TopherPirkl
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« Reply #1 on: May 19, 2015, 11:53:55 PM » |
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Well, finding the next job is unfortunately about 50-70% of your time as a freelancer, in my experience. At least, that's how it is until you're established and have enough people that you've worked with that they approach you rather than you having to hunt down work.
From my own experience, the most important community to be a part of is your local community, if you have one. I'm in an area that doesn't have the most active game dev community, but I've still gotten all of my gigs from someone I've met face to face. Involving yourself in an online community can be immensely rewarding, but nothing beats in-person contact, and most devs I know would always default to working with someone they can meet up and have coffee with. I would venture to say that this is doubly true for composers. I'm a sound designer, and I'm lucky in that I'm kind of the only really active sound designer in my area, so any developers who know sound will play a major part in their game usually end up approaching me at some point. On the other hand, there's six or seven people I know who would consider themselves primarily video game composers, and they're constantly competing for projects.
So as far as online communities, I don't really have much to offer. I've had really poor luck on Reddit, unfortunately, and have had marginal luck on some other small, non-game-dev-centric forums.
As for things I wish I had done sooner? I wish I had spent more time trying to understand other elements of game dev, like the ins and outs of Unity, Game Maker, Unreal, etc. as well as what goes into animation, rigging, modeling, environmental art, stuff like that. And programming. I probably could have gotten on a couple of projects in the past if I had been a more confident programmer. Again, though, a lot of my experience is really pretty specific to sound design. I think one thing sound design and composing really have in common is that you need to constantly be creating content and upping your game.
Like I said, the game composer field is hugely competitive, so find what you're good at and refine it as much as possible, and expand your skillset during your downtime. If you aren't working at your craft on a near-daily basis, you're already well behind the competition, so to speak.
TL;DR: Spend all your time networking and looking for gigs, then spend the rest of your time honing your craft. Oh, also work on your current projects when you've got a minute.
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