This is the story of a Romanian game designer wannabe. It is filled with passion, true love, action, excitment and drama. There will be unexpected turns of events, races, things that blow up, and cake. At the end of it all, there will be cake.
Or at least I hope so. The Hunt – my hunt for a game design job somewhere in the Northern part of Europe – began together with this year’s summer. Some people plan holidays; I started to plan my way of getting my dream job, stirred up by a passionate game designer who, unfortunatelly for him, showed me the design tests that are given to candidates at Spellborn NV. He didn’t find any more peace from me, ever since. But he gave me wings, so he needs to live with the consequences of his actions.
The Hunt began with an application at Spellborn NV. I dare not speculate the spiritual implication of what followed, but in few words, Spellborn announced it’s bancrupcy only days after my application. The outcome was a broken hearted hunter (that would be me), but at least one with confidence untouched. Apparently, this time it wasn’t me (or if it was, I don’t really want to know).
Next step was to keep on searching, and throughout the process, I met a recruiter, I kept on nugging El Drijver (the Spellborn lead designer), I made some new friends, and I applied to Relentless Software and Funcom. Relentless said no, without any additional explanations, and Funcom still owns me an answer…
Furthermore, I took some neat game design lessons (from El, of course), I wrote more GameDev articles for Level, and I convinced myself more and more that the experiences I go through could be quite useful to others who may have the same dreams as I do (Romanians or otherwise; it’s a tough industry to get in). So as of as soon as I can pop it up, this blog will have a Romanian mirror in Eurogamer.ro, where I shall describe the same oddysey of mine, only not in English. However, this blog will carry on as well.
