How to identify skills

In this video, we explain an exercise to get you thinking about how you match technical and professional skills to typical job descriptions.

First, have a look at this job description.

Junior Games Designer

A top games studio is looking for a junior games designer to work on cutting-edge mobile games released by our rapidly growing studio.

Position Overview

• You will be working as part of the creative team to design, prototype and implement compelling gameplay mechanics
• You will be assessing, fine tuning and balancing game mechanics in existing and new levels, including difficulty and flow
• You will be creating levels in Unity for new and existing games
• You will adapt games designs based on player testing, feedback and live analytics
• You will be expected to use modern mobile games design principles to ensure success

We want to see:

• Experience in a studio or similar environment
• Ability to balance a game to suit a particular audience
• An excellent working knowledge of iOS and Android devices
• Ability to demonstrate designs using hand drawing or art tools
• Awareness of the mobile games marketplace and mobile games design
• Facility to communicate effectively and proactively with other team members
• Able to work alone or as part of a team
• Highly organised, analytical individual capable of delivering to schedule

It would be great if you had:

• A BSc/BA in games development/games design/computer science
• Experience with Unity
• Experience or understanding of free to play monetisation
• An understanding of games analytics packages
• Experience of split testing
• Some experience of onboarding
• Know some Swift and Java
• An artistic sensibility

Next, you’ll need to download the Games designer skills matrix in the downloadable links below. In this you’ll see a list of common skills requested by games studios for games designers.

We’d like you to mark up the games designer matrix, ticking the ‘Must have’ and ‘Nice to have’ skills you think are required for this role. Leave the ‘They have’ column empty for now.

You can either print out the matrix or copy it into another document format, and then mark it up on your screen.