What timing... I never even thought about how busy the hiring person would be. I'm currently working on my portfolio to better my chances of job hunting after I graduate university in a month. Thanks from a hopeful digital content producer!!
Hey I’m cool with any excuse to use the little game dev because she’s probably my second favorite reoccurring EC character after Walpole or the heck snek
@@Yanramich The heck snek is a little green snake that shows up whenever the narrator says heck, if you'd like to try and spot it there's some especially hecc snek filled videos of theirs I can direct you to if you'd like
Software engineer here, comments aren't what's important. Your code needs to be well written, self explanatory, with variable and method names that make sense, and require no comment. I don't need this comment: // This makes the object look at the target. For this line: transform.rotation = Quaternion.LookAt(target.position - transform.position, Vector3.up); I get it, I have eyes, and years of experience at what you're trying to get a job in. Have a description of the class, some of the fields as well (unless they're obvious, like turnRadius in class Ship). More than that, and your code starts looking messy, I have to wade through comments to see HOW you're doing some of the things you describe. After all, assessing *the quality of your code* is what I need your portfolio for, not the verbosity of your comments.
Agreed. Comments are not for explaining how, but for explaining why. Information like design decisions that cannot be conveyed by self explanatory symbol names alone. What is the intended purpose of this class within the larger context? Why did you decide to implement that method in this specific way, rather than some other way that is perhaps more obvious? What trade-offs did you consider when writing this code, like simplicity, performance, flexibility or some combination of these or other traits?
Absolutely, comment should generally cover what you'd need to tell someone if you were going over it in person. In this context, "Hey, look at this thing I did" comments are probably reasonable - but be careful, highlighting something trivial doesn't do you any favors.
Sure, variable and method names need to be self explanatory, however comments are also very important. You dont need to comment every line (which in fact would be counterproductive), but having documentation for most of your (non-trivial) methods and classes makes it a lot easier for others (and yourself in the future) to understand the code, reduces the time required for maintenance and makes it easier to find the right location in the code. To support this i also like to add single-lined headline comments for longer methods, that basically describe what the following block is responsible for. Because let's be honest, as soon as the programm becomes non-trivial and you didnt work on one aspect of it for a couple weeks or months, you dont have a clue anymore what you did there. So having no comments means you will find the correct location a lot slower, and also need to think about some of the reasons for decisions you made again. Good documentation is a plus point. Anybody who claims differently has no clue or never worked on a project with multiple editors and more than a couple hundred / thousand lines. That said, "good" doesnt necessarily mean a lot of text, which is more often than not counterproductive.
A lot of this stuff also depends on where you live or want to work at. In Finland, much, much more frequently most of the game studios are looking for a game artist, that can do 3D models, textures, rig and animate as well as do 2D concepts, marketing materials and UI art. It's pretty crazy. Here, you _have_ to be multitalented and absolutely show as much variety in skill in your portfolio as you can, if you're an artist. Also, a quick tip for (3D) artists. If you find an interesting game studio you would like to work at, don't mind if they don't have an open position. First, research their games and their art style, especially their newest project. Come up with a single prop, character, environment diorama or similar. Take just 1-3 days, but make it as great, optimized and close to their art style as possible. This is called an "artifact". Send an open application to the company and put a link to your artifact you just made. This will show them that you can take the initiative, copy their art style and are clearly able to start doing productive work on day 1, if they would hire you. Game studios usually stay away from people, who would require weeks to get up to speed and be able to start doing something productive. Sending an artifact with your application is HUGE. Try it out people. Especially if your portfolio isn't that great yet. Good luck.
A piece of advice I heard for artists (not my discipline but could potentially be extrapolated to all) was to never include assessment pieces from studios you've applied to as part of the your portfolio, even if you're proud of it. The reason being is that studios begin to recognise where applicants have applied before by how oddly similar a lot of portfolios appear - and if other studios didn't accept that applicant for whatever reason, they start to think maybe they shouldn't hire them either. So keep all your work independent from outside sources.
My financial consultant Wray Thomas Cooper Jr, I watched his interview online where he was featured and reached out to him afterwards, He has been of immense help to my portfolio since then.
Just what I needed! my college degree is conditional based on how good of a portfolio I have for my bachelors in fine arts along with my grades. I just had a famous artist say they liked an animation I made and they were shocked the school rejected it. She said why this stuff is in right now, Thats the problem with art degrees at times super subjective.
