Breaking In

An interactive simulation of building a junior games-industry application from scratch: pick a discipline, spend nine weeks of prep time across six kinds of material, then watch three studios — an 11-person indie, a 210-person mid-size, and a 900+-person AAA — respond to what you built.

Live site: https://jamesbell2021.github.io/bmet-breaking-in/

Built for Unit B1 Phase 3 — creating materials for career progression using technical practice (B1.3, assessed under AC3: technical skill) at Belfast Met.

How it works

1. Pick a role — environment artist, character artist, games designer, gameplay programmer, animator or technical artist. Each is screened differently, and the weighting behind every studio verdict changes with the choice.
2. Spend nine weeks across six materials — personal brand, recapturing/organising old work, CV and personal statement, portfolio or showreel, online presence, and supporting material (write-ups, design docs, references). Each can be skipped, done roughly, or done properly; doing everything properly costs thirteen weeks, so the nine-week budget forces a real trade-off. Every material has a "why this matters" explainer — that reasoning, not the clicking, is the part that's actually assessed.
3. Apply. Three studios each judge the resulting profile against a gated set of thresholds (findability, evidence of craft, credibility, professionalism, role fit) and return a verdict with a specific, in-character story explaining exactly where the application stopped being read — plus the fix.
4. See the grade band. A closing summary maps the outcome to Pass / Merit / Distinction language against AC3.

Every piece of industry jargon (CV, breakdown, turntable, ArtStation, keyword filter, and so on) is a tappable term with a plain-English explanation, and the full glossary is listed at the bottom of the page for printing.

Using it in class

Runs well as a single lesson: pick a role, spend the budget, apply, discuss why the grade band landed where it did, then reroll with a different role or a different spending pattern to see how the same profile reads completely differently to a different discipline's gatekeepers. It intentionally rewards deciding what to cut as much as it rewards building more — that's the AC3 technical-skill judgement the unit is assessing.

Running it

No build step, no dependencies beyond two Google Fonts. Sound and music are generated live from note data via the Web Audio API — there are no audio files, so the page works fully offline once downloaded.

• Online: use the GitHub Pages link above.
• Offline: download index.html and open it in any browser.

Updating the content

Everything lives in <script> at the bottom of index.html:

• TERMS — the jargon glossary. Any {{key|display text}} in a string elsewhere in the file becomes a tappable glossary term automatically.
• ROLES — the six disciplines and how each material is weighted for that role.
• MATS — the six buildable materials, their three levels (skip/basic/properly), time cost, and stat impact.
• STUDIOS — the three studios, each with a gates array of stat thresholds checked in order, and a win case for clearing all of them.

---

🤖 Built with Claude Code