My main issues are living in a country (Hungary), where a college degree would be almost mandatory for any dev jobs (mainly due to HR being dumb), also I'm disabled so my only job opportunity is a crappy government program one that pays half the minimum wage for full-time employment (!!!!!!), but this is the only no-12 hour shift and no-6AM starting option (most of which are also like 60+km from me, which means I would have to wake up even earlier, which isn't good for my health at all). however, not only a pay is very low, but also the 7AM starting is beginning to be way too much for my health. I'm already on sleeping pills to try to make myself fall asleep before midnight (almost impossible), and I also don't have the money to get my meds changed to something better at a private doctor. Of course no disability benefits, because "I'm not disabled enough", and otherwise I would just spend it on luxury cars (a common pre-2010 myth in Hungary was that disabled people could buy brand new Mercedeses).
I primarily have experience with game development (mainly from open source stuff), but without a long list of corporate experience, I have an even harder chance. I could work at other places too (I have some audio development experiences too), but would like to stay far away from web development.
Regularly attend game-jams, conferences and meetups. Share your little games there, talk about games and most importantly, make friends.
The word friends is important. I dont want to use the term "networking", because thats an advice thats given around a lot, but it never really turns well - if youre only networking, then it makes the whole encounter about " i want something from you, im here so you will know me so i can get something from it". Thats not how you land a good gamedev job. Why should they care? Theres so many people who approach them just to "network" and talk about themselves, it gets tiring, and counter-productive.
So, get to know people, make games for fun, and eventually you will end up in an amazing indie studio with friends, where you will love your job, instead of getting your passion sucked out of you in a corp.
Im now working in an amazing small indie studio, and i got the job becuase they approached me that they are starting it and would like to have me there. I wasnt sure from where I know them, but it turned out that we met on one of the gamejams, and the story they told me was kind of sweet.
"Well, we were working in the same room as your team. We started working, you started brainstorming. Then went for a beer. You got back late, slept, started working for a while, and then later again went for a beer, while everyone was still working. The whole time, it looked like youre having more of a casual party than a serious working environment. And then you won the gamejam with an amazing game."
That is, unless you really love making games, and arent in it just for the money.
Not OP, but I was wondering if you had any advice on how to find when and where these kind of events take place? I'm a first year game design student at a very small institution (our class is just 9 students!), so I'd love to make some friends outside of my fellow students.
Here in Czech we've had a game-jam as a optional course we could take for credits once per year, and a game-jame before a game-dev conference in our city. I've also convinced our teacher (I was also studying Master's game development), to make a public onsite event at school for Ludum Dare, because on-site events are the best and it's usually not that hard to organize it at school, assuming you can convince the teachers.
Other than that, there's usually at least several different gamejams happening at the same time almost every weekend, just take a look at https://itch.io/jams . They also usually have some kind of online chatroom/website/Discord server where you can look for team members, but then it will probably just be online. Or maybe you will get lucky and find someone from your city to cooperate with!
Another thing would be gamedev meetups, if you have some game studios in your city, some of them may be orginizing meetups.
Thanks for this. :) I dunno why, but the way you worded things here made it clear what I needed to use in a search engine, and I've now got a couple of promising options. One is a lot smaller, but is specifically for people working in games, and the other is much larger for the digital tech industry as a whole (but includes digital creatives). Both have events every couple of months.
And doing some online gamejams looks like a great idea too. Thank you for the suggestion! :)
depends on where you're located. here in Seattle we have IGDA Seattle and Seattle Indies putting on events every week.
I'm in south west UK, unfortunately, so Seattle is a bit far to go. I'm right in the middle of a geographic area with four universities running game design degree courses, two of which are in a city with a few indie studios operating. (Sadly the biggest studio in the area was shut down by its parent company last summer - lots of alumni from my university lost their jobs.) So I'm genuinely not sure if there are no events happening, or I'm just not searching properly!