My Journey

As a brief summary, here are the key milestones:

I started my transition with 36 years old.
Got my first remunerated job a little before turning 39.
I had 7 years of experience in Civil Engineering behind me. Very little programming experience.
Studied C# for 4 months before quitting my job and starting to learn Unity.
First learning year I was unemployed and spent 40 hours a week with Unity.
Second and third year I worked a part-time job and could only devote 20 hours a week to Unity.
I looked for jobs for 1-2 months every 5-6 months as my portfolio grew bigger. No luck.
After 1.5 year I decided to participate in a 5 month long online Unity bootcamp. It proved to be key for my chances at landing a job later down the line.
After the bootcamp ended, I started as a programmer part-time collaborating in the videogame company my bootcamp teacher managed.
Never stopped sending CVs, but only got a couple of interviews that got nowhere.
After 8-9 months of collaboration, a recruiter contacted me through Linkedin.
Nearly 3 years after quitting my job, I got my first remunerated job in the videogame industry (100% remote).

Other interesting background that should be known is that I spent around 5,000€ between online courses, assets for my prototypes, and other things. Most of the money went into the online bootcamp and a gaming laptop, though. Before quitting my job, I had quite a lot of money saved and, before doing anything drastic, I took career counselling to make sure this was the right call for me.

This is going to be a long ride as I’m going to go into a lot of detail on what I did since I decided I had to bring change into my life until I finally landed a job. Make yourself a coffee/tee and sit down comfortably. Here we go!

If you have specific questions or corrections, don’t hesitate to drop me an E-Mail.

In The Beginning There Was Doubt

It was a long time coming. My job didn’t fulfil me and, even though it wasn’t like I hated it (I was just indifferent to it), that ate into my confidence an my mental health little by little with the years. As I first (and my wife, too) started to notice that my stress levels were getting higher than normal and not going away in the long term like in other occasions, I knew it was time for a change.

I took on the internet to inform myself what could I do with my life, how could I know what I really wanted to dedicate my life to. As back then I didn’t even know I wanted to do videogames. In fact, I was doubting between becoming a translator or working on anything related to climbing. The first one because I always liked writing and I already had collaborated in manga translations from English to Spanish in the past for several years, the second is because climbing and the outdoors are my other passions apart from videogames.

I studied civil engineering in college and worked as a structural engineer and test engineer for 7 years by this point.

You, reader, might feel the same way and think that you totally, 100%, want to work making video games!

Unless you are a really self-reflecting type and know yourself pretty well, I would advise against it.

Ask yourself for real, do you really want to work making videogames?

Playing videogames and making them are vastly different things. Creating videogames can be really frustrating and elicit a good level of psychological resilience. Then there is the fact that for a given position and seniority level, chances are that you are going to make more money and work less hours developing regular software than making videogames. This is of course of little importance if you have a big artistic drive that needs an outlet and are also ambitious enough about it that becoming a hobbyist game developer doesn’t cut it for you, but is something that I think is only fair to know before making any life-altering decisions.

So, what is there, at the reach of your hand, that can help you in this very first hard step? Career counselling to the rescue! However, before speaking directly to a psychologist or a career coach, I’m going to give you advice on how you can test yourself the waters, so when the time of seeking profesional help comes, you are ready to make the best of it. It can also happen that after doing several tests during weeks/months you get to a pretty good understanding level of your own psyche that you don’t even need to seek help.

I am going to simply share some resources along with advice from my own experience. I strongly recommend to take everything I say here as a stepping stone into your own research. The goal of this first step is to make sure you are making the right call and only you (and maybe close enough family and friends) know yourself the best.

I think I spent a good 2-3 months in this phase. I did quite a lot of research and tests, recorded my results and compared many different ones. When I had a good picture I ended up doing 4 sessions throughout a month with a career counsellor that cemented my findings. Without further ado, Let’s get into it.

Know Yourself

This is maybe the website that led me to everything else. Honestly, I did all of this 3 years ago and my memory is a bit fuzzy, but luckily I still keep some of my bookmarks. If anything, you can ignore any other links and advice I’ll give and just research that website according to all the titles you can find in the following screenshot from my bookmark folder:

Most of what I’m going to say is already mentioned somewhere in that website.

To know if videogames is for you, you have to know yourself well first, and see if your personality, your aptitudes, your professional interests, your strengths and weaknesses and your professional values line up with what is needed to make videogames. Who knows, you might even find out that your vocation lies somewhere else.

