Introduction¶
Estimated time to read: 14 minutes
A game developer portfolio is a collection of materials that showcase a game developer's skills, experience, and accomplishments. It is typically used by game developers to demonstrate their abilities to potential employers, clients, or partners, and may include a variety of materials such as:
- A resume or CV: This should highlight your education, work experience, and skills relevant to game development.
- Examples of your work: This can include demos, prototypes, or completed games that you have developed or contributed to. It's a good idea to include links to any online versions of your work, as well as screenshots or video trailers.
- A portfolio website: Many game developers choose to create a website specifically for their portfolio, which can include additional information about their skills and experience, as well as links to their work.
- Blogs, articles, or other writing: If you have written about game development or related topics, you may want to include these in your portfolio to show your knowledge and expertise.
- Testimonials or references: Including positive feedback from clients or colleagues can help to demonstrate the quality of your work.
Overall, a game developer portfolio should be designed to demonstrate your abilities and accomplishments in a clear and concise way, and should be tailored to the specific needs and goals of the person or organization you are presenting it to.
Building a portfolio is not only about you, it is about making the life easier of the ones interested on you by giving insights if they should hire you, follow you or anything else. In order to make people understand you, you have to know yourself better.
Who are you, what you excel and what do you enjoy doing?¶
In your portfolio, you will have to express yourself in a way that others can understand who you are, and it can be challenging for some. In order do help you discover who you are, what you excel, and what do you really enjoy doing. I will be briefly vague here to point some emotional support and reasoning to help you answer the question. If you are clear about that, please skip this entire section. Here goes a small amount of advices I wish I have heard when I was young.
Note
The above image links to a very good reference to understand the drives that you should be aware while taking decisions on your future career. Visit it.
You are a complex being and hard to define. I know. It is hard to put yourself in a frame or box, but this process is relevant to make the life of the others to evaluate if they want more you or not. If for some reason a person is reading your portfolio, it means that you are ahead of the others, so you must respect their time and goals while they are reading your content.
What you do, do not define what you are, you can even work with something you dont love as long it is part of a bigger plan. Given that, you have to know how to differentiate yourself from your work while respecting your feelings. The sweet spot is when you mix who you are with what you do, and you have nice feelings about it. But this can be hard to achieve and require maturity to mix things. If you dont have a clear understand of those aspects of yourself, you will be subjected to be exploited by bad companies and managers.
It is totally fine try to excel some job you are not passionate. You just have to find means to make your time doing it as enjoyable as possible. In the end of the journey it will slowly become something you can be proud of, and you will become a different person than the one you are now. Understanding this kind of mentality will help you endure more and be more resilient to problems.
Keep track of your progress towards your goal. First of all, have a clear goal, so you can build a path to it. Otherwise, any path would sound just like any other apathetic path. Having a clear goal will make your path shine and easy to choose. It will help you in difficult moments where you feel uncomfortable by being just a small piece of a machinery. You will be able to act as part of machine while you need to achieve your goal as a necessary step.
Focus on always keep track on your evolution on your journey to excellence. Don't compare too much yourself to the others, everyone is facing a different journey and everyone took different paths in their career that probably you didn't have the option to chose in the past. But you cannot be uncritical either, you have to analyse your progress and check if your current path is making you life good, you have to take a decision to change the plan or even the goal with the new information you learned through the current path you are pursuing.
In other point of view, you wont start your career as senior developer, so you have to build your own path. Making mistakes is part of the process, and that is the reason you will be gradually exposed to big things. You should accept yourself, don't push too hard, and do some basic stuff. Just accept the challenges of doing something not fancy, but relevant to build your career.
Define and state your mission and goal¶
- Are you a generalist or a specialist type?
- What position you are looking for?
- What kind of person you want to become?
Gather information¶
In order to build a good portfolio, you will need to gather information about yourself and your work. In the process you will discover yourself. It will feels like looking to a mirror for the first time.
If you didnt published yot your projects on itchio, github, or any other platform, now it is a good moment for doing it. Pay attention that if you are going to share your code publicly, you have to avoid sharing content that do not belong to you. In other words, avoid copyright infringements.
Proof of your accomplishments¶
It is a good practice to always take screenshots, use web archive or any means to prove what you are stating. Some games got lost in time, they die or become unavailable in the long term.
Personal advice
In my case, we developed a very successful game in the past, and because of some problems with investors and judicial dispute, we had to shut down the game. But it was one of the most successful games in that year, it was nominated to Unity Awards and it was the most downloaded racing game. The only things that I can showcase now are print-screens, recorded videos and web-archive pages. So it is something that can make you survive the questions.
Videos, photos, or lightweight web builds¶
A good way to express your work is to show it in a form of videos, or photos. If your game is small enough to be embedded, or you can strip the most relevant part of it and built for web(webgl, wasm etc), try to publish the relevant part of it online, but do not over-do it, because it will take too much time to craft a good interaction.