Junior game developer
| Highest | $4,500 / mo · United States |
|---|---|
| Experience | 0–1 yrs |
| Degree | Not required |
| First paycheck | 18 to 24 months of study or 3.5 to 4 years university |
Pay in the destination countries
Monthly, in US dollars. Each country is an Imora admission package — open one for that route's fees, language requirement and deadline.
| Country | Monthly |
|---|---|
| United StatesTOEFL 80–100 · $10–70k | $4,500max |
| CanadaIELTS 6.0–6.5 · CAD 20–40k | $3,950 |
| Hong KongIELTS 6.0–6.5 · HK–200k | $3,850 |
| SingaporeIELTS 6.5 · SGD 18–35k | $3,850 |
| United KingdomIELTS 6.0–7.0 · £11–38k | $3,850 |
| SwitzerlandIELTS 6.5 · CHF 0.9–8k | $3,700 |
What does the day look like?
A junior game developer works standard office hours of 40 hours per week (typically 09:00 to 18:00 or 10:00 to 19:00, Monday through Friday). Shift work, night shifts, and emergency on-call rotations do not exist for gameplay developers. Overtime occurs mainly during crunch periods before publisher beta submissions or platform certification deadlines.
Only 10% to 15% of the day is spent writing gameplay mechanics or interface logic, such as inventory UI, camera collisions, or weapon reload timers in Unity (using C#) or Unreal Engine (using C++ and Blueprints). In contrast, 50% to 60% of the day goes into debugging and bug fixing: pulling QA bug tickets from Jira or Hansoft, reproducing crashes in Microsoft Visual Studio or JetBrains Rider, and tracing memory leaks. Another 15% to 20% involves daily 15-minute stand-up meetings, submitting Pull Requests via Git or Perforce, and responding to senior code reviews, while 10% to 15% is spent waiting for shader compilation, baking lighting, and cooking project builds.
Where does this lead?
Next step up
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