Game Industry Portfolio Best Practices

Last revised February 19, 2021 by Mike Sellers (@onlinealchemist, iugameprof, sellers @ iu . edu)
(This doc includes contributions from many professional game designers and hiring managers including Mitch
Goldstein (@mgoldst), Larry Mellon, Nathaniel Ferguson, Geoff Zatkin, and in particular Ian Schreiber, among many
others who contributed their experience and wisdom.)

Note: If this is not showing up well (may happen on mobile), here is a link to the doc as a PDF.

Your online portfolio is often the first thing a potential employer will look at to determine if they
want to interview or hire you. A resume can list all sorts of accomplishments, but a portfolio
shows what you can do based on what you have actually done.

In particular, this is your opportunity to tailor how someone sees your work:

Build your portfolio for the position you want.

This is your opportunity to really impress a potential employer the way a dry resume may not.

Take the time to get this right -- and understand that you can’t put together an effective portfolio
in a short amount of time. If nothing else, you will need time to create and put together the
content that makes up the heart of your portfolio.

Main Points
1. Who are you? What are your skills? Make sure your name and contact information
are clearly shown on your portfolio, and that your skills/focus area are immediately
apparent. (But: don’t let your name/face/etc get in the way of your portfolio content.)
2. What job are you looking for? Provide a high-level description of your professional
focus on the first page a visitor sees. Think of this like your personal concept statement.
“I am a systems designer adept at creating and balancing multiple systems and
progression curves.” Or, “I am a concept artist specializing in bright fantasy pixel art.”
a. Avoid the temptation to try to be too many things. Focus on one area where you
want to work. Saying, “I’m a gameplay programmer who also designs complex
systems and composes awesome audio” makes it sound like you don’t yet know
what you want to do. If you do have amazing talents in different areas, show
these on your portfolio as their own sections, but choose one to emphasize here.
b. You will of course need to support your professional focus in your portfolio. If
you’re “a narrative designer who can quickly sketch compelling characters in
text,” then you need to have multiple examples from different genres to show
this.
c. In terms of overall organization, it can be helpful to list similar examples of your
work first, rather