Aptitudes

Aptitudes are an individual’s ability/potential to perform a certain task and can be cognitive, as well as mechanical and other types. Tests tend to measure different aptitudes and give career recommendations based on the results. Here is a website that offers a free test, although you can probably find others online. I found the free one here more than enough for my purposes.

There are other useful tests like the DAT-5, although that one is best that you perform it under the guidance of a specialized psychologist. Nevertheless, if you search hard enough you might be able to find a copy online and do it yourself to at least get a good sense on where your aptitudes lie.

Professional Interests

What do you actually like to do in your free time? The answer to this simple question can entail deep ramifications for your professional choice. Of course, make your passion your work, right? This step precisely tries to pin down your passions and elucidate an order among them, should you have more than one.

Performing the Holland Code Career Test will give you a pretty good understanding on yourself by responding a handful of seemingly benign questions. Here is a good one to get you started on this. That website in general will be very useful for this phase.

Professional Values

This is related to your interests but goes slightly into a different direction and tries to figure out what is it that makes you happy or unhappy during work. Do you value Home-Office or presential work? How important is your wage? Do you value socializing with your co-workers? The social recognition of your results is something that you put value on? Do you like to be micro-managed or to work independently? These and other questions is what professional values are all about. Not so much as what drives you, but more about everything else that is related to actually working. Here and here are good places where to start from.

Personality

Are you an INTJ or an INFJ? Did this just sound like Chinese to you? Yes, I know the Myers-Briggs personality test has its limitations. You should not take the results as absolutes, but rather as tendencies in your personality and behaviour. They can really give you great insights into your mind that you weren’t even aware of. Begin here. Of all the tests, The Myers-Briggs is by far the one with the biggest presence online and there is an army of websites that offer one.

Strengths and Weaknesses

Where aptitudes related more to what is usually called “Hard-Skills”, strengths and weaknesses here are meant more in a “Soft-Skills” kind of way. Teamwork capabilities, reliability, working under stress… this is what will be measured here.

I think that the Redbull Wingfinder Test is really a great resource for this. It’s free and available in different languages!

Some general advice that I found useful in this phase:

Whenever possible, for the same topic I tried to do different tests from different websites, if I could find more than one. I even explored the Play Store and found a couple of useful Career Advice apps (which I unfortunately erased long ago, so I can’t tell exactly which were…)
Do the same tests several times, at different times of the day and on different moods. Don’t repeat them again right after having taking one. Leave a couple of days between attempts. It’s important to explore your chances on different psychological and mental states, compare your results and take what you think makes most sense. You would be surprised just how incredibly efficient and good all of us are at self-deception. We lie to ourselves a lot more often than we like to admit.
Don’t overthink the answers. This may seem a bit odd, but don’t take longer than 10 seconds answering single questions (maybe except in the aptitude tests, on those there are actually right and wrong answers!). If anything, don’t be afraid of letting your subconscious answer the tough questions for you. You will be surprised by some of the answers that you give. Besides, the more you overthink, the more room you give to self-deception and the higher the probabilities of not getting an honest result.

It is of utmost importance that you are 100% honest with yourself when taking these tests. Once you start getting the logic behind the tests, it is very easy to self indulge and start giving the answers that will give you the result that you want. However, doing that is as good as shooting yourself in the foot as years down the line you may painfully find out this career path wasn’t for you after all.

What’s next?

I didn’t stop there. Once I thought I was ready, I started researching on career counselling. On this aspect I can only speak about the company I hired for it. This is OrientaEuro, a Belgian career counselling and coaching company with years of experience. What convinced me to go with them was a short E-Mail exchange I had with its owner, Roger Cohen, where he gifted me a copy of his book, which I found incredibly useful. If you are introspective enough, this book will have you covered, and after finishing its exercises you will have 5 possible career paths in order of relevance which you can compare with the already massive amount of info from the tests that you should have collected by now in order to make an informed choice.

In my case, I ended up taking the 4, 2-hour long coaching sessions. I found that it was well worth it in the end, but mileage here may vary.

As a curiosity, the career choices that came to me as a result were:

Programming/something to do with computers
Language Teacher
Climbing Coach/Climbing Route Setter
Translator
Structural Engineer (my current job at the time)

As it stands, I wasn’t very off for what I wanted for myself at the very beginning. It wasn’t also a surprise, I consider myself relatively computer-savvy above average (MS-DOS generation for the win!) and I did learn C++ and JavaScript many years prior (but never used them and had thus forgotten about everything).

