Level Designer at IO Interactive? Yes sir!

So today I was over for my 2nd meeting where I got to talk a lot to team which I might be joining.

First off I had a talk with Sebastian(Level Designer) and Jeremy (Director) about how their mapping workflow was and which tools they used. It seems like I am going to be using max a lot more than I am used to, thankfully not for complicated high poly modelling way beyond my capabilities.

I also got to sign an NDA for the first time, which was kinda wierd. I did not read it as it was rather long, so I hope that I did not sell my soul to satan or similar by signing the papers.

So I am not allowed to say much, but I hope I can say that if I had any doubts before, then they are gone now: IOI is a super sweet place to work. The games in development got a really good feel and the developers there know their stuff very well.

I was also supposed to have lunch and a talk with Mads Prahm who I met last time. This unfortunately did not happen as he could not come today because his daugther got ill or something. This was rather sad as I really enjoyed our last conversation, this guy got a really nice attitude to things and we understood each other well. He had the same mix of gfx/programming/level design/management experience, which was really nice. It can be annoying to explaining code to an artist or the other way around, but this guy just knew it all:)

So Jeremy and Sebastion were stuck with me for 2 hours, which did get a little long in the end. I did hear a lot about how their level designers work. First the lots of 3dstudio max scared me off a bit, as that is an application which I am far from mastering. It turned out that as level designer you were only supposed to do rough mockups in max though, which fits me a lot better.

During all of this time I talked english, which I haven't really done a lot since I had it a year ago in school. I thought I was fairly used to english as I write it every day, but my english turned out to be pretty rusty. This was pretty bad as I am afraid that I sounded like a n00b:/ Actually there were quite a bunch of stuff that I had prepared to say, but when you in the middle of it all, then it's just gone.

In the end I had a talk with Mette, their HR manager, who turned out not to be scary despite what I had heard. She asked the usual job interview questions and told about about the the social activities they had and the overall style of the company. They got some of the worlds best game developers and people are expected to always develop their skills. Sounds just perfect to me, so now I just REALLY hope that they accept me in as trainee.

So if all of the above is filled with grammar mistakes or just sounds like plain nonsense, then it's just because I got up at 0530 today which I can feel now...

Ahh yes Mazy, that must have been me. So now two visits to IO without getting even saying hello to you, shame on me...

Yeah regarding that project then I was not really sure if how cool it was before I saw it. After having heard them tell about it, seen the vids from it and and such, then it was clear that it indeed is fucking awesome:D

Ohh yeah burgers, people seemed to like that a lot:)

I need to get myself a scooter...

Yep, I got a trainee position as level designer at IO Interactive:) I can't believe it atm, as it's just incredible fantastic to have scored my absolute dream job.