Hello everyone, how are you? I hope you're doing well. I don't know who's going to be reading this but enjoy your stay in my personal cove on the Internet.
First, I'll give you a bit about myself.
I'm in my mid 20s, female and in Northern California.
I'm a game designer for a small company and I'm finding myself happily wearing quite a few hats from game systems design, document updating/archiving, level design, tool research and a multitude of miscellaneous tasks. As long as I'd been playing video games, I was thinking about what would make them better, cooler, more fun to play, easier to get into and so forth. After finishing college, I thought I'd be inane and daring; I gave myself 2 years to see how far I could get in the game industry. If I didn't get anywhere, I'd try looking for a more "serious" job but that never happened.
Before I got my design job, I spent about a year hopping around various QA testing jobs. I went for QA figuring I'd gain the most exposure to the development environment as a tester. That and numerous professionals had mentioned QA as a good place to start.
QA was quite a rough ride, no doubt about that. As I gained more exposure to various design documents(technical, game systems, data sheets, etc) I started writing down my own ideas, mimicing what I saw. The results were utilitarian and boring to people to death. I realized I had to place my ideas in a format that had people realizing how cool they were to me. I drafted a template that consisted of 5-7 key questions pertinent to what defines the game idea, what makes it cool and how to play it if it was made.
Fortune granted me a chance to to show off the ideas I'd compiled in this streamlined and spiffy new format and thus I got to where I am now. There are people out there actively scouting fresh blood to add to the designer pool. Keep persisting.
Random Encounters in Imaginary Realms 