What matters the most is not portfolio, but having friends in right places who could recommend you and get you through a meeting set up. Even better If they have enough leverage and can be trusted enough to actually give you that job. Those friends are the only ones who truly matters.
I'm surprise the artist didn't took the oportunity presented at 6:45. I mean, we are talking about being profetionals, so I guess they had to resist the easy joke urge.
Professional game dev here. One thing I would add is that if you worked in team projects (which is probably the case for most of you, and if you haven't worked in a team, you really really really need to do that ASAP, since being able to work in teams is often even more important than what you can make), be sure to differentiate what you did from what the other people in the team did. Go farther than just saying what your role was. For example, if a hiring manager is looking at a game on your portfolio and the character art is incredible, but the background art is mediocre, and you just say you were an artist on the team, even if you did the amazing character work, they won't know if it was you or a different artist on the team that made those amazing characters, so be very specific about what you personally did, so they know what to focus on and can feel more confident when calling you in for an interview.
*Tip: Put your contact information AND page number (eg: page 1/2) in the footer* 5:32 In case they misplace one of your pages (eg: the "front page with your contacts"), they STILL can contact you AND can see that one page is missing. AND any decent text processor (eg: MS Word) can let you design a footer & automatically place it on every page, meaning less work for you. (Google how your particular word processor does this)
Hey extra credits, I don't usually watch the videos that aren't history, I am a history fanatic, however I saw this. I needed this. I'm currently in highschool and when I'm older I want to go to a very hard-to-get into school. I am building a portfolio on Google website but man, this helps sooo much with the design. Really, thank you sooo much for this, it is appreciated by me and many more. Have a nice day!
I'm saving up to finally be able to afford a website and get a professional portfolio. You need patience, man, and get used to rejection ("Your style doesn't fit us uwu sowwy")
@@Meloncov use artstation AND your own website. keeping artstation as the endless dump of material while your website is nice and clean. or so i have been told anyways.
@@profwaldone Nah. I personally don't put anything I don't consider portfolio-worthy on Artstation (flooding people with mediocre work isn't gonna help you any), but if you do, just set up a portfolio folder and send a link to that. I'm always happier to see an Artstation link than a personal website when I'm reviewing portfolios.
As a model, I found this useful. I recently did a photo shoot as a mermaid, which was a first for both me and the photographer, and she submits her photos for publication so I'm likely to have something more substantial for my portfolio very soon. Thank you for providing this guide, and for pointing out that it can be adapted to any creative endeavor.
There's a reason a lot of artists use Artstation. At the end of the day, if you are applying to be something like a 3D environment artist, you're not going to be judged on your ability to do graphic design or website design. With stuff like Sketchup/Marmoset, there's less pressure to be able to take a lot of crazy screenshots. You should still take some beauty shots(especially since texture quality can take a dip with those due to compression, file size limits etc.) but having a fully viewable 3D asset is always nice and shows you got nothing to hide. I will tell fresh grads though, to not pad out their portfolios with assignment work. Especially when your friends are doing it. It'll become obvious that it is your assignment work cause sometimes we get multiple applicants with suspiciously similar subject matter and we see that you all graduated from the same place. If you have nothing but assignment work, then you look bad compared to your peers who did some extra personal work. We will also compare the absolute living shit out of all of you because you all did the same thing. Also chances are some of that assignment work is pretty bad cause you did it while you are still learning and probably isn't fully reflective of your ability. I know there's a lot of anxiety and feeling like you're not good enough when you first start out, but padding a portfolio isn't a good way to go about it. While ideally a course should give a bit of freedom for a final project so that everybody ends up with a few more unique pieces.... it doesn't hurt to take a bit of time after graduation to work on a few portfolio pieces. It just takes one really good piece to get someone.
As an animator in AAA game dev, the answer for 'how much to put into a portfolio' (demo reel), 1-2 min tops, and DO NOT have offensive and/or lyric-ridden background music. Put your best work first, but save 1 good clip for the last clip as well. Keep a good taste in their mouth at the end of the video.
Thank you. I'm graduating in a month and have actually created a digital portfolio with Wix. I'll probably update it after school when I have a little more time.
If you're not familiar with them already, I highly recommend Marshall McGee for anyone interested in learning how to do sound work. It's a very interesting channel that talks about sound design while either trying to re-create existing sounds or make entirely new ones.
