Hello Everyone,

I'm currently in school for game design and was looking for some insight on creating my portfolio. When creating a portfolio is it best to have it focused on your area of interest (programming, design, level design, etc) or to showcase a lot of your different work? Also I'm looking for some advice on becoming more experienced with the different game engines. For school we've used Unreal Engine so that's where most of my experience is. Whats another good engine to practice with? I've been curious about Unity but not sure where to start with it. Does anyone have any tips or links to guides for some of the other engines?

Thank you,

Bethie

Decide which job you are going for, the ones you listed are very different.

If you're going for a programming job, a portfolio is less critical but can be nice. It should demonstrate that you know how to program and have an interest in games. It is best to have one or more completed games, even if the games are simple. Showcase your best work.

If you're going for a level design job, it is best to have working games showing your level design, preferably with videos documenting why you made the choices that you did. Showcase your best work.

Unreal and Unity are both great game engines, the experience you've got with Unreal is sufficient.

It is good to show of a range of capabilities, but specializing is very important in this industry. Your portfolio should really focus on your area, programming, art, design, sound, etc.. but you also should have a specialty within that, like for me I'm mostly interested in Ai programming, but I included most the other things I've done in the past. Oh I also wanted to say because I'm primarily a unity developer I redid my web portfolio as a unity webGL build, it's a great way to show off an example.

On 11/18/2019 at 4:14 AM, Bethie said:

I've been curious about Unity but not sure where to start with it.

Unity has a lot of books for beginners. You can go to Amazon and look for unity. I like this book: Unity in Action: Multiplatform game development in C# 2nd Edition

You can find a lot of courses here:

www.lynda.com
www.udemy.com
www.digitaltutors.com
www.pluralsight.com
www.3dmotive.com
www.skillshare.com
www.cgcookie.com
www.coursera.org
www.packtpub.com

On 11/17/2019 at 4:14 PM, Bethie said:

I've been curious about Unity but not sure where to start with it. Does anyone have any tips or links to guides for some of the other engines?

With technical questions, your best bet is to use the For Beginners forum. https://www.gamedev.net/forums/forum/71-for-beginners/

THIS forum is for career advice, like career preparation, choosing/prepping for college/uni, portfolio questions, and like that there.

I had posted this in the beginners forum originally. I'm not sure how it got tagged as game career development and business, I think it got moved during the site update? Thank you for your response, I'll definitely address any future questions like this in the appropriate forum.

Bethie said:

I had posted this in the beginners forum originally. I'm not sure how it got tagged as game career development and business, I think it got moved during the site update? Thank you for your response, I'll definitely address any future questions like this in the appropriate forum.



It was moved to Career Development because you initially wrote: "was looking for some insight on creating my portfolio. When creating a portfolio is it best to have it focused on your area of interest (programming, design, level design, etc) " - that is a Career question. Feel free to ask portfolio questions here. Feel free to ask technical questions (tools, how-to, etc.) in For Beginners.