Hey all.
I’ve been doing stuff with Unity since I was 13. I’ve learned a lot, I went from only knowing how to use the first person controller and dragging cubes around, to being able to actually write my own code in C#.
Now, I know that I don’t have even close to enough experience to consider myself proficient enough to have a career in this yet, that’d be laughable.
But, I’d very much like to. And if not specifically Unity, I want to use the experience I gain in programming with C# here to help me get a programming job doing something else. I’ve talked to a lot of people already in the industry, and they said that Portfolios and experience are worth more than a college degree when applying for a job.
So my question is, how do I go about making a portfolio that will aid me in getting a job during/after college? What kind of projects should I put in there? How do I know what is worth putting in there or not? Where do I actually put it, a folder on my desktop or what?
You should have a remote backup at the very least (e.g. Google drive, Dropbox, Skydrive, etc). As a professional programmer you will be using a version control system. Get yourself a github account if you don’t have one already, learn about version control, and use it for all code you develop. Do this sooner rather than later. Other version control systems you can lookup are CVS and SVN (and people might chime in their favourite).
Work on stuff you love. If you are passionate it will show through your work. Also consider working on an pet open source project and/or contributing to other projects in your spare time. If I were an employer looking at your resume and I saw you contribute to opensource projects in field related to the one you are interviewing for, well I’d be rather impressed to say the least.
If the opensource project is big enough your code submission will probably be put through the ringer. This will be a really good learning experience. Another benefit to the opensource thing is that it gets you working in a team (or sorts), and encourages good practices. Do you really want to show off your bad code? No, you’ll clean it up first. And no projects would accept it anyway. No more shitty named variables, no more one line of commenting per 4,000,000 lines of code, no more bad formatting, etc.
When you (eventually) have enough high quality projects to show in a gallery style you can setup a dedicated website. But if you want a career in programming working for some big company this isn’t really necessary. Just show your prospective employer your best gihub projects. I would personally setup a gallery if I had projects where the idea itself (possibly a game mechanic or art style, etc) was more the focus. But employers probably don’t have the time to download demos unless you are already shortlisted. In that case a simple demo reel would suffice.
I’ll get right on this. I’ve tried before and never had much Success. But I’ll figure it out!
Not sure where to begin for submitting stuff for an open source project. I feel like I don’t know enough to be of any help, and pretty much 100% of my programming experience is within Unity3D
When you say this, do you mean that prospective employers would be more interested in my raw code, vs actual finished projects? If I made 10 games from start to finish for example, they’d be more interested in looking at each class instead of looking at the actual finished game?
About what to put in the folder…you should really put only your BEST work. It is better to have a few things that are really good than to have lots of them, some good, some not so much. Quality counts much more than quantity, and I can guarantee that like all of us, you have some things that are best not seen, especially the earlier projects.
As far as where to put the things, it depends on your exact goal to start with. As suggested above you should have some sort of backups. I’m not doing anything open source, so I generally just keep things on my dropbox, my desktop, and I have an external drive as well. It isn’t great, but it works fine. The most important stuff is in my dropbox as that gives an external backup in case my apartment burns down.
As far as what to show employers, I’d say the project itself, as in the final result, is much more important than the underlying code. There is lots of production code that is ugly as hell, but since it works, nobody seems to care. You should try not to write such code, but sometimes crunch time comes and makes you have to do things quicker than you would like. Now, if the employer is truly interested, they might want to see said code(or not, who knows), so it is indeed a good idea to keep it available for download somewhere, even if it isn’t open source(rather GIT, etc…) This also serves as a backup. Remember to keep things as easy as possible for said people to access if you intend to go that way. Just like an online art portfolio, you would make the slideshow be simple as a click to access. So you wouldn’t expect sign-ups, passwords, etc…
Now, I don’t work in the industry(as much as I think I know about it ;)) so don’t take my advice as law. But I’m sure others can concur with my thoughts.
You might also consider contributing to the Unity Answers or a particular subforum as a stepping stone. If you don’t know an answer you will have to research it first, which is great experience in solving problems yourself. This might seem like strange advice but I recall a SO answer given by Eric Lippert who said that this was a technique he used and he was one of the designers of C# at Microsoft. He’s answered thousands of questions becuase anything he didn’t know was a learning experience.
I can’t speak for every employer or situation, but when I’ve been on an interviewing panel the first thing I wanted to do was look at some source code. Not a lot, just enough to get a feel for your coding style and competency. I would also be interested in seeing your finished games, and the two aspects should ‘agree’ with each other. Usually a panel will have a number of people on it and they will all have their own priorities.
Probably the fastest way to learn Unity. See a problem. Research until you understand the solution. Post the solution. Fix the solution as more experienced coders comment. Repeat.
You should also have complete games up on the app store or portals or the like. They don’t have to be great, but showing that you can follow the entire process through will help.
At this point your portfolio is mainly to get you into a good school. From there you can use your schools network to find summer employment and the like. Schooling and industry experience will count for more on your CV then your high school level portfolio.
I disagree. School is NOT the only path now. The only thing school has over learning yourself is connections, however, often these internships and studies are open to everyone and you just have to look.
School in my opinion, should be the back-up plan if you can’t shove your foot in someones door. Too much money for free and open knowledge, that is plastered all over the internet. I was on the same path as the OP, actually younger. However, I’m working on a professional level project with industry experienced members, remotely. All of which I’ve talked to have express some level of regret from attending school.
Keep working on yourself, a diploma will get you the interview, but will it teach you everything you need to know to succeed? No. Improve your skills until its impossible for them to ignore your resume, and save yourself 100k.
You may be right, games are not my native industry. In chemical manufacturing you don’t even get considered without a degree. I started off supervising veterans of 10+ years experience straight out of school. I’ve seen people with 40+ years experience passed up for promotion because they don’t have the right degree. I will be the first to admit that my industry is ultra conservative, and my insights may be completely wrong when it comes to making games.
First off, I’m not trying to discourage you just maybe give you an alternative path.
I’ve been programming for around 20 years, been in the game industry 10, worked on around half a dozen profitable games.
Everyone wants to make games. Companies won’t even look at you without a CS degree or experience of some type. And even if you have that, they are going to pay you around 25% less then what you can earn for the same skillset outside of the game industry.
My suggestion is decide if you really like programming or are just enthralled with making games. If it’s the former, pursue it but don’t expect to get a game industry job right away. If it’s the latter, then this is only going to be a hobby for you.
Now, all of that said the best thing you can do is to make a game that’s playable. Start with something reasonable and actually finish it. Do it with friends if you can. But actually go through the process of making a complete game or two while you are going to school. It doesn’t have to be a great game, it just has to be one you actually finished and it’s not just some idea you never followed through on.
I strongly suggest taking some schooling centered on CS. It’s true experience is often valued more then a degree, but the easiest way to get that experience is to get a CS degree that will get you in the door to get the experience. You need something more then just making a couple of hobby games in school to be a developer. Those games you make while in school will distinguish you from a lot of other CS grads, but it’s not a replacement for a degree.
I started without a CS degree, but I did it by starting my own company and then leveraging that to learn what I missed from not going to college. Bottom line there just isn’t any shortcut.
As far as general skills to be learning. Best advice is to focus on becoming a good developer first. Game specific experience is not really going to help you that much, outside of showing you can actually complete something. Good developers tend to be able to learn new stuff fairly quickly. When I’m hiring people my focus is on do they have solid development skills, do they work well in a team, and have they shown they can produce value. Which comes back around to why I say go make a complete game. Making something end to end (with friends if you can) is the best way to get some of that experience before hitting the job market.
