Resume and Cover Letter Basics
Resumes and cover letters in game dev aren’t all too different from those in other industries, but if you’re never written one before or you want to make sure you’re hitting the nuances of a game dev application specifically, this page is here to help! We’ve got templates and examples for you, as well as basic do’s and don’ts and some starting pointers for how to really make your resume and cover letter stand out.
If after reading through this you’re feeling good about your resume and cover letter and ready for more, or if you’ve got a specific job application you really want to nail, we’ve got a second article with tips and exercises for leveling up and customizing your resume and letter even more!
Overview:
• Resume and Cover Letter Templates and Examples
• Resume Basics for Game Dev
• Cover Letter Basics for Game Dev
• Write for Busy Strangers
Resumes and Cover Letter Templates
These are a bunch of my resumes and cover letters from the years since I started saving them. They’re mostly VFX-centric, but hopefully useful to everyone as reference. The main point here is much less about how to write a VFX resume and much that these don’t have to be fancy - they can simply be clear and detailed about the skills that make you such a great candidate and the unique skills you bring to the table.
Resume + Cover Letter Templates
Some templates to help get you started! Resume Template A is a very standard template, while Resume Template B is especially good for major career switches and putting relevant skills front-and-center.
Resume Templates A and B in Google Docs
Download Resume Templates
Cover Letter Template in Google Docs
Download Cover Letter Template
Annotated Resume + Cover Letter
I took one of my old resumes and cover letters and commented them up with why I wrote and structured them the way I did, called out a few things I wish I'd done differently, and noted a bunch of more general things.
view resume with comments in Google Docs
view cover letter with comments in Google Docs
Resume + Cover Letter Sets
I also dug up a bunch of sets of resumes and cover letters from old job applications (generally ones that led to at least an interview). Hopefully these are useful to see side-by-side.:)
view resume/cover letter sets from old job applications in Google Docs
Game Dev Resume Basics
Simple is good. Yes, that means clear and concise, but it also just means you don't need to wild out on a fancy design or fonts or graphic designs for your resume (unless you're in UI or graphic design, then a resume is a fantastic place to flex). It doesn't need to be lovely, just easy to read - and ideally have a light background, because we're going to print it out to take notes on during your interview.
In my experience, everyone who interviews you will read the resume, but it's maybe a coin flip whether or not people will read your cover letter. So while cover letters can still be a very valuable tool, especially with recruiters who will be the first to review your application but rarely have domain expertise in your role, try to get all the essentials in your resume.
Guidelines and Tips
Keep it concise and easy to read.
Use a clean, simple font and format and optimize it to be easy to skim.
You don’t need to waste space talking like a real human - “resume-speak” is a very real thing and will let you cram way more information in there.
Write about what made your work special or improved things, not just the bare facts of your role.
Use the fact that you did VFX at your last job as a VFX Artist to paint a more detailed picture of your work for the people who weren’t there. Use follow-up bullet points to elaborate on less obvious things you might have done, such as ways you helped improve a pipeline or challenges you rose to meet.
There’s a more in-depth exercise on how to do this here.
Highlight soft skills too.
Tailor your resume to the job.
It’s not as easy to meaningfully customize your resume as a cover letter, but you still can! Organize skills and work history details based on how relevant they are to this specific job, and copy words from the job description where relevant.
There’s a more in-depth exercise on how to do this here.
1 page maximum (usually).
It’s fine if you don’t include your full work history - focus on the last few projects/years and your most relevant accomplishments. If they’re curious for more than that then they can look up your LinkedIn.
An important caveat here: Roles that rely less on a traditional portfolio, such as engineers, production, and design, will often rely much more on their resume and cover letter. So while it’s unlikely you’ll need more than a page at the beginning of your career even in these roles, that might change over time. The important part is to make sure you’re continuing to be concise, clear, and highlight your best work and skills… and then see if you still really need the extra page.
Should I Include…?
An Objective?
An objective is typically a one-sentence version of a cover letter - an opportunity to introduce yourself a little more personably before you transform into a pile of work history. However, an objective isn’t necessary for modern resumes, so if you can’t come up with a one-sentence you feel good about, or you want the space for other content, ditch it.
Awards, tangentially-related work like game jams, etc.?
if you have anything like these, they’re often great to include. If you do include them, make sure to include at least a line or two giving context to the award/work/etc. and why it’s cool in case people aren’t familiar with the competition or project; if you want and are able you can also flesh these out to include as much detail as a typical Work History entry.
Non-industry work experience?
if you’re really light on industry experience and are worried your resume feels empty, you can include non-industry work as well - especially if there are skills that are important in game dev as well. However, I highly recommend using Resume Template B in these cases - many devs tend to tune out the moment something isn’t happening in game development, and Template B highlights your skills separate from your work history and helps avoid this trap.
A photo of myself?
Unless you know including a photo is expected in the area you’re applying for, I’d recommend against it. Including a photo is a highly regional expectation - in the USA it’s outright taboo while afaik in Brasil it’s a basic expectation - but if you can use that space for more information about your skills instead, that’s probably much more helpful.:)
Other images such as graphics or logos?
Ideally, don’t include any images at all, unless they’re small, unobtrusive graphics that just help make your resume a little more you.
Especially don’t include graphics or logos as a substitute for software or project names! It’s unlikely everyone reading your resume is going to know what they mean, and they’ll be skipped entirely by any automated filters.
