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Mobile gaming has exploded in popularity over the last decade. Once considered a niche pastime, mobile games now capture over 50% of global gaming revenue. As the industry grows, so do opportunities for creative women looking to level up their careers in technology.
Image source: Statista
However, women remain underrepresented in technical roles across the tech sector. The same holds true in gaming, where men overwhelmingly dominate programming and engineering jobs.
The good news? That gender disparity presents a major advantage for talented women with the skills and drive to succeed in mobile game development. This guide will equip you with strategies to break in and reach the top of the industry.
Why Mobile Game Development is a Great Career Fit for Women
Mobile gaming companies, large and small, need more gender diversity in their technical teams. As a woman, you have a prime opportunity to bring a fresh perspective while doing work you love.
Here’s why this fast-paced, creative career can be an especially good fit:
Utilize Your Strong Communication Skills
Game development requires close collaboration within a multidisciplinary team. As a woman, you likely have natural strengths when it comes to verbal and nonverbal communication. These “soft skills” are tremendously valuable for mobile game developers in coordinating with others to bring a game from concept to launch.
In fact, studies show women score higher in empathy, which allows you to understand teammates' perspectives better. This emotional intelligence helps facilitate smooth teamwork. With sharp listening abilities and top-notch presentation skills, you can connect groups with clarity and tact.
Express Your Creativity and Passion
Great games are a combination of creative vision, engaging gameplay, and flawless execution. As a developer, you’ll exercise creative and analytical skills daily. Each project is a labor of love, requiring passion, mental toughness, and top-notch abilities.
Game development lets you channel your imagination freely, merging art and technology to bring novel ideas to digital life. You get to invent living worlds, delighting players with surprises hidden around each turn. Every day offers new frontiers to conquer as you craft captivating stories through emerging tech like VR and AI.
Embrace the Challenge
Game development isn’t easy. Creating fun, innovative gameplay and seamless app performance means constantly pushing your skills and abilities. But challenges invigorate women who relish learning on the fly to overcome obstacles. If you thrive under pressure, game dev will continually excite you.
Indeed, since coding games requires mastering diverse, complex skill sets, you'll continually expand your capabilities. Applying analytical and critical thinking to tackle issues means connecting the dots across disciplines. While demanding, the thrill of overcoming daunting projects delivers immense satisfaction.
Make an Impact
As a woman in gaming, you’ll bring a greater diversity of thought that manifests directly in the games produced. You have an opportunity to shift culture while inspiring other women to pursue technical roles. Consider just some of the ways you can make an impact:
Bring fresh ideas: Apply your unique worldview to create novel gameplay mechanics, characters, and narratives that resonate.
Inspire future women in tech: By succeeding in a visible role, you motivate young girls to become the coding rockstars of tomorrow.
Influence better products: Your perspective allows teams to identify blindspots and weaknesses in existing games, improving end-user experiences.
Drive innovation across the industry: Pushing new boundaries advances video games creatively and technologically.
Accelerate equality: Your leadership abilities can help reform studio culture to be more inclusive.
You have an opportunity to shift culture while inspiring other women to pursue technical roles. Your influence and example can elevate female perspectives across the industry.
Essential Skills to Develop
Breaking in will require dedication to build a blended set of technical and soft skills. Focus first on developing expertise in these fundamental areas:
Swift Coding Language
Swift is the predominant iOS coding language used to program gameplay, graphics, and app architecture. Mastering Swift is mandatory to get your foot in the door. Build a portfolio of mobile apps you create solo to demonstrate your programming abilities.
Fluency in Swift means understanding best practices for writing optimized, scalable code across platforms. You’ll want to get comfortable with features like protocol-oriented programming and access controls for enforcing structure. Expect to level up as Apple releases major Swift updates annually continually.
Start by mastering basic syntax and commands completely. Then, advance to handling user input, integrating rich media, accessing hardware sensors, and building server-side application logic.
