foolmor0n posted...
Option 4:
Go back to school and get a computer science degree, get a real game development job
Ah, I forgot you don't understand how game development works. Thanks for the advice though man.
metroid composite posted...
People do move from QA to design positions, so it's not a crazy route to take to go EA. Although...do you know for sure what games you'll be working on? Because EA closed most of its console development--it's mostly Facebook games and The Sims now.
I'm not sure if moving from QA to design happens at Zynga--I do know it's hiring a mixture of 10-20 year industry veterans, and 40-year-old moms. Zynga's actually a very interesting place, though; they do things like have a game design question, and then just try both methods (with some "tiny" sample size like a million people) to see which is more effective. Zynga is kind of on the forefront of some very new game design (although not necessarily game design you want to work on, but damn, I'd love to be a fly on Zynga's wall once a week; I think there's a ton that the rest of the industry could learn from Zynga's experiments).\
As far as knowing what I'd be working on at EA, they mentioned Origin a lot, and stuff like Autolog and Battlelog, and their further integration of games with social media. In addition, they said there would be a good amount of backend server maintenance.
But yeah, I actually really enjoyed the Zynga interview. From the sound of it, they have some really cutting edge design and operation techniques that would be really awesome to get in on. Pods for example, something that I saw at Sledgehammer, as well as interoffice studios for each game. Pretty cool stuff.
But thanks for the advice. I trust you probably more than anyone when it comes to this kind of thing. For now, I'm learning more towards Zynga, mostly for the reasons you listed.
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