How to Make a Great Game Design Portfolio
As many of my students enter the industry and seasoned industry folks dust off their portfolios, I thought I’d write out what catches a hiring manager’s eye in a game design portfolio. I’ve interviewed and hired at my own studio and at various companies I’ve worked at, and I’ll be teaching a course on portfolios and professionalism at ArtCenter next semester.
Though your portfolio doesn’t have to be a web page (it could be a Powerpoint of PDF), I’ll be going over what should be in a web page in this article. Your portfolio should adhere to basic web landing page best practices:
- A clear headline about what you want to be known for, like “combat game designer” or “level designer” or “lead game designer.” A good example is Davi Arco Baptista’s headline:
I’m also a co-founder of Nano Knight Studio
- Engaging visuals that show off some of your work or who you are
- Above-the-fold content includes the headline and the most important information, so the reader doesn’t have to scroll to see it
- Navigation for the most important content, like ‘projects’, ‘about’, ‘blog’, and ‘contact’
A great example of a good landing page Chad Cable’s portfolio. He keeps it simple in the navigation menu, and immediately shows his work on the landing page. Best of all, each project’s thumbnail is a GIF which immediately catches attention.
The Composition of a Portfolio Piece
Once you’ve got your layout and menu solidified, you’ll need to add those projects! A portfolio piece for a game designer should include visual and prose information about the outcome of the work and the design process you went through to create the work. The goal is to communicate your thoughts about the work and WHY you created it. This is a story about your 0 to 1 process.
Make sure to only include work you are interested in on your portfolio. It doesn’t make sense to include 4 mobile projects when you don’t want to make mobile games. Instead, include 1–2 mobile games and some other work you’re more interested in, even if it’s unfinished. You also don’t need to include every project you’ve worked on, just the ones you feel are the most representative of your work. For instance, I chose to include my recently released mobile games like Chief Emoji Officer in my portfolio, and include my larger scale work at Niantic and Oculus because I want to work on story games on a global scale. I left off some of my more experimental games, like a Discord text adventure, because I already had narrative games on my portfolio that were more polished.
Image/Header
At the start of a portfolio piece, you’ll want to include a visual to catch people’s eyes. This could be a visual header you made, a marketing image, youtube video, or trailer of the work that was done.
I specifically like Frank Lantz’s projects because he includes polished photographs of the physical game.
Top Line Items
Including the relevant information in a nicely formatted way helps hiring managers understand what role you played, how you contributed, and what tools you used.
Jay Van Hutten does a great job of this by including each relevant piece of data at the beginning of his layout.
This could include:
- Role
- Engine
- Studio
- Team Size
- Project URL
- Duration
- Platforms
Summary
Make sure to include a short summary of the project, what the design of the game is and the goals of your work.
Contributions
Contributions should include YOUR specific contributions. This could be game design, systems design, visual effects, character design, scripting, 3D art, animation, level design, mission design, narrative design, etc.
Include detailed information about your design process, goals of the design, outcomes, and any relevant screenshots, videos, gifs, charts, or sketches. Also include tools that were used in the design process.
For instance, I worked on the effects for a game I made at Global Game jam with a few friends. So I wrote “Visual Effects — I created the water, electricity, spiders, and bubbling ooze FX using Illustrator and particle systems in engine” under that piece’s page.
Mockups/UI
Mockups here could show the draft workings of layouts you had for games…
versus how your UI actually turned out through all your hard work…
Attributions
Finally, always make sure to add attributions to content you used that wasn’t made by you, or referenced from elsewhere. Maybe you used Midjourney, or reference images from Pinterest, or references from a specific artist. Always make sure to add a link and information for that original piece of work.
Making a portfolio takes time and effort! But a good one can pay off.
