My interview process was broken down into three parts: 1. Initial HR phone screening: I was asked about my current job, why I was leaving, setting out the whole interview process if everything went smoothly. She asked about what I know about the studio, their history and what games they worked on. I got a follow up email later to set up a phone call with 2 of the leads there. 2. 30 min design oriented phone call: I talked to two higher ups who had been there for 14+ years and talked about my experience at my current job, my design process, and some more design oriented questions. They liked the call and what I had to say, and got a follow up email a few days later. 3. On-site interview: The interview lasted about 5 hours, with three sets of interviews. Everything was paid for, including flight and hotel, which was nice. The studio is quite small in size since they only have over 100 employees. Everyone I talked to and went to lunch with had been there for 4+ years, which was a green flag for me since that means stability and that they like the place and people. I had a level design - type interview that lasted about an hour and a half, mainly me doing a whiteboard test while drawing diagrams, top downs, and beats for a prompt that I was given. Next was a technical interview where I had to dissect snippets of code they had on a PowerPoint. They had multiple small questions, like "what is a function," "what does variable X hold after running the code," "why do we have this line here?" and bigger questions like "what does this overall script do." With barely any scripting experience, all of the questions were really easy to get right. Plus, its more about your thought process rather than getting the questions right. I also had to pick from a list of scenarios and do a small whiteboard test / pseudo code on how I would create / implement it The last section was a more free thinking / design oriented prompt where I had to pick 3 things and create a whole game based on those items. I had lots of follow up questions during this in which I had to quickly think how I would edit or change something based on their question or feedback. This part was pretty fun.

The entire process was really fast, with the first initial phone screening with the recruiter happening less than a week after I applied, and the second video interview with the Creative Director and Lead Level Designer happening a couple days after that. Everyone I spoke to was nice, friendly, and had plenty of thoughtful questions about my past experiences. A bit harder than other interviews I've had in the past since this one was more design focused, but catered towards my exact experiences rather than generic and vague design questions.