So the big question was before me: What’s Next?

And Then There Were Even More Doubts

Preamble

At this point I still wasn’t sure about dedicating my life to videogames. It was something I discussed with my career coach but I wasn’t sure about it. Like I mentioned before, I did study some programming back in the day and I even dabbed with RPGMaker one summer when I was 17 years old. Apart from that I’ve been an avid gamer since the Commodore64 but I just had no clue where I could start.

So I turned to the internet once more. This time I had already a better idea where to start my search: Reddit.

Independent of the opinion you could have about the website, r/gamedev Beginner MegaThread is an absolute goldmine of information. You should start on the Getting Started thread and keep going from there. That thread is much more thorough that I can hope to be in this blog post, so I’ll keep the information brief and more related to what I did and my personal experiences going through the process.

On another note, other communities like r/learnprogramming and/or r/gamedesign can also be very helpful for newcomers.

The First Questions

Before blindly downloading an engine and start making games, there are a few considerations to take in account if you want your transition to be as efficient as possible.

If you are college-aged or even a teenager, you will be a lot more flexible and will have much more room for trial and error. If, like me, you are already approaching your 40s, time is a commodity you can’t afford to waste. Thus, you need to make careful considerations on your possible job wishes. However, if you went through the previous section, the Professional Values might give you already good hints on where you want to go. Namely, you need to consider if you want to work for a AAA company or for an independent/AA one.

Do I need to have studied a relevant degree in college?

It helps a lot, but it’s not mandatory. It is far more important what you can demonstrate with a relevant portfolio.

Can I get a job in 6 months if I just learn to code?

I’ve seen this question a lot and the answer is “yes, but…”. The few cases I’ve seen online are either from people who have already been working in software development for years and only had to learn the engine and/or that for one reason or another they already had a good network of contacts in the industry. Otherwise it’s not a realistic goal, in my opinion.

I want to do an MMORPG!!

Most people will benefit the most by starting really small and achieve quick successes in a short period of time. Finishing projects give a confidence boost that it’s not to underestimate. On the other hand, massive projects that seem to never move forward are a very good way to get demotivated and leave videogames for good. Although some do love big projects from the beginning. It is up to you, as you know better than anybody else how you learn best.

Working in AAA

Working for companies like Activision Blizzard, Ubisoft or Sony might seem like the easiest way of getting the foot in the industry, specially if you can land a game tester position and build a network of contacts from there while you learn programming/game design on the side.

I’m not sure this can be a good path, although if you are lucky enough to land on an opportunity like this it won’t hurt, as you already are going to be learning on the side of your current job anyway. But getting something like this out of the blue without having a contact in the company is nearly impossible.

AAA companies require highly specific and specialized skillsets. This means that if you are an all-rounder programmer/designer/artist you are never going to get a job there. You need to specialize yourself and, for example, become a Background or Character Artist, an AI or Netcode Programmer, an Economy or Level Designer. The choice is yours. You need to find out what is the specific aspect of videogames that you like most and build a portfolio around it. This will take time as it can take a lot of trial and error.

AAA have more leeway for teaching on the job, and so it is more normal that they have more internships and entry-level jobs available. However, the concurrence is numerous and fierce, which allows them to pick the very best of what they have available. Standing out is your #1 priority when applying for a AAA company.

From a programming standpoint, many work either with Unreal Engine, which uses C++, or their own in-house engine, which are usually based on C++. So C++ it is if you want to go the AAA route.

Working for an Independent Company (AA/III/Indies)

Here the complete opposite applies. Because teams at indie companies are made of a handful of individuals, it is important that everybody has a core competence while at the same time being able to do other things. This is known as the T-Shape principle, where the vertical line is your core hard-skill and the horizontal line encompasses the rest of your knowledge.

All-Rounders are welcomed here, although due to the inherent risk within the industry, junior positions are barely to be seen because most of the indie companies look primarily for senior level people. They tend to fill out their junior positions through their inner network of contacts and get people on board that they can trust because even small mistakes can mean bankruptcy down the line.

As a positive note, there are many, many indie companies out there you can apply to for remote work.

The best advice here is to look for many companies that you would like to work with, see the genre they specialize in and try to build your portfolio around that.

