I want to work in a Call of Duty game one day. What must I do to achieve my goal?

Hi William,

Having worked on a Call of Duty game in the past, I can tell you that the teams making these games are amongst the most talented artists, engineers, etc of any creative company. I have worked for studios ranging from Dreamworks to Lucasfilm to Visceral and can definitely attest to the quality of work being done there.

That being said, I think what you are really asking is what can I do in order to work for one of the best AAA game studios in the world? As suggested above, I would first try to figure out what areas of game development interest you the most. There are a number of good books on game production which would talk about the various avenues that one could take. There literally are positions for almost every discipline including, Art, Engineering, Management, Legal, HR, etc... At Zynga, we even have an entire kitchen staff that don't necessarily get to work on games, but they get to be part of the game culture and working around/for game development. To work in any of these disciplines, you will need to work your way up from smaller projects that you either do on your own, or could do in a college education or internship. All of the Designers on COD have several years of experience prior to joining the team except for maybe an exception here or there.

One way to get a foot in the door could be via game testing or QA. However, these departments are inundated with people who are secretly trying to move their way up the ladder (to the dismay of many developers who would prefer their QA artists to just focus on QA). And generally, these people tend to end up in Producer roles and not so much Designers. They almost never make the jump to any sort of Artist positions.

There's also a great documentary called Indie Game: The Movie http://buy.indiegamethemovie.com which you can find on Netflix, which paints a really authentic picture of indie development. It's not COD, but it does paint a picture of the other side (indie) of game development in which you get to do a bit of anything and everything. Who knows, maybe this is something that would help you figure out exactly what you want to do in games and could better inform your decision.

Good luck in your career search!

I think you should probably consider what it is about the Call of Duty games you really enjoy and what you think you'd enjoy working on, as your typical AAA shooter game is the work of hundreds of people. Everything from production management to sound engineering to programming specialists like AI and physics engineers and concept artists will be represented within a Call of Duty game team, and all those different disciplines have different careers routes.

You might want to think about what you'd enjoy doing, and then how that might be applicable to working on a game you enjoy playing, rather than the other way around. I mean, I love eating pizza, but that doesn't mean I'm going to go try to get a job at Domino's.

Typically though a Call of Duty game will have an awful lot of 3D and 2D artists and videogame programmers working on it, so it's worth looking into getting formally educated in art or computing science, depending on what you enjoy doing. There are a lot of tools, such as Unity3D, out there for free, and you can find tutorials for making first-person shooters all over the Web. Maybe you should consider having a go at making your own very basic Call of Duty clone and see what parts of that process you enjoy the most.

As mentioned above, the range of roles on a CoD game, or any other major game of similar scope make this both easier and harder to answer.

One good way to start is getting involved with communities online which create new maps for the PC version of the game, to see if design roles are for you- if you'd rather have something more technical, modding groups could offer you something better.

It may be well worth lowering your scope, though- it can be very easy to get burned out when you realise exactly what goes on to such a game, so starting smaller and getting experience across all supplies might be better.