Game Dev Cover Letter Basics
I'm really bad at cover letters, I'm sorry. I'm sure there's lots of good advice out there - all I can really confidently say is to be nice, be sincerely excited, and use it to expand upon and support your resume (and vice versa). Cover letters are where I tend to do the most tailoring to the specific job, since the goal of a resume is to be concise and extremely readable, and customizing a portfolio takes a ton of time. So this is where I'll cite my appreciation for the game and/or studio, indicate any research/experience I've done into them specifically, and stitch together all those bullet points from my resume into a more a cohesive story of why I'm well-suited to their job in particular.
Cover letters are also where you can give people a bit more of an idea of who you are as a person. Unlike your resume, you’re writing in longform, and you can use this to show off more of your personality, passions, . In the name of efficiency, still keep it relevant to the job, but this can be the place where people start getting the first glimpse of what kind of teammate you might be to spend 40 hours a week with.
Also, these don't have to be long. Common industry advice is typically 2-3 paragraphs - the example on this page is the longest cover letter I've ever written, largely because I was a) jumping career tracks (from art to outsource management) and b) it wasn't an art creation role, so I couldn't lean as much on my portfolio to do the talking for me. If you look at my other cover letters in the downloads at the top of the page you'll see they're a fair bit shorter.
Finally, as with resumes, cover letters will likely be longer for things like design, engineering, and production where you’re more reliant on your words selling yourself rather than a portfolio. You still don’t want more than a page, but utilizing that entire page is probably more important.
Guidelines and Tips
Get to the main reasons you're well-suited to the role asap (not that different from a resume). For a longer cover letter (i.e. design, engineering, production, if you don't have a ton of experience in the role you're applying to), stitch the details of your work/resume into a short, readable story of why you're a good fit for the position.
Communicate anything you can't easily do in the resume - for instance explicitly stating why you like the game, team, or studio and showing that you've done your research (where possible), or aforementioned more personal stories (I say stories relative to a resume - so normally like, a few complete sentences).
Customize it to the job!! No matter how much you've customized your resume to a role, it's very hard to make them feel genuinely tailor-made to a single application - the format just doesn't really support it. Use the cover letter to balance that out. Doesn't mean you have to write it from scratch each time, by a long shot, but a form cover letter is even more obvious than a form resume, so make sure you're doing what you can.
Your resume and cover letter should support each other. Use them both to emphasize your most important qualifications repeatedly and from different angles, and to cover the things that the other can't (i.e. cover letter is good for introducing more human personality and story, resume is good for communicating facts quickly).
Again, it really doesn't have to be long. The people reviewing it are still super busy and 2-3 paragraphs is usually plenty, especially for artists.
Making It Personal
Greeting: Cover letter greetings are surprisingly contentious and opinions go in and out of style - do you research the specific person it’s going to and address them by name? Assume nothing and simply be politely ambiguous? Try for novelty or a joke?
I’m generally not a huge fan of addressing it to a single person, because, well, even in the best case scenario a lot of people will read it (and in the worst case, your research turned up the wrong name). A joke can easily be, well, really bad, which may be really off-putting or incredibly endearing depending on the specific personalities reading it.
Simple, positive, and broadly-addressed is by far the safest, and it’s unlikely anyone will fault you for writing “To the Moonshot team.” (And if we do, we’re butts.) However, since I don’t follow my own advice, I like to try for a little bit of charm and a slightly more tailored greeting just to emphasize out the gate that this application is for them, specifically. So I might change “the Overwatch team,” to “Scientists, adventurers, and oddities,” or greet the Hearthstone team as “Taverngoers.” It probably makes no difference either way, but it’s fun.
Passion, research, etc.: Make the cover letter about how excited you are about this application in particular! Talk about things you enjoy or respect about the team, the studio, the game(s), the way they approach the discipline you’re applying to. Talk about your love of games, your job, development in general. Sneak in a few of those little details that show you’ve done your homework and are taking this seriously.
Any other details you want to include: I go pretty lean and impersonal on my cover letters, which isn’t everyone’s style - cover letters are, after all, a great place to start showing your personality. If there’s more of your story that you want to tell sooner rather than later, or a journey to your current career path that you want to make sure they know, the cover letter is the place to do it.
Write For Busy Strangers
So here's the lousy part - for pretty much any junior art or design opening, especially at a popular studio, recruiting is reviewing hundreds, sometimes thousands, of applications. For pretty much any role (not just art or design), dozens or hundreds of those will go to the hiring managers, who need to fit reviewing them in alongside all the things that easily fill a full-time job. If a studio is making an effort to respond to people quickly, we may be reviewing dozens or hundreds of applications - resume, cover letter, and portfolio - a day, often in addition to our day-to-day tasks.
So the easier your resume and cover letter are to read, and the faster they make it absolutely clear that you possess the skills required for this job, the more likely everyone will make it far enough to decide to call you and the happier everyone (including you:P) will be. If your resume isn't particularly clear or focused, it might even make it hard to tell whether you are in fact among the best-qualified for the job, and when people have limited bandwidth or tons of applicants to narrow down, that can be really bad for you.
To be clear, in reviewing hundreds of applications, across multiple roles, I don't think I've ever had resume formatting make or break an application or my opinion of any applicant (obligatory caveat that this could be very different for a graphic or UI designer - your resume might be best thought of as part of your portfolio). But I've definitely appreciated particularly clean and well-written resumes, and bemoaned a shockingly high number of resumes that were a pain to parse because someone decided this was the time to be clever with their fonts or formatting.
Another thing to consider: there’s a very good chance the people reading your resume know basically nothing about you, your projects or your work. Even if you know someone very well at the studio, the chances they’ve given your detailed skillset and work history to everyone is slim to none. Write for people who know about game development in general, but little to nothing about your projects and nothing about your unique contributions there. Get the basic facts of your responsibilities conveyed quickly, then flesh them out with the details, accomplishments, and constraints unique to the game and your contributions there.
