player out and sent it to the Erez free of charge (it’s 7 minutes long), then got a lovely email back this morning! When Christian and Marvin onboarded me they made sure to communicate their vision of happy customers and it's great to see this playing out and confirmed! #playtesting #PlaytestCloud #GamesUserResearch #Retention #GameDevelopment #CustomerFirst

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Hello friends. Last month, I was looking for more work and finally secured some on Reddit from a guy who needed help with preproduction on his Tabletop RPG / Card Battler. After a meeting with him, he showed me what he had and it was quite impressive. He had a prototype of a card-battler using a tabletop RPG battle system, but he had little to no documentation or planning—he's been chiseling away at his game for a few months in his spare time after work. I suggested that before I dive into art, we flesh out the game design and the rest of the game up to around an 80% mark and let the last 20% be changes, additions, and that sort. As your game evolves, it'll come into it's own and you'll find things that need changed or added, this accounts for that. He agreed and I asked if I could work on all this since I did that with my game Alligori and lead the team from start to finish with our vertical slice, and I know tabletop RPGs very well. He agreed and we did the whole song and dance with paperwork, and he sent over a retainer and I began work the following Monday. Three weeks go by and we're working great together. I'm fleshing out his game, adding some meat to the backbone of his prototype with classes, abilities, etc. My goal was to write out as much as possible and then trim content to fit it into a 1-year development cycle. So I flesh a bulk of his game out, and then categorize it more into a game design document that clearly conveys concepts, ideas, and mechanics. Catching up, last week was the final week of my first month and payment was due. He just up and disappears like a fart in the wind, I have no idea if he's alive, incarcerated, on vacation, or what. He didn't remove me on Discord, so I don't entirely suspect malicious intent, but he gave no notice. That's the risk you run with working 1-on-1 with a client remotely, one day they can just up and disappear. I do have paperwork, so I may pursue legal action. If he doesn't log on by Friday, I'm going to publicly release all my documentation and the GDD I wrote on here.

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It’s been my experience that standards for quality control within AI/Simulation/Breakout technology are not very well defined compared to traditional industry approaches. I’ve also found working directly with Davina Armstrong it’s because those standards don’t really exist yet. Solution? Hire an expert with real experience defining and implementing entirely new testing methodology for an entirely new innovative product. In my case, specifically, the work provided was for a highly advanced multiplayer game simulation heavily structured within multithreaded systems which bear the potential for unpredictable gameplay consequences stemming from error prone non-deterministic systems. You simply can’t manually test these types of things. Automated testing is even difficult, but Davina Armstrong handled it better than any even my high bar of quality expectations. If your team have QA gaps for your innovative systems, or want a highly qualified lead for traditional, I highly recommend connecting with them and seeing where it leads. Your product will thank you for it.

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How to Deliver the Bad QA News The CRC build has just been delivered to QA and QA has broken it to the point of it not being a CRC build anymore. This story has played out a billion times since video games were invented, but how should QA deliver the bad news to production and development? Ideally, swiftly. The sooner the rest of the team knows there is a major problem with the build, the sooner the team can design and implement a solution to the problem. But that's the when, not the how. Personally, I find that by creating an air of positivity around my QA team, it makes delivering bad news simpler. By maintaining a positive attitude, a friendly demeanor, and keeping lines of communication always open, it helps makes delivering bad news easier. Also, by having strong testing practices such as the consistent collection of logs and video before presenting an issue and a robust peer-reviewed set of test cases. Being able to say, "I ran the new feature through all the test cases. It fails because of X. Here's logs and video of X occurring." There is a big difference between having too little information and having too much information. It is always better to collect unused information than to not collect important information.

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I've mostly done photography within FFXIV, but I decided to have a go at using it to do something else. Cut to me making a little video about how my Viera is sick of fruits and vegetables, tries to find some fish, finds out they have no bait, so asks around where to get bait! I didn't quite end it, because maybe I'll make a second part with lots of fishing action (one of my favorite things to do in FFXIV) but primarily this was just a little test to take a look at a few things: 1. How games can be used to develop stories and narrative by the player 2. How far you can use FFXIV in-game actions and gpose to create little productions 3. Flexing some video editing skills, aiming for it feeling more on the uncanny/off side of retro ⭐ Music used is "The Nautilus Knoweth" from the FFXIV OST

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