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Eric
“Dalmarus” Campbell has
been a deliverer of dentures, a U.S. Marine, a security guard, an IT
specialist, and a writer. He has also worked for a few game industry
heavyweights you may have heard of – Blizzard, BioWare, and
ArenaNet. Tune in
each week as he tells his tale and provides numerous tips from an
insider’s
perspective on what it takes to make it in the game industry.


href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/inside-the-game-industry/make-your-dreams-come-true-pt1"> style="">Last week style=""> I mentioned that I worked at Stratics as a
volunteer before going to
Ten Ton Hammer as an employee. What I didn’t tell you is that
while I was at
Stratics, I made a massive
error in terms of etiquette and
professionalism. We were running a contest in conjunction with
Perpetual
Entertainment to give away some Gods & Heroes beta keys on the
site. Me, in
my infinite wisdom (meaning  I
had ZERO),
decided to spread the excitement by posting about it everywhere I
thought
people would care.

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Now
to be fair
to my former self, I was a volunteer that had no clue how things were
done. I
was super excited to share the wealth (beta keys) with potential
players, and
thought I was doing a good thing for gamers everywhere. What I was
actually
doing was spamming other network sites with links and information about
a
contest one of their competitors were running.

 

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class="MsoNoSpacing"> style="">Rule
#4
style=""> – You
are going to make mistakes. Huge ones. Use them to learn, not
as an excuse to quit.

 

style="">Most sites took my
posts in stride as spam and simply removed them. Ten Ton Hammer went
one step
further and banned my account. When I sent an email asking why, I
believe it
was Boomjack (it may have been Ethec) that sent a scathing reply,
informing me
in no uncertain terms how unprofessional it was of another site manager
to do
something like that, etc. After promising that such an act would not
ever take
place again, I was allowed back onto the site.

 

style="">Rather than be
upset about the ass reaming I had received, I was actually grateful
(once I got
over my immediate reaction of “poor
me, I was just trying to do something
nice for the fans
”).
This was a clear wake-up call in many ways. It
reminded me that if I wanted to be treated like a professional, I
needed to act
like one and that’s exactly what I did from then on. It was
the work I did after
that incident that allowed me to be taken seriously by Ten Ton Hammer
nearly a
year later when they were hiring for the Vanguard Assistant Community
Manager
position.

 

As
soon as I started working at Ten Ton Hammer, there
were two things that became immediately obvious to me. The first is
that there
was a ton of potentially cool things we could do with the Vanguard
site. The
second was that even though I was getting paid for 20 hours of work a
week,
that wasn’t going to be enough hours to accomplish everything
I wanted to. So I
was left with a choice to either do less than I thought the site
deserved, or suck
it up and put the extra hours in. If you think you would have gone with
the
first option, you need to either pick a different field to work in or
quit
reading now and not start the article back up until you’re
ready to choose the
second option.

 

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class="MsoNoSpacing"> style="">Rule #5
There
is no place in the game industry for
anyone that isn’t going to put in however many hours it takes
to get the job
done right.

 

After
I had gotten the hang of things and accepted the
fact that if I wanted to make a career out of this (I was still working
fulltime in the IT field at this point) I was going to need to do
whatever it
took to make sure the content we were putting up was the best it could
be for
our readers, things started to fall into place. This obsession with
getting
things right continually escalated the longer I was on the site.

 

When
I eventually became the Community Manager of the
Vanguard site, I started working on a number of projects designed to
improve
things for our readers. One of those was a complete revamp of the spell
lists
for every class. Sounds easy enough, right? Not so fast –
there were 18 classes
in the game and nearly all of them had over 150 spells each. It was a
task of
monumental proportions and took up nearly 40 hours of my time each week
to
complete, but in the end, it was worth it.

 

Despite
my love of Vanguard, the game’s population had
tanked long before we eventually made the business decision to stop
updating
content for the game. It was a rough choice, but if there’s a
small amount of
people playing, that doesn’t leave a lot of readers either.
So it was with a
heavy heart I said goodbye to my baby and started working on the main
site.

 

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class="MsoNoSpacing"> style="">Rule #6
Change
is going to come. Rather than gripe
and bitch about it, use the opportunity to branch out and learn all you
can.

 

Even
though I was heartbroken about the closing of the Vanguard
site, moving to the main site staff was a great move for me. Rather
than
focusing all my resources on one game (as I had always done up to this
point),
it allowed me to branch out and begin to take a “big
picture” look at the
industry as a whole. This expansion would prove to be invaluable for my
professional growth.

 

Tune
in next week for more of this tale and tips on what
it takes to make your way inside the industry. Can’t wait
that long to hear
more? Be sure to href="https://twitter.com/Dalmarus">follow me on
Twitter
– you never know what I might say.

 

Last Updated: Mar 13, 2016

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