Game Design Resume Sample

The game industry is booming, and game design is a versatile field with many rewarding job opportunities. Take a look at these tips to create a winning game design resume.

1. Tailor your resume summary to fit the job description

Impress hiring managers with an attention-grabbing resume summary. A resume summary sits at the top of your resume and highlights your most relevant skills, career highlights, and work experiences in 3–5 sentences.

Here’s what to include in your resume summary:

• Years of relevant experience: Use hard numbers to make your work history stand out.
• Main responsibilities or achievements over the years: Mention any special roles or large-scale projects you’ve been involved in.
• Essential skills or qualifications: Review the keywords from the job posting and include any that fit you as your 1–3 top skills in your resume summary. Companies use applicant tracking systems (ATS) to evaluate resumes. Review your resume and include the same keywords that the job ad uses to make sure a hiring manager sees them.
• Educational background: State your education and relevant certifications or courses so employers can see that you’re qualified.

Game design is a field with diverse game genres, and each company’s requirements are different, so use your resume summary to specify which type of game design you specialize in.

These are the four types of game designers:

1. Content game designers: Create the story, lore, and mission of the game. They need strong creative and communication skills.
2. Level designers: Conceptualize game space and focus on the strategic, tactical gameplay aspects of a game world. They require strong artistic and technical skills.
3. System designers: Use spreadsheets to build and balance system mechanics. They require strong math skills.
4. Experience designers: Specialize in handling feedback and managing the general feeling and responsiveness of a game. They’re the rarest type of designer.

Here’s a good game design resume summary example:

Imaginative, highly analytical, and team minded Game Designer with 10+ years of experience working on long-term, large-scale projects at Rockstar Games and Activision Blizzard. Fluent in 3ds Max and Maya. Passionate about innovative storytelling, scripting, and level design. Possess a BA in Computer Science and Game Design. Looking to leverage my design-thinking skills and programming experience into a role as a Level Designer for [Company Name].

2. Highlight your game design qualifications in your skills section

Creating innovative games requires passion, technical knowledge, and artistic ability. You need to show a variety of hard skills such as cinematic storytelling, interaction design, and level design on your resume to demonstrate your competence. Hard skills are industry specific, and come from practical experience on the job or through schooling. Here are some hard skills to add to your resume:

• Storyboarding
• Character and dialog development
• Gameplay, rules, and scoring systems
• Digital editing and image rendering
• Adobe Photoshop
• UI/UX
• Computer skills
• Level and world design
• Programming, scripting, and game prototyping
• Building environments and interfaces
• 3D animation and design software including ZBrush, iClone, Mixamo, Unreal, Unity, 3dsMax, and Maya
• Programming languages including HTML, CSS, Lua, Python, Java, C, C+++

Game designers also need a range of soft skills. Soft skills are used to interact with others and deal with challenges. A game designer’s job is project-based with many layers within each project, and requires excellent project management skills and time-management skills. Here are some more soft skills employers look for in game designers:

• Multitasking skills
• Creativity and an artistic vision
• Communication skills
• Teamwork and collaboration
• Organizational skills
• Willingness to learn new concepts
• Leadership skills
• Delegating
• Conflict resolution
• Language skills

Show your skills on your resume by providing a link to your portfolio or on a code-hosting platform like GitHub. Make sure your completed projects are organized and ready for hiring managers to see.

3. Clearly state your video game designer education

Game designers require a deep understanding of how video games work. A game designer job typically requires a degree or certificate from a game design school, as well as experience playing, making, and analyzing games. Game design, computer science, and computer engineering are suitable bachelor’s degrees for video game designers.

Your resume education section should provide solid evidence of your knowledge and interest in game design. Place your education section closer to the top of your resume for employers to see if you’re a recent graduate or don’t have much work experience in game design.

Include the following information in the education section of your game design resume:

• Type of degree/field of study
• Name of school
• School location
• Graduation year
• GPA (if above 3.5/4.0)

Add any additional certifications, extracurricular activities, awards, or noteworthy relevant coursework that are relevant to video game design.

4. Personalize your approach to the company with a winning cover letter

Game designers are fantastic storytellers, and a tailored cover letter allows you to tell your story about your passion for games and invite hiring managers to learn more about you.

Proper cover letter format means writing a cover letter that fits your experiences onto a single page, with plenty of white space so employers don’t skip over your application.

Include the following in your cover letter:

• Salutation: Professionally greet the hiring manager by name to show that you’ve done your research
• Introduction: Begin with an engaging opening paragraph that introduces you and your intention to apply as a game designer
• Body paragraphs: Write two or three paragraphs describing your relevant work history, special projects, skills, and game design education
• Closing paragraph: End your cover letter with a call to action (CTA) that requests the hiring manager to reach out to you for an interview