AA companies are a bit of mix between both worlds and many have a highly specialized department while others are filled with T-Shapes. In this case you need to research on a case by case basis.

From a programming standpoint many use the Unity Engine, which works with C#. The Godot Engine, an open-source engine, has been gaining traction in the last couple of years and many indie companies seem to be changing from Unity to this one. It is still early to say what share of the market it will have in the future or how fast will it grow. Right now it has very little presence, at the very least not enough to absorb the demand for it so if you decide to learn it you need to count with a lot of concurrence with years of experience. It is nevertheless worth keeping an eye on to see its further development. Godot uses it’s own scripting language: GDscript.

Now What?

I recommend that you look for job offers on the positions you are interested in in various websites or in the company websites. Check what they ask for. Check many, even have a spreadsheet with them and group their requirements together. When you know what is it that it is asked more often, you will have a very good grasp of what it is that you need to learn the earliest.

My Journey

After careful thought I decided that AAA wasn’t for me and that I wanted to be a designer. Nevertheless I also decided that I would learn programming and Unity in order to build ground knowledge and have something to show in my portfolio.

Learning C#

The first thing I did was learning C# for 4 months before learning Unity. This was from September to December in 2020. Independently of the engine you decide to learn, it is best that you actually get acquainted with the programming language before learning the engine because most of the hands-on courses out there that teach both at the same time skip many of the non-gaming related intricacies of the language that can help you in becoming a much more flexible programmer when dealing with bugs and choices for systems’ architectures (like quests, weapons, enemies, etc).

My choice for learning C# was C# Programming Yellow Book from Rob Miles. This is a great resource, and is free. Rob Miles is a now retired Professor of a UK University that taught different programming languages, and this book is his C# course. In the prior website, make sure you not only download the book, but scroll down to also download the weekly class’ slides and labs as well as the semester exams. You’ll have plenty of exercises to practice with. If you go as far as doing the final semester exam, you will even have a couple of small games done in the XNA Framework to show off!

One thing about the XNA Framework: it was already kind of difficult to make it work with Visual Studio 2019 but there are ways explained online. I’m not sure if it’s possible with the newer versions and you might need to look into MonoGame as a substitute for doing the necessary exercises.

In parallel with the book, I also did several exercises from the C# road included in the website exercism until I started full time learning Unity.

Transition between C# and Unity

I didn’t start right away with Unity, before that I spent a month doing a couple of small Windows-Console games according to the advice given in this page. I already had the Pong clone and the Breakout Clone covered with the exercises in The Yellow Book (and even a small ASCII board game!) so I did a Tic-Tac-Toe game (even drawing an ASCII board), a Blackjack game and, the one I am most proud of from this period, a small conversational adventure.

Learning Unity – The Beginning

By this time, January 2021, I was 100% convinced that this was what I wanted to do professionally and quit my job to learn full time. I did some quick research that complemented the extensive one I had already done during the summer to see what courses out there would fit better my needs and settled with the courses at GameDev.tv.

Right now their selection is massive compared to two years ago and cover a lot of bases. I can’t speak for the non-unity courses which I haven’t done, but the Unity 2D and 3D ones are quite solid, albeit teaching not really good coding practices (as Rick, the teacher, isn’t really a programmer but a game designer). This is one of the reasons why getting familiar with the programming language before learning the engine is so important. You will go through the courses much faster and writing better code. At the same time you will be in a much better position to extend the projects and make them stand out.

Along with the aforementioned courses I also did the courses Finish It! (how to avoid procrastination), Math For Games, How To Use Git and How To Get A Job in the Industry. I didn’t buy them directly, but on a bundle. I still found all of them interesting and containing good knowledge. The courses of GameDev.tv are often on sale either on their website or on Udemy as well as having bundles from time to time in HumbleBundle, so it’s worth to keep an eye on them and get them when they are cheap.

Learning Unity – 2D

I started with the 2D course with a pause in the middle to do the projects in the book Unity In Action. The book is really insightful and has good advice. While I didn’t extend none of the projects there (except for the Memory Game), I applied the knowledge gained in many of the projects I did in the 2D and 3D courses.

The 2D course took me around 5-6 months to finish. It included “just” 5 projects, but the last 2 took considerable more time because I tried to apply really meaningful extensions and were just more complex games. The Plants vs. Zombies clone took me 1 month and the platformer 2, which accounts for more than half of the course time.

