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Anchorlight Games — Design Interview Simulator

A browser-based mock interview for a junior game-design role. Students play as a candidate meeting Priya Osei, a lead designer at the fictional studio Anchorlight Games, and answer six interview questions by picking between three responses — one weak, one adequate, one strong.

Play it live: https://jamesbell2021.github.io/bmet-interview-techniques/

Built for the B1 (Year 2) unit of the Level 3 Creative Media — Computer Games Development course at Belfast Met, to support the interview-technique and professional-practice element of the unit.

What it covers

Each of the six questions targets a specific employability skill, and every answer is followed by a short explanation of why it scored the way it did:

# Question focus Skill assessed
1 "Walk me through your background" Communication & structure (the pitch: hook, evidence, relevance)
2 "Tell me about a system or level you designed" Design craft (reasoning over results)
3 "Tell me about a time you got blunt feedback" Resilience & coachability (STAR method under pressure)
4 "How do you run playtests?" Playtesting method (silent observation vs. asking friends)
5 "Pick a game you admire — what would you change?" Critique & design literacy (mechanism + trade-off)
6 "An engineer says your feature is too expensive to build" Collaboration (protecting intent, not implementation)

At the end, students get an S/A/B/C rank, a per-skill breakdown, an answer-by-answer log explaining every choice, and a "loadout" checklist (STAR stories, a reversed decision, a two-minute critique, two questions to ask the interviewer) to take into a real interview.

Using it in class

A suggested structure for a session:

  1. Cold run (10–15 min). Students play through individually without discussion, so their first pass reflects instinct rather than the "correct" answer.
  2. Compare ranks (10 min). In pairs or small groups, compare ranks and talk through why an answer was marked weak, adequate, or strong — the in-game notes give them the vocabulary to do this without you re-explaining each point.
  3. Apply it (remaining time). Have students draft their own STAR story, playtest description, or game critique using the same structure the tool rewards, ready for a real mock interview or portfolio review.

It works well as a warm-up before a live mock-interview exercise, or as independent study before an assessment on professional practice.

Running it

No installation, build step, or server required — it's a single self-contained HTML file.

  • Online: use the GitHub Pages link above.
  • Offline / on a classroom machine with no internet: download index.html and open it in any modern browser.

Customising the questions

All content lives in the QUESTIONS array near the top of the <script> block in index.html — each question has a skill, a prompt, a theory explainer, and three options (weak / adequate / strong) with their own text and feedback note. Edit that array directly to retarget the questions at a different unit, role, or specialism (e.g. narrative design, UX, production) — no build tooling is needed, just save and reload the file.

Tech notes

Plain HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript — no frameworks, no dependencies, nothing to install. Portraits and icons are inline SVG; sound effects are generated with the Web Audio API. Respects prefers-reduced-motion.


🤖 Built with Claude Code

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Anchorlight Games — a branching game-design interview simulator

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