If you haven't, consider watching their existing sound design videos ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-CKgHrz_Wv6o.html ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-0mCdd-6Bxo4.html
It is nice to have any tips or help from people who deal with this day to day. I have a college that has 3 classes all about portfolio. I have a website and reel, but I need to clean it up more and see what my limits are to my reel. This does help even though this was a small video.
If you're going for an art role, please, please just use Artstation. Making your own website can go wrong in a lot of ways, from technical issues to annoying design. And even if everything is perfect, it's not going to win you any points over Artstation. Plus, Artstation makes it easy to keep an eye on artists that we like, but for whatever reason we don't want to hire just this second.
@@loaf5398 Some context is useful, but if you think you need more explanation than will fit with Artstation's format, you have too much text in your portfolio. By all means include process sketches and so on, but no one wants to read an essay (and I'm speaking from direct experience here; I have reviewed portfolios of potential hires for an AAA studio).
I’m currently trying to build up more work for my portfolio so I can have more high quality work to show for when I wanna get a job in industry. I’m using artstation mostly because it’s an easy one to use, but I must admit that creating my own Wix website or equivalent doesn’t sound like a bad idea.
Just stick with Artstation. Please. Get Artstation Pro if you want to be fancy, but it's not necessary. Creating your own site adds nothing, and can go wrong in a lot of ways. -signed, someone who has reviewed applicants' portfolios for a AAA studio
My initial composer portfolio was exactly what they described here - a series of clips from existing games with my original music over them. And like they said, very important to be explicit about which part of the presentation is original compared with what isn't.
Yep I made one for my level design job. Make sure you show the best of your work. Either make it be a video of you playing your game but show you having fun. And like they said show your best work.
I've found Instagram a good platform, but, if on too long, there's no need to search for the website. This phenomena seems to be the nature of the arts and entertainment business for right now, seeing that the cellular is slowly replacing the computer.
All those "I shouldn't need to mention this but..." are actually very important. The first few times you assemble your CV and portfolio the mistakes slip in. So double-check, get a friend to double-check and finally .... SPELLCHECK! I honestly wish you the best anywhere you apply.
This is why I'll never get anywhere, the competitiveness of these industries scares me from trying to improve because I'll probably never be good enough to get a job anyway and just end up having to do something else... *Sigh* Not really complaining, games deserve the best people working on them. Just felt the need to vent my sadness to an unfeeling comment section.
Having just left my job of almost 8 years, I should really make a portfolio showing some of the big stuff I did there. Thanks for the kick in the pants to get going on it!
Think of each page of a portfolio as a cost; every time you add a page you are directly making the portfolio worse - UNLESS what is on that page is so good that what it presents can pay for the cost of that page and then some. I review dozens of portfolios a year - which isn’t very many by industry standards - and I still get tired of bloat. A four-page portfolio of genuinely brilliant concept art sells me on a concept artist better than a twelve-page portfolio with six great works, or a forty-page portfolio with thirty great pages. It speaks to confidence too; if you send me four pages I know that you are confident enough in those pages that you are willing to make or miss the interview on those alone.
Also, if you have multiple fields, mention it on the resume and at the interview, but specialise the portfolio to your field. Irrelevant pages are dead pages, and cost you directly.
👏👏👏 Man this was a good episode! so much good info and it was kept consistent with the idea of game design. Especially fond of the idea of making a specialized portfolio for different jobs.
Question: What if what I feel I'm good at is writing with a bit of 3D design work on the side? How do I pitch that in a portfolio? If text should be used a little as possible, how and what can I show to indicate script writing (like dialog, flavor text, game lore and so on) is what i want to be doing while 3D modeling is something I CAN do in addition to it?
Honestly not sure I agree with the commented code part. If your code needs commenting it generally indicates code smell or bad naming conventions. Good code explains itself. Sure, sometimes a specific loop or check might need some commenting to make it clear what it does, and public api's should always be documented as other developers might use the compiled libraries and thus need to know what is what, but in general you should always keep your comments to a minimum.
Later in life, I want to see what people can do to create awesome ideas since we can learn from past mistakes and improve on those ideas. Just think about how games, art, and design would grow in our lifetime and for future generations.