When doing online courses it is important to double or triple the total course time to get a hang of how long it could take you to actually finish it. This is of course depending if you decide to just copy the project or try to do a more personalized one with extensions. Debugging and fixing errors can take a considerable amount of time as there will be many unexpected situations you just don’t know of.

Here are the links to the GitHub repositories if you want to check them out. They are all on MIT licenses:

Lost in the Vast White, a Choose-Your-Own-Path style narrative game.
Breaking Knowledge, an Arkanoid clone featuring a Tetris-like mechanic.
Laser Defender, a scrolling shooter where I did my first boss battle.
Elven Last Stand, a Plants vs. Zombies clone featuring elves and orcs with a total of 3 levels.
Kage to Muon, a stealth-action platformer. With just 3 months of Unity experience, it was a massive undertaking and for a long time remained my most ambitious project.

Learning Unity – 3D

After a month of vacation I started the 3D course around July 2021. This one took considerably more time to finish for various reasons. Again, I extended the last 2 projects maybe with a bit of a bigger scope than I should have and also in December I took on a part-time job that cut my gamedev time in half.

And let me say that was really hard because game development takes a significant amount of time and I tend to get desperate when things move slowly, and getting closer to my 40s and savings dwindling, I couldn’t afford to waste time at all. The good I got from this was to develop real mental resilience to setbacks and obstacles, which is an invaluable soft skill to have in this line of work.

All in all I finished the 3D course close to summer 2022. Like before, here are the GitHub repositories (all MIT licenses as well):

Obstacle Course, a casual game where you move a ball by tilting the underlying plane with the mouse.
Escape From Mars, a 2.5D game where you fly a little rocket to the end of the level while dodging obstacles.
Skies Over Norville Valley, a shooting game making extensive use of Unity’s Timeline functionality.
Castles & Aliens, a tower defense game where you need to prevent encyclopedia-selling aliens from annoying King and Queen Rock.
Nightmare Night, a horror-lite FPS where you need to find your lost friends during a camping trip in the woods.

The Advanced Unity Programming Bootcamp

After finishing the 3D course I spent a couple of months sending CVs everywhere, but with no luck. I did get 2 recruiters to be interested in my profile and got 2 interviews and 2 technical tests. Those got nowhere as well.

As an aside, let me tell you that you should distrust tests that consist on taking one of the games the company has done and give it a twist of your own. Those are sent to dozens of applicants and are basically to gather fresh ideas they can use, and for free!

I felt that, even though I had a decent portfolio, it lucked something. Whenever I looked at junior profiles online they all seemed to have this really good-looking projects I lacked. The technical tests I did also left me with the impression that my programming knowledge wasn’t just on the required minimum level. This is what led me to research further ways of gaining more advanced knowledge.

There are two-fold:

You pick a topic and you write “Advanced Tutorial on X” in youtube. This is all knowledge you are going to use in your day-to-day work. If you are lucky enough you may not need to do anything else, but just devote more time on more complex projects.
You pay for a bootcamp. They are not cheap, so you really need to do your homework and make sure you go for one that will actually help you.

Some advice on finding a good bootcamp:

Check the teachers’ background. If they have actual experience in the industry and the companies they have worked for. You are looking for senior or principle developers here with vast industry experience.
Find and talk to previous students to get to know their experience.
Try to get someone high up on the bootcamp company to have a short conversation with you and talk about your interests and answer any questions you may have (including prices!).
See if you can find the course’s curriculum and check that is not overtly broad and generic, as at this point you are looking for specific advanced knowledge.

In the end is about the feeling that you get. If you trust the company, go for it. If not, look for something else.

In my case I went with Level Up, a Spanish Game Development Hub that offers many courses related to different aspects of game development and even manage their own incubation program for companies that are looking to publish their first game.

This was a before and after for me because I made substantial knowledge gains not only on Unity, but on game development in general.

The course lasted from November 2022 to April 2023 and I developed a 3D stealth-action game that is my most ambitious project to date. I spent around 20 hours a week on it for the duration of the bootcamp and spent around 100€ on assets (at the end of the day, if you want to stand out you can’t limit yourself to the same free assets everybody uses).

Kage no Shuuen on GitHub (no MIT this time, sorry) and on itch.io.

