During one of the 343 Social streams the people hosting mentioned you could be hired by working with the community or by using the Forge and they mentioned Whos Blaze who is, only heard it, apparently 16 or so yrs old and has a 343 emblem n such. Wanted to know if there were any prerequisites for getting a job for Forge through using Forge.
I would venture to guess that having your Forge maps consistently recognized and/or implemented into matchmaking by 343 is likely a step in the right direction.
Hey there Seventh Orca.
16, haha. I’m a little older than that. Though my voice probably hasn’t aged since then. 
Jokes aside…
While forging is a large part of my job as a Multiplayer Sustain Designer, forge experience was only a small portion of what helped qualify me for this position. Previous to working here, I had forged over a decade. This allowed the possibility for lots of community involvement, structured team interactions, playtest coordinating and probably most prominently to grow level design knowledge. Over that time, I have also gained experience in a handful of 3d softwares and game engines, having worked on several indie games.
Forge and the community surrounding it is a wonderful way to gain some very valuable knowledge. All that said, there is no definitive path of how to get into the industry. What worked for me might not be the path for someone else.
I’m not entirely sure if this is the appropriate place to have the discussion but if you’d like to DM me about any more specifics, I’d be welcome to answer some questions. Though for this post, I’ll drop a list of some skills that I personally feel helped me.
Programs:
- Unity 3d
- Unreal Engine
- Radiant
- Source Hammer
- Sketch-up
- Blender
-
Maya
In-Game editors/Editor add-ons:
Reflex Arena
Diabotical (Releasing soon)
Black ops 3 + Radiant tool
Far cry 5
Unreal tournament + UE4
Portal 2 + Source
Practices/traits:
Playtest coordination
Feedback curation
Team involvement
Efficient design pipelines
Presentation & Documentation
SCRUM
There are plenty that I’m sure I’ve missed but I wanted to try to give you something to run off of. 