What should I expect?

Hi, I'm new to these forums, hopefully this is the right subforum for this, I wasn't sure between this or the employment one. I'm currently a student working on a degree in Game/Simulation Engineering and have taken it on myself to learn Unity outside of class (the program only spends 1 class on it in the final semester). I have about 1.5 years of experience with Unity at this point and have completed a couple of projects with a couple others partially completed. My background is more programming heavy knowing the typical languages plus the web stuff with about a decade of experience. I'm not a great artist by any means but I can use Maya and 3dsMax well enough to make my own simple assets/animations for scenes though you probably don't want me making the main character, and I have a good grasp of the art pipeline as I mostly use my own assets in my projects. I've got about 5 years experience with 3d modeling, plus I'm competent with Photoshop/GIMP for the 2d stuff (though that experience doesn't really translate to artistic talent).

I think I'm good enough with Unity at this point that I'm confident I could start taking on jobs, and this would be ideal as I could get paid while getting more experience. However, my school schedule keeps me pretty busy and relocating isn't an option until school is complete. There are few jobs in this area that have a demand for Unity or technology in general. I was hoping to find part time remote jobs on the various job sites but the vast majority of what I see posted is looking for relocation+full time, there is little outsourced contract work. Have I just been looking in the wrong places or is this reflective of the current job market? The places I've been looking are LinkedIn, Dice, and Indeed.

Last, this one is probably a more sensitive question but what should I be expecting compensation wise without posting the specifics of my resume? I live in Southeast Ohio which has a very low cost of living compared to most areas of the country (100 here is about 250 in LA) so I have no problem in passing some of that savings on to an employer but my skills just aren't valuable locally, which means I just don't know a fair price to charge... I have little experience working for others doing this stuff. For example, a year ago I got laughed out of a guys office for charging way too much when I wanted $1000 for an entire job to build a database driven website+point of sale system for this guys business. Experiences like this have left me really confused as to what I should actually charge, I see the occasional annual rate on job postings but those are usually for full time positions requiring more experience than I currently have.

 

$1000 sounds like way too little for that, actually. Some people have no clue whatsoever about how much effort is involved and think you can press a couple of buttons and be done.

--Eric

 

1000 for a db website + pos system is CHEAP.

The guy will go from laughing to crying if he tries to hire a professional to do it.

 

Welcome to small town USA. Yeah it can be difficult to convince local businesses in a small town that what you are offering is actually worth the money. It's all about the perceived value. I've made a few db-driven websites including eCommerce in the $1,200 to $1,500 range. I was able to get those projects without much resistance because I also developed a backend admin control panel so they could easily update the pages, add more pages etc without needing to hire me or anyone else to do it. Later on WordPress came along and the last gig I took oh maybe 4 years ago I used WP which saved me a lot of work. Basically I am saying I did it more just to help local businesses than to make money. Although it was nice bonus income for doing something enjoyable. It sounds like you were dealing with a small business and many of them do not have much money. You cannot judge the value of your skills based on that market. Unless that is where you plan to focus and try to make your living.

Are you talking about trying to get gigs for website development or game dev with Unity?

In either case it would help you a lot to work on building a solid portfolio. You may need to do some small projects for free or very low cost. Then once you have a solid portfolio of real world projects to show off...those will do far more to communicate the value of your skills than a simple resume.

 

Yep it was pretty low. I thought I was being reasonable and was taking the job more so that I could use it as a published work example in the future than for the money it would provide. But, that's what happens in a small town that has little interest in technology it's a whole different world from what some areas are like and with small business especially in a small area companies just don't have the capital to pay what would be considered a normal wage for this stuff. Which is why I've been hoping to find some places that contract work out, however I'm not having much luck there as far as Unity goes. It seems everyone wants to hire an in house full time person.

I'm ok with doing either. My ultimate goal is to design games which means I would prefer to be doing game dev work in Unity.

I've been working on a portfolio since I started but I don't know how good it is. Basically I include the stuff I've created that isn't completely horrid. I stay quite busy though so it's a small number of projects in the past year. I've made a 2d top down bullethell shooter, a multiplayer Mario Kart style game, a question/answer trivia game, and for non games a 3d product turntable app. My goal over the upcoming winter break is to create a multiplayer first person dungeon crawler that I can eventually expand as time allows into more of a Skyrim type game (without as much content obviously, but it's more about showing I can implement leveling, quest, equipment, crafting, etc systems).

On the subject of time I have a question, given that I'm not billing myself as an artist but I do want to convey that I have basic artistic skills so I can help a small team cover needs like animation and some modeling if there's an art bottleneck would it be better for me to build games using the asset store and put that extra time into game development or should I make sacrifices in the amount of content I'm creating in order to design my own models?

 

I think only you can answer that. What do you want to do? Be a game programmer or artist? There is value in being able to do both but you must keep in mind the whole "jack of all trades master of none" thing. If you want to be hired as a 3D game artist/rigging/animating then focus on modeling, rigging and animating. Oh and textures. If you want to be hired as a game programmer then focus on programming and use art assets from the store and other places. Master your trade. Become an expert. Maybe spend 80% of your time programming and 20% modeling or whatever. But focus most of your time on the area you want to be in. That is my best suggestion for you based on the info I have.