Thank you for this. It took me a great while to get into my field and I got A LOT of bad advice in terms of building a resume and a portfolio. While I did get into my field now am probably going to use this if/when I start looking to move.
Probably. Your portfolio is still going to be processed by a person with little time on their hands, who knows the field, and is still supposed to give them reason to hire you, while not giving them reason to ignore you. The material you present is different, but it's still the same procedure. Focus on moments you'd want the audience to remember, your strongest dialogue, best developed worlds, most interesting scenarios, or highest climaxes.
Perfect timing, I was just thinking about how to pitch my stuff to companies. Quick question though : could most of this apply for a comic book artist & writer portfolio ?
"..build your portfolio for the position you want." Bingo. The same should be true of your resume as well, which is your first foot in the door. The achievement-oriented resume is best for this. For background, make a list in short paragraphs of 10-20 achievements from your history, and include a results statement IN BOLD at the end of each paragraph. My personal achievements list has items in electronics assembly, supervision, quality assurance, production control, and technical writing. So when I would apply for a quality-related job, I'd pick 5 of my achievements that looked good for the quality position I would be applying for. Ditto for any of the other areas. The nice thing about the achievement-oriented resume is it show what you HAVE DONE, plus any positive result of your work. Unlike the generic resume, in which you list several areas you have experience/background in, with no clue as to how well or how poorly you did said work. Years ago, some of us on line were discussing resumes, and I mentioned the achievement-oriented one to some friends, and posted my tech writing one as an example. It's nice when you have editors and award-winning authors tell you it's a fantastic style of resume, so keep that in mind.
Could you do an episode on reviving (after dyeing in a game and respawning slightly before you died)? Me and my co-workers recently got into a... flavorful discussion about whether after the player respawns we should change the movement of the AIs they just fought so it wouldn’t be the same pattern every time. We also discussed wether or not, after respawning in the same part enough times we should include a “item drop” that will help the player go forward. It was even shared that we should lower the level of the AIs (without player knowledge) so its easier to pass. Nevertheless I would like your take on this. Thanks
Love this and I am going to use this for fine tweaking my portfolio. Just wondering, why didn't you include writers in the rapid specifics section? Seems like you provided tips for the other big pieces of game design so I just noticed that writing wasn't there
Making a site with a CMS (content management system) like Wordpress is always the way to go, but I don't recommend it for people who are just starting since using a CMS is a huge time investment at the start (and can become a huge money waste if things don't go well).
(FULL DISCLAIMER THIS MY OPINION I'M NOT criticizing ANYONE) I'd recomend to make the portfolio with CSS, Java Script and HTML for those who know how to program games with C++, C# or any other language and with that you can demonstrate that you have skills for back and front programing which might spread the word about your work as a programer.
Also keep in mind that Github is setup as a code repository, not a portfolio, so while it's useful for devs prepping to interview you, it's probably worth setting up a Github Pages site as your portfolio to act as a landing page. This way you can highlight the stuff you're proud of, and I don't waste time hunting through the irrelevant bits (like a repo full of Dockerfiles, config dotfiles, and similar)
Honestly I'd go as far as to say github is probably the wrong place to direct people, its a fantastic tool, but a terrible demonstrator platform. Remember often people filtering the candidate pile are looking for a reason to throw your application out, not looking to pick the golden example to recommend you forwards, and day to day stuff will include the sorts of understandable boring issues that give them just that. Besides, few people are going to take the time to sort out what ratio of a project you did if you link them collaborative works as well, so instead show off polished examples of what you do well, instead of the wider snapshot.
And when you get to the interview part, remember that its you looking for work, not just them hiring. Dont be picky, but be interested. Ask questions. Thats true through your work too. Ask questions. Not any questions, like, How do I do this? Your employer does not want to spend time doing your job. But DO ask questions like, how do you want it, and which one you prefer. You have to take responsibility on the quality of the end result, the timetable, and the budget. Yes, you dont make the decisions, but when there are promotion opportunities, only the ones capable of taking those responsibilities are promoted anyway. Show it from day one. And if your employer does not keep his eye on talent, you are sitting in a dead-end job in a company that wont be there much longer. Keep your head down, get good references but look for a better place.
What about story writers? You can't exactly send in a entire draft. either they will just throw it out without giving it a look, or, if they are roofless enough, just straight-up steal it. I know you should always try and copyright your work, but that isn't exactly cheap. What would be the best approach for them?