Git Version Control
Git manages changes across development teams by tracking code revisions. Experience with collaborative systems like Git helps you coordinate updates seamlessly.
Using Git allows you to experiment freely without fear of breaking functionality. You can roll back changes and branch codes to test ideas and merge approved updates from others. Whether working solo or alongside a squad, version control keeps everyone's contributions organized.
Master commands like committing, pushing, pulling,branching and merging to unlock the full power of Git. Using GitHub also lets you contribute to open-source projects to gain real-world practice.
Agile Methodologies
Agile techniques like Scrum and Kanban organize workflows into rapid development cycles. This iterative approach is standard in gaming, so Agile skills are vital to effectively synchronizing with your squad.
Agile empowers teams to adapt quickly to evolving requirements and user feedback. You’ll want to get familiar with concepts like user stories, sprints, standups, retrospectives and backlogs. Understanding various roles like Scrum Master and Product Owner allows you to plug into the development rhythm seamlessly.
Math Fundamentals
Solid mathematical skills empower you to manage complex gameplay logic. Brush up on geometry, physics, trigonometry, and algebra basics, which frequently appear in game dev.
For example, you may build environments and animations using vertexes, matrices, vectors, and collision detection. Physics simulation using Newton's laws of motion helps objects look believable. Any area of math that relates to visual concepts will come into play daily.
Cloud Computing Platforms
Games rely on cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud to handle computation, networking, storage, and more. Knowledge of platforms like Firebase helps you build scalable app infrastructure.
Understanding cloud architecture allows you to plan server capacity, database needs, and content delivery networks programmatically. You can also implement robust user authentication, push notifications, analytics, and social integration using available APIs.
With the right cloud tools, you can launch games at any scale - from thousands to millions of simultaneous players. So, cloud expertise makes you invaluable for bringing titles to global audiences.
Focus on Teamwork & Communication
At gaming studios large and small, game production requires tight collaboration across disciplines. Strong interpersonal skills ensure you interface flawlessly with artists, producers, marketers, and others who are essential to development.
How to Get Your First Game Development Job
Breaking in as a woman in mobile gaming does have its challenges. But obstacles quickly disappear once you secure that crucial first job.
Here are pro tips to land your dream mobile dev role, even without industry connections or experience:
Perfect Your Portfolio
A stellar portfolio and cover letter are essential when applying for gaming roles as a woman with no work history. Create 3-5 polished iOS apps or games solo to exhibit your programming talents.
Contribute to Open Source Games
Making meaningful contributions to open-source gaming projects demonstrates your ability to hire managers who review GitHub. Identify popular open-source games and consistently submit clean code.
Attend Game Jams & Hackathons
Local hackathons and game jams offer opportunities to build games while quickly networking with pros. Bring your A-game to these intensive coding sessions to get noticed.
Get Certified in Unity or Unreal
Two game engines dominate the field - Unity and Unreal. Certification in either platform is a recruiting magnet, instantly qualifying you for more junior roles.
Start as a Quality Assurance Tester
Consider applying for QA tester contracts as a springboard into development. Testing experience grants you visibility to see how production teams operate. Outwork others to get promoted from within.
Join Women in Gaming Slack Channels
Slack groups like Women in Gaming rally both newbies and veterans. The connections, advice, and job boards you’ll access can fast-track your career - take advantage!
Promote Your Personal Brand on Twitter
Build a developer persona on X (Twitter) to share your work, chat code, and amplify other women. Curated social media clout displays the well-roundedness key to landing interviews.
Keys to Thriving Once You’re Hired
Congratulations, you’ve scored your first game dev gig! This hard-won role is just the beginning of a rewarding career in gaming. Here are top tips to excel on the job while paving the way for other women:
Keep Building Your Expertise
Learning never stops in mobile gaming. Continually expand your knowledge of code architecture, design patterns, emerging tech, and new programming languages.
