Level Designer at IO Interactive? Yes sir!

No not really hired yet, but yesterday I was in Copenhagen for a talk with IO Interactive regarding a possible position as level designer there. Was pretty damn awesome as those guys rock and a job there would be SO frikkin great.

I was extremely nervous when arriving there and waiting for the interviewer to come around. Thankfully it turned out that he was a total cool and relaxed guy called Mads Prahm. He told a lot about the history of IO and the way they worked today while giving a tour around the building.

It was very little like I had imagined it to be. I had expected there be usual job interview questions like "what are you strengths and weaknesses" or technical questions about level design.

Instead we just sat and talked about all kind of game design related stuff where he managed to somehow get all the information he wanted without it felt like a test.

The tilde master

We did visit Mazy on our way around the building, but I did not realize who it was before afterwards. When I mentioned it to Mads we went to see him again, but then he was just gone:/ But ohh well, we got a look at the more or less crazy drawings he got hanging around with planet mazy.

So?

At first there did not seem to be big chances of a job there as they aren't really recruiting more people atm. After having talked for a while it looked better though as we seemed to be very much on the same wavelength regarding game design.

So I got no signed contract yet, but we are going to have another meeting where the HR manager and other level designers are going to be asking me questions. If I don't fuck that up, I should have a good chance of a position there.

Benjamin and Guppyworks

After visiting IO I went over to have a beer with Benjamin(Nimajneb here from the SoW team) and see Guppyworks where he works.

Coming from IO this looked a lot different as they are just 15 people there compared to 150 at IO.

They were all real nice here too and it was pleasant to see yet another SoW crew member irl.

Thanks guys for the nice words:)

Skdr, I have a feeling that what I showed in my portfolio was only one of many reasons combined. As far as I could understand it was more the combination of a decent portfolio, good school grades, lots of mod work, tutorial writing, design document writing, coding skills, project leading experience, etc. which all together made me a viable candidate.

I am quite happy about this as the only current gen map in my portfolio is a quickly thrown together test map to test SoW2 on. Thankfully the interviewer had a very good overall understand of how game development work. He was personally the same type with a mix of design, coding and graphics experience.