How To Get A Job In The Videogame Industry

As Rick Davidson says in his GameDev.tv course of the same name, getting a job in the industry is about 3 things:

Having value (a portfolio and/or professional experience)
Showing value (take really good care on how your portfolio/Linkedin/CV/Cover Letter look)
Proving value (performing well in the interview and technical test)

Having value

By this point, you already should have a very good portfolio to show. Remember that it is better to have less projects that are really well polished than lots of mediocre-looking ones. If you have too many, choose 3 and really give them a nice coat of paint including VFXs, nice textures and models/sprites and cool animations. In the aforementioned r/gamedev thread are a lot of links to free resources for making games.

I still need to mention a harsh reality. Industry experience trumps portfolio in most cases, specially because they demonstrate ability to work in a team, among many other industry-specific skills. But how can you get this precious experience? That is exactly what you are looking for! Well… let’s look at two possible ways.

Collaborating with an indie company

This is, working for free. It is called “working in regime of collaboration”. Or maybe you can find a paid internship. They exist out there, but are pretty hard to get due to the amount of people that apply to them. So your best bet is to look for videogame incubation programs online or even looking at Steam Greenlight. There you will find very young indie companies that are trying to get their first game done and published. They won’t give you any money because they aren’t getting any themselves, so they will tend to be understanding of tight time constraints (if you have an actual job to attend) and little mistakes. They will be more than happy for you to tackle parts of the game that they can’t get to at that moment.

One thing you need to be aware of is how feasible is that the game gets published someday (ideally in the near future). It would be a real pain for you to spend months on a game that stops production and the company dissolves for lack of funding or because of demoralization of the team and have nothing to show for it in your portfolio. You will still have it on your CV, but it will be harder for you to sell the experience in an interview. Make sure to assess the seriousness and level of commitment from everybody in the team before accepting (should they want you to collaborate with them).

Why you should (not) do Game Jams

Game jams are semi-professional contests where people gather in teams or solo to do a game in a fixed amount of time with an agreed upon theme or certain constraints. They can go from one day duration to a month or more, but the most usual jams last one weekend or 7 days. You will quickly realize that the bigger ones like GlobalGameJam or Ludum Dare straight up feel like professional competitions, with teams of 5-7 seven people with a lot of professional experience mixed in with lots of newbies. Nevertheless, you can check itch.io’s gamejam calendar to find that there is nearly one or two done every week somewhere. You can for sure find some that fit your needs. Game jams will give you insights on how it is to work in a team and for exactly this aspect they can be sold really well in interviews if you don’t have any industry experience yet. As a designer you should aim to do a game jam every 2 months. As a programmer you don’t need to do them so often but still 3-4 a year is recommendable. As an aspiring game developer looking for work you should be doing 1 a month if you have the time and aren’t working in any other projects for your portfolio. Don’t overdue them because they are very intense and stressful.

Game jams are a very good way of putting your knowledge to practice, so it is recommended to participate in one once you have at least a bit of experience. You will meet many people with 0 experience participating, and that is fine, but be mindful that if you have 0 experience it can be very stressful and frustrating for you not being able to do anything and letting everyone down.

On top of this is the inherent risk of joining randoms on the internet. It can go perfect, or it can go terribly wrong. One jam I participated in, the artist and other programmer bailed on me the day before turning the game and forced me to redo big parts of the project and finish it all at the last day, spending over 10 hours after a whole week working on it… these things can happen.

When joining a game jam:

Team up with people you know and can trust
If you don’t know anyone (most probable case at this point), talk with several people before the jam and test their commitment. Many jams have open forums weeks in advance where people look for partners.
If you can’t find anyone, participate solo. You can still get good experience you can sell, but no teamwork doesn’t look good in your CV.

You need to have always in mind that at this point the game jams are for your portfolio, so you need to get people on board with your same level of commitment and focus because you need to 100% get a finished game at the end of it because you are running against the clock. I can’t overstate this enough.

Showing value

You have a portfolio and maybe some experience. Your chances of landing an interview vary depending on how well you present all this information. There is a vast amount of resources and websites all giving good advice (for example, this one is a pretty good one on game design) so I won’t be writing much on this part. Just as general good advice:

Be always short and to the point in your CV, have it be visually appealing.
Always adapt your portfolio and CV to the position you are looking for. In your Linkedin/GitHub you can add all the rest of the information about you.
In general, the less clicks someone has to make to get the information that they need, the better. Infinite scrolling webpages are your friend.

