Your First Game Audio Job

toddtcastillo
Late night audio work

So how do you get your first game audio job?

That’s one of the most common questions I run into.

It can seem like such a Catch-22: to get a game audio job you need experience, but to get experience, you need a game audio job.  And what about school? Will a degree help?

Let’s take a look at some important steps you can take to getting your first job.

What You Need

Not school, not years of experience, not some magical connection into the game industry - all you need for most applications are the following:

 

 

There are no special rules for creating a good resume and cover letter for game audio that’s different from other industries.   A demo reel is a short clip (about a minute long) of your game audio work for the team to preview.  

Building Experience

There are many ways of building experience before your first job. 

  • Join a mod team 
  • Participate in a game jam
  • Start an indie team 
  • Create your own game and setup original sound design and music
  • Remove the audio from video game clip or animation and redo the audio yourself

All of this will give you valuable experience. It will also provide content for your demo reel and resume. This can even lead to actual game audio job opportunities. 

Find Game Audio Jobs

A great place to start is a traditional job posting board like Indeed. Social media accounts can also be helpful - LinkedIn and Twitter can both be fruitful places if you build your network around game audio folks. Along with talking shop, jobs openings are sometimes posted, and often, the poster will be open to questions which is a great way to start the conversation.

But search everywhere - new jobs are posted almost daily.

 

Conclusion

Good luck on your first game audio job.

Searching for your first industry job, and sometimes even your second, can be an exhausting and sometimes demoralizing process. 

But try to focus on everything you can control - creating awesome audio, applying to new positions, always improving your submission packet. And let go of what you cannot control, especially rejections.  They happen to even the most experienced of us.  Getting rejections should be a positive sign: you are on the road to finding your first game audio job.