Hello there. My name is Will Bonner. I'm a 2011 graduate of the Michigan State Game Development Program. Since my graduation, I've enjoyed a career in the commercial games industry. Brian contacted me asking if I'd like to share my post graduation experiences and perspective with you. I told him that I would be happy to help you guys in any way that I can. So first, I'll tell you a lit bit about what I'm doing now. I'm a test engineer at Riot Games, you can think of that as a cross between a gameplay engineer who codes the features that players end up getting their hands on, and a tools engineer, who is empowering the rest of the team. I'm currently working on an unannounced game title. Hopefully I'll be able to share more details about that with the rest of the world soon. I'd like to tell you about how I ended up working at Riot. It has been an enjoyable but difficult journey, full of hard work with some surprising twists and turns. I started school at Michigan State with the idea of becoming a designer, but I quickly discovered my talent and passion for programming. While I was in school, I worked my butt off in computer science classes, game design courses with Brian, internships, and freelance work of my own. Post graduation, I was lucky enough to get hired at an independent game studio in Grand Rapids Michigan called Yeti CGI. They're still around, too. You should check them out. In the two years I worked there, I was a full stack developer, working for companies like Zynga, Nickelodeon, and the Game Show Network on contract, as well as some in house game titles of our own. Additionally, I've been an active participant in the Game Developers Conference since I was a student. I worked as a volunteer conference associate where I do everything that I can to help the show run smoothly. In the process of doing so I've made friends across the country. Including those at Riot that would eventually help me get hired as a technical QA analyst on League of Legends. I did well enough in that capacity that I was promoted to an engineering role and transferred to the R&D team that I am on today. There's a long list of valuable skills that have helped me get to that point but I think the most important and underrated of those are the people skills. Communication isn't about what you're saying, it's about what they're hearing. The value of empathizing with others, asking good questions and being sure not to over or under communicate cannot be overstated. I also say for engineers in particular that abstract reasoning and deep, complete knowledge of what you're trying to do and how it should work is invaluable. Don't settle for assumptions on how important stuff like your engine, password encryption algorithms, or databases work. Measuring twice and cutting once can massively increase the speed and quality of your work. And makes it easier for similarly well informed teammates to collaborate with you. It can also improve your ability to identify and learn from your mistakes. Lastly, I'd like to offer some career advice for everyone. If you're serious about games as a profession, you need to be a total bad ass to pull it off. That's not trying to scare anyone out of trying. The industry is bigger than it's ever been today, and many of the skills that you would be getting to work at a game studio are just as valuable in other pursuits, too. I only want to stress the competitiveness of this industry. Nobody in a triple A game development studio is there by accident. They've earned that spot. Sometimes over literally thousands of other applicants, through a combination of social and disciplined specific skills. As a practical example I've kept up with about 25 of the students from my graduating class at Michigan State. About five of us out of that 25 are currently employed at a commercial game studio of any type. Now, some of the folks outside of that five are at a game studio by choice, but some of them aren't. The hard truth of it is, there's very few studios out there with the budget, capacity, and desire to hire sub-par developers. To overcome those obstacles, you'll probably need to work harder to achieve it than anything you ever have in your life. Either that, or be incredibly smart or incredibly lucky. And even then, working hard is only going to help. So have internships, exercising your discipline specific skills every summer. Ship a game. Have at least a fleshed out LinkedIn profile and perhaps a website and portfolio to boot. Go to industry events like GDC or PAX. Contribute to an open source project that you like, or any other collaborations like a game jam or IGDA that you can. This is not a job for the lazy. So now you have a pretty decent idea of who I am, where I've come from, and how I think about the game's industry. With that in mind, let's delve into a subject where I spent much of my time lately, developing games as a service.