There are more, but I think images speak louder than words. I will link my own stuff. It is far from perfect, but it did help me get a job, so I hope you can get some positive learnings from them: my Linkedin, my CV and my Portfolio.

But What About Networking?!

It is very important and something you have to have in mind from the very beginning. Even as you start learning because it takes time to build a network of people you can comfortably talk to about game development when you meet them face to face.

It is the part everybody struggles and I’m far from being good at it. I will still try to give some advice with the things I have done that I think went well or had a positive impact on me:

Go to physical events and get to talk to people there.
- Events were indie developers are showing their games for you to play are the best because you have a common talking topic and there are usually many games to choose from.
- If it’s a big event try to show up early before lots of people gather up. Once that happens the people there will tend to group up and talk with others they already know and it will be harder for you to strike up conversations. Meanwhile, when there are only a handful of individuals you might even be approached by others!
- If someone gave a talk and is still hanging around after it, go and have a chat with the person!
If you aren’t in an area with a significant game development hub, your best bet is the online world.
- look for game development telegram/mastodon/whatsapp/meetup groups, ideally a regional one close to where you live and try to have a presence there to let yourself be known. This will prove invaluable should it come to a physical event with this very same people.
- Discord groups are also great and also more numerous and with larger userbases in my experience. Try to be participative, ask questions, solve doubts. Be open. Here you can search for servers. Look for regional ones or about your engine of choice. Many indie developers create communities for their games, join them if you played their game at an event!
- Take the opportunity during events to meet people in person that you have previously spoke to online.
Connect with people in Linkedin if you have a profile. If you don’t have one, go do one because it will increase your chances of getting a job if you play it well and manage to build an interesting profile and a good network.
- Who should you connect to? Well, for starters look into your game library for your favourite games, search the credits online and look for the exact people that work in the departments you are interested in and send them a connection request where you ask them questions about it or let them know how much you appreciate their work on the game. Very rarely game developers don’t like to talk about their work, so if you can keep the conversation going with more questions you can learn a lot!
- Connect with the authors of books relating to game development that you have read.
- Very important: connect with HR managers/workers of the companies you send CVs to show interest!
- In general, try to connect with external recruiters because they tend to connect among themselves too and you can appear more often in their search results when looking for candidates.

Networking is important and can help make the difference in taking way less time into finding a job. Don’t underestimate nor neglect it.

The End of my Journey

Instead of talking about Proving Value, I’ll continue talking about my journey. The way my situation plaid out makes it so that I don’t really have useful advise about proving your value to prospective employers. I was contacted by a recruiter and I got the job without a technical test (but did 2 interviews), so what I can do is recommend this course.

After finishing the bootcamp, my teacher was so pleasantly surprised with my project that when I asked him if I could collaborate in his company, he gladly accepted. I spent from April to December and learned a lot. Because of my other part-time job it was very taxing, though. I barely had any free time and that is something that can really get you psychologically if you are not prepared, so be mindful of that if you decide to enter into a collaboration agreement with an indie team.

The game I worked on is still not announced so I can’t speak about it, but it was an overall very positive experience that enriched my portfolio enough that I started getting noticed more often in Linkedin. Specially after my boss left me a recommendation.

I have to say anyway that during this period I sent several CVs to over 60 companies around my region and not even a third of them responded. All of them rejections. I need to mention this because one of the harshest realities of the industry is that you will barely hear anything back from anyone you apply to. It is good to follow up 1-2 weeks after the fact, and forget about them if they don’t answer. Never stop sending tailored CVs to relevant job postings and don’t think about if they will get back to you or not because most probably they won’t. Don’t give up and eventually you will make a breakthrough.

Other than this always keep your profile and portfolio polished and visually pleasing. Another harsh truth is that in the end I got a job because I got lucky. A recruiter found me and concerted an interview. I happened to also love the project he was working on. The good news, though, is that the luck I had is the kind of luck that you can bring on yourself by fostering the correct environment.

That is why connecting with HR people and recruiters on Linkedin is so important.

That is why networking on Discord and Telegram is so important.

That is why keeping your portfolio and profiles up to date, nicely structured, visually pleasant and accessible is so important.

That is why bringing yourself out there is so important.

It takes for only one relevant person to notice you for your situation to take a 180° turn and get a job. So make sure that you foster this environment frequently.

And this is it, I hope you enjoyed this read. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact me and I’ll try to do my best to help you. It may take time, but I do answer always.