Hi everybody,

I'm looking to make a transition into doing game development (preferably as a gameplay programmer). I've been updating my portfolio and resume to show off some of the indie game dev work that I've done and I was wondering if anybody could provide any pointers / feedback on them:

my portfolio is @ david-d-zimmermann.com

my resume is @ david-d-zimmermann.com/resume_ddz_141109.html

Thanks in advance for your time!

Here are my thoughts, from the perspective of a hiring manager:

• I personally don't find "summary" or "objective" statements useful in any way. Others will have differing opinions, but that aside your summary is buzzword soup. I think it makes a damaging initial first impression.
• Your actual work experience is really, really lacking. Your descriptions of the tasks you performed are overly general and don't give me a good sense of the skills you bring to the table. You don't need to list everything, but you should list something specific. If you get past the initial screen and into an interview, you're going to be asked about the specifics anyway so you need to be able to communicate them clearly and concisely. If you can't do that on a resume you won't likely be able to do it well in person, under pressure.
• I think you should give more focus to your experience than your personal projects. Personal projects and portfolios are good to have, and can be interesting, but they are not generally going to be the thing that sells you. Potential employers want the most information about what you do in a work setting. Side projects and game jam participation say that you are in to games, which is excellent, but they will rarely be looked at in great detail.

I'm sorry to say that I wouldn't immediately bin your resume, but even if I were looking to hire an entry-level gameplay programmer you'd be towards the bottom of the stack and would need to survive a pretty harsh phone screen before I brought you in.

Your portfolio site does a better job, but there are some minor polish issues (several of the "play at" links are not links at all). Although it does not bother me any, you may want to consider removing your projects that have political connotations, even if they are satirical, as politics can be a polarizing issue. My biggest concern with your portfolio is that none of the projects I looked at (I didn't look at all of them) were in C or C++, and none of them seemed to have source code I could look at.