I feel like every day I see juniors posting about how they're a really amazing creative who has an excellent body of work working on cool little games, and how you should hire them because of that.
They'll mention the independent projects they've worked on by name (which only a handful of their close circle people would ever likely have heard about), and then tack on "by the way I'm looking for work and you should hire me", and then they don't provide any form of contact information or even a portfolio where anyone can learn more or take action to hire them.
I cannot stress enough: make a portfolio. You want a source you can link someone that concisely compiles the work that you have done, overviews the projects you have contributed to, and outlines the expertise you have. If you don't have a portfolio it's incredibly unlikely you will find work just shouting into the void about how good you or your work is. No one will implicitly know you, and no one can implicitly be expected to know the games you have contributed to.
Sorry like...that's just where we're at. If you want work, you need to make yourself a portfolio. You need a place where someone who might be hiring and happens to come across you can visit and say "oh I can actually view what you're talking about and it sounds like you do know what you're doing". If you don't have an avenue to do that then there's very little point in advertising yourself in the first place, because you're just making people jump through hoops to try and hire you. Make it dirt simple and as easy as possible to show off everything you've done.
People don't just make portfolios for fun; they make them because they work.
The Empress of Aeser: Act I will be available to play during #SteamNextFest!
About the Empress of Aeser
The Empress of Aeser is a visual novel with light point 'n click puzzles and lots of choices. You start out with the option between four personalities, which will influence how Tetrine grows as a person later in the game.
Lie, show restraint, be diplomatic or audacious. There are many dialogue options.
Solve light inventory object puzzles and explore a library of strange books.
Interact with newspaper articles and uncover the secrets of the city, once the capital of an old and dark Empire.
Tetrine begins in an existing relationship. It is already fraught. Will you repair the damage or start anew?
Other scenes are told from the perspective of other characters. Meet Sabina, a sheltered artist, Tell, a farm girl who has already encountered the dark secrets of the city and Kalevel, Tetrine's employer and an ancient demon.
A dump of some things. I briefly mentioned how I had rewrote the game in Godot 4. During the transition I decided to give up on pure 2D and just make a 3D game that looks 2D... so in my own words, pearlessential is now a Psuedo2D game. Here are some captures from early in the transition.
- Rockstar announces in-person work mandates for all employees (a 'soft layoff' that will force some staff to quit, which likely means that actual layoffs are forthcoming)
In 2023 6,000 games workers were laid off. Now in 2024 over 10,000 workers have been laid off, and there's still 10 months to go.
Not to be hyperbolic, but I think this is perhaps the worst year for video games ever if we're measuring by number of layoffs.
THE BEEKEEPER'S PICNIC - a cosy cottagecore Sherlock Holmes point and click game!
It is the 1920s, and in the sleepy Sussex village of Fulworth, an elderly beekeeper (who is definitely NOT the world's greatest detective... any more) is trying to arrange a pleasant clifftop picnic for his lifelong companion. The only problem is that a series of pesky mysteries keep getting in the way.
You can now download the 'Proof of concept' demo! A short taster with a few locations, characters and game mechanisms I created to test out some ideas.
Follow this blog for continuing updates on development of the game!
Progress continues on the combat systems with a lot of new animations being added into the build to ensure that it feels nice and responsive when using the Unicorn abilities. In this combat test you'll see a lot of these newly tweaked features:
- Hit stops have been added to give sword strikes more impact when making contact with an enemy
- A unique deflect animation will play when a block is perfectly timed
- Sparks occur when Unicorn's sword strikes walls and other objects
- The dodge counter is a unique sword strike that occurs when you attack while quickstep dodging
There's a whole bunch of additional moves and animations that we didn't manage to show in this particular clip, but I think things are at the point where we need to give the VRmin AI a little more attention so that they can start utilising more of their move sets to make the combat more varied and interesting.