Hello, I’m on track to finish my degree in game development this autumn and am focusing on projects to fill out a portfolio. My goal is to work for a small-ish indie studio, or find some level of success as a solo indie developer or part of a two person team (everybody has already told me that’s impossible, I know it’s stupid).

A lot of the career advice out there seems to be focused on getting into a larger game studio. Does anybody have any advice on how to position and sell yourself to small indie studios?

My school projects have mostly been in Unreal using blueprints. The one class I had using C++ in Unreal was supposed to focus on graphics engines and was literally just copying and pasting code from tutorials, and I honestly didn’t learn very much at all because nothing was explained and the reading was never related to the work. I’m currently planning a 2D side-scroller using C++ to tighten up that gap, and planning on making everything for the game myself to appeal to the indie studio scene. I have another C++ project I’ve been working on creating a prototype for what is intended to become a mobile game, but more of a tabletop/card game than a video game.

Any advice, thoughts, experiences, anecdotes, words of wisdom, or fortune cookie fortunes would be greatly appreciated!