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What are some good “backup” career choices for someone who wants a career in either arts or game design?
What are some good “backup” career choices for someone who wants a career in either arts or game design
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Mark’s Answer
Know that game design and all creative arts are something you can do for yourself and enjoy your whole life - given the current state of the industry it will be highly competitive and challenging to find stable work making games professionally for some time. Thinking about a 'backup' career is a great idea. You want to find something that you can physically do and self sustain (pay the bills) at a baseline - it will likely be less rewarding artistically and emotionally than your dream job obviously. Something that leaves you with a little time and energy at the end of the day is ideal. The more overlap with skills or the more transferrable skills the more valuable it will be to your creative work - so you might want to be a game designer but authoring corporate educational courses would let you make interactive content and do creative writing. One technique is to break down your artistic career into its elemental skills and functions - then score your potential 'backup' jobs using that as a scorecard. You might at the baseline not be able to find something with overlap that will pay your bills - in that case get basic skills and work ethic that will apply to any job including games. Managing people, dealing with challenging constraints and resource limitations, creating clear specifications for work, etc - people management and communication are life skills that you can apply everywhere. Offer to take on additional creative challenges when they present themselves at your backup job - they do pop up and volunteering gets you more opportunities to expand your job and gain recognition for creative efforts. Be excellent at anything you do and save some energy and heart for making fantastic games. Keep making games (in any medium) no matter what you do.
List the fundamentals of the creative job you want
Gain transferrable skills when you can
Take on additional challenge in areas like team leadership, management, organization
Look for opportunities for creative work in your 'day job'
Work on games and creative pursuits in any medium
Mark recommends the following next steps:
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DIANARA’s Answer
Substitute teaching; tutoring; landscaping; working in an art gallery, or film/production studios are all good back ups, and still in creative realms, to keep those artistic juices flowing, and allowing you to network in your field of interest.