Stay on the cutting edge by mastering skills like:
Augmented reality development platforms such as ARKit and ARCore
3D graphics programming using OpenGL and Metal
Cross-platform engines like Unity and Unreal Engine
Integrating social features via Facebook and Google APIs
Implementing ads via networks like AdMob or Chartboost
Optimizing performance through profiling tools and rendering techniques
Carving out dedicated self-study time ensures you constantly expand your capabilities over time.
Volunteer for Stretch Assignments
Stand up to take on responsibilities that others do not want to accept. Exhaustiveness and effort should be used to address the most difficult problems that may crop up during the development process.
Do not flee from complex heritage systems that require significant improvements. On the contrary, one should actively encourage structural modifications to incorporate more modularity and less fragmented interfaces. Promote vital improvements where there is still an indication of manual work that hinders the advancement. Repair bad issues that hinder the creation of new console ports.
It is a good practice to accept the most challenging assignments in order to build up the tenacity and ability to handle projects that are crucial in the later years as an IC and staff-plus engineer.
Mentor Junior Developers
Always be ready to offer your input to junior programmers, including the knowledge you gained from your experience and your outlook on the field. Support them through technical challenges while encouraging them to follow the right procedures.
Rather than just fixing their code, walk them through identifying issues, applying fixes, and testing solutions themselves. Build confidence through encouragement while setting standards for quality work.
You'll gain management abilities while paying forward support that was pivotal for your career ascension.
Explore Specialized Roles
After mastering the basics in an entry-level post, start focusing on specific disciplines like backend, systems, tools or cloud architecture. Niche down to become uniquely valuable.
In addition to coding-centric specialties, creative leadership paths can utilize the full blend of your left- and right-brain capabilities:
Game Design Director: Guide creative vision by leading a team of designers planning gameplay experiences.
Technical Art Director: Pioneer techniques pushing visual fidelity by managing rendering engineers and technical artists.
UX Design Lead: Architect intuitive game interfaces and experiences focused on user engagement.
Online Services Manager: Strategize in-game events, player communication pipelines, and live operations.
Pursuing a niche aligning with your innate talents accelerates professional fulfillment and impact.
Present at Industry Conferences
Getting selected to share your work at gaming expos like GDC or E3 generates industry-wide visibility. Submit speaker proposals flaunting your expertise.
To boost your chances of snagging a slot, pitch fresh talks on need-to-know topics like:
Implementing procedural content generation to design endless playable worlds
Leveraging Apple's latest ARKit upgrades for innovative gameplay
Fighting mobile ad fraud across advertising networks
Diagnosing performance problems in Unity versus Unreal Engine
Ensuring cross-platform game saves with cloud data storage
The connections you make presenting at tier-one gaming conferences can fast-track your rise as an industry thought leader.
Publish in Gaming Journals
Pitch articles to gaming trade publications like Gamasutra, profiling your work. Discuss emerging tech, from mobile advances to augmented reality innovations.
Submit detailed postmortems dissecting development processes on past game launches. Share tactics studios can replicate, as well as pitfalls to avoid.
Securing bylines raises your professional visibility while validating you as a thought leader.
Secure High-Visibility Projects
Pursue opportunities working on games headed to major industry events like E3 or featured in press reveals.
Spearheaded technical deliverables help showcase titles that will get attention from media outlets and users worldwide. Tackle the most exciting features planned for these flagship launches.
Owning implementations that fans and journalists will see firsthand further spotlights your capabilities on a global stage.
Level Up Your Mobile Gaming Career
Mobile game development is an industry where women, with proper concentration, can quickly rise through the ranks to executive positions. When you are breaking barriers and dispelling myths, do not forget to raise others.
The more women empower their fellow women in gaming, the more the growth of creativity and innovation in the industry. Don’t be afraid to bring your different strengths – the future of mobile gaming is waiting for you and your ideas!
* This article does not intend to advertise any company, solution, or event - all of the above are provided only as examples of well-known or popular ones.
