Hello all.

So, I'm a student in my last year of study in a degree for video game programming and development and I am starting to turn my attention to my future career. I think I have narrowed it down to Gameplay Engineer as that has been the most compelling part of my studies so far, with a focus on procedural level design and population.

I am currently doing a skills gap analysis and was hoping I could get some pointers for the community. What would be the key skills required to pursue this career and what can I do now to increase my chances of making it?

Thanks for your time.

I don't think it's going to be as clear as recommending specific skills to you. ‘Gameplay’ engineer is a catch-all term for anyone that isn't really specialising (e.g. in rendering, networking, AI, tools, etc). So, you just need to be making games and ensuring you have a wide knowledge of the general process. Can you read input and have a player character respond to it? Can you implement in-world gameplay systems such as jumping, shooting, zones that trigger effects, spawning, etc etc… and can you implement more abstract systems like timed effects, skill trees, experience points? How are you with UI - both overlays and more complex menus or screens? Audio? NPC AI such as navigation + pathfinding, behavior trees, or utility systems? Save/load systems or checkpoints? And can you do all this with an eye on performance? And while keeping the code clean and maintainable?

If there's just one thing I would say you would need for a gameplay engineer that you might need a bit less for other specialties in gamedev, it would be the ability to interface well with designers. That isn't just things like knowing how to read a design doc or interpersonal skills in general - all programmers need those! - but things like:

• thinking about the interfaces that the features you build present to content creators
• asking questions to resolve terminology ambiguities in the docs
• building a spec from vague wishes on the part of design/management
• spotting cases when a designer has misconceptions regarding how your features work
• determining what a designer is trying to accomplish with a feature request, rather than what they think they need to do
• being familiar enough with design goals to be able to suggest alternatives when a feature request cannot be fulfilled

I don't think you can get any of these skills through anything other than experience on a team where the designers are non-programmers. So, my advice to cultivate these skills would be to find an artist/designer and do game jams with them.

Thank you both for the awesome feedback!

I know that “gameplay” engineer is a generic term, but it does help to narrow the broad field of game development down a bit to make it more digestible for someone new to it and a little overwhelmed with the career choices. I do understand the need to specialize and that is what this exercise will help me to do somewhat, find what I'm good at and build on it.

Working within a team does seems to be a crucial skill to have and the suggestion of joining game jams is a great one I hadn't thought of. It's definitely something I will be looking to do in the near future, once I am a little more confident in my coding abilities.

Some really great feedback and ideas here which have given me a lot to think about. Thanks again