You'll have to move to where ever their office is. If its a large company that has a location in your state, you might be able to get a job in the local office.

But if you assume that you can work for a company that has no presence in your state, and they'll just mail you a check when you work out of your basement, well that's not going to happen.

It's not clear from your question which of these two scenarios you were referring to.

Very few game studios allow their employees to do most of their work from home. Both design and coding are activities that are highly collaborative and require you to be able to communicate regularly with your fellow workers, not just by email, but face-to-face time, time in front of the whiteboard, and time for meetings. In addition, "Agile" programming methodologies are all the rage and nearly all of them prescribe quick, daily face-to-face team meetings to relay progress and share stumbling points. This is difficult to do in a mixed local/remote worker team.

There are some smaller, generally independent studios that are made up of people working remotely, but they tend to be a small number of guys who a) are all established veterans, and b) know each other but happen not to live in close proximity. These types of studios grow slowly and tend to bring in known entities rather than recruiting, so you're not likely to be brought into the fold without an established record and lots of connections.

The only thing of that kind that I'm aware of is gamedevmap.com. There appear to be a few shops in Phoenix and in Tucson. There may be more around since gamedevmap.com's list is not exhaustive.

Whyever did you put this in Your Announcements? Moving you to 'Breaking in to the Games Industry, as you appear to be investigating industry jobs and I feel your question probably best fits there. Good luck! [smile]

Quote: Original post by garrettj94
is there some list of game developing companies i can get?

Quote: Ravyne
The only thing of that kind that I'm aware of is gamedevmap.com.

There's also gameindustrymap and Wikipedia's "list of video game developers" and "list of video game publishers."
Garrett, you should scroll up and click the eensy-teensy itsy-bitsy blue "View Forum FAQ" now that you're in the proper forum. Location, location, location!