Senior Enterprise/Unity Developer, making the switch over to 100% Unity

Having 25+ years of experience working in the software industry, Unity has taken up most of my time in the last 5 years. I am still at the point where I can pivot my CV towards the enterprise .Net stack, with lots of web development to support.

However I really enjoy working with Unity and the challenges you face working with those type of problems, vs. the 200th custom business app. In the past few years I was lucky (I think) to have found non-game projects, but rather business applications that needed the possibilities Unity provides.

All of that work was done remotely and in a freelance capacity, an arrangement I am very happy with.

Now I am wondering if it's a viable option to keep going down that road, or if I was just lucky.

To put some numbers behind that, I usually aim for an hourly rate between 70 and 80 Euro.

Is this a viable option on the long run? At least via recruiters/placement agencies I get very little response when I look for Unity projects compared to "regular" .Net. Because of this I am concerned that this isn't a good option, or am I missing something else here? (for example jobs in those areas usually being filled through a different route)

Would be great if someone that works in that particular area could share some insights.

 

Theres a lot of jobs using unity in AR/VR and mobile, and a lot of SimVis, EdTech, AEC etc jobs.

I work in the enterprise unity sector and make a living here no problem, I am also trying to now freelance which is a lot more difficult given covid, and the closure of the collaboration forum + unity collaborate being garbage that seems mostly unused by majority of the industry out there.

So I would say its viable IF you can find contracts - they are out there just harder to find than standard .Net, web etc dev work. If your in or close to a major city like london then you can directly approach the various companies out there, and maybe find work direct which has worked out okay for me so far.

Once you find a few decent clients you can just bounce between them as they will likely regularly need work each year or every few months.

 

Thanks, that was the kind of info I was looking for. I am close to Frankfurt, so I will try to tap into that, and other cities over here. I also had a feeling that AR/VR is slowly picking up speed. I did some VR work for a couple of years, but I am sure it has evolved since then. So catching up will be something to do in the meantime.

 

If your near Frankfurt you should have no problem finding studios in need of some work, both AR/VR and other work. Theres a ton of companies that use unity in a variety of ways. Off the top of my head the types I would blanket email (With tailored emails ofcourse):

- Creative advertising agencies (These are great for unity work but the work is extremely varied - can be a pro or a con depending on how you like to work)

- Any AEC company, whether its a manufacturer, someone involved in training or logistics, it doesnt matter all these clients have been tapping into AR/VR and other standard unity platforms for visualisation purposes, and theres a lot of work within asset management, training and digital-twin related work that is great for unity gigs

- Any educational companies that offer courses or preferably make bespoke training. Anywhere that does e-learning is fair game too and are in my experience open to 3D content if they havent already started doing it. Otherwise you can still knock together a unity e-learning piece that uses SCORM or tincan API to do whatever LMS stuff you need to get the gig - ive done this a few times now so there are quite a few out there open to this option if you negotiate well.

- Universities - surprisingly a lot of universities have a ton of outsource work, whether its simply creating an interactive demo of some sort of data they are modelling in their classes, or creating visualisations for use in lectures. Theres also ample work to do on research projects, as well as a lot of start-up camps within campuses that will provide decent paid work. From experience universities are great to work with and the work is again varied.

- And then ofcourse every game company you can contact, but start with the above if your from the enterprise world so that your CV will seem relevant.

Good luck!

 

Thanks, again

I thought about universities before before, but thought that they probably just work with their own students and whatnot?

As for education, haven't thought of that before.

Great input all around and helps the decision to stay the course. I guess it's just difficult to gauge the market if most of the content online is geared towards games.

 

Unity is increasingly used for architectural apps, interior design, education (often game-focused learning) etc.
It does fall down in a couple of major places here for this kind of dev:

1. UI dev. is better than it used to be but nowhere near .net I imagine.
UI font rendering at desktop (non 4k) resolution is still poor with blurriness a common issue

2. It does not really deploy to the web! Sure it has webgl export, but in practice this is still problematic, with key platforms like Mac Safari popping up messages about energy use and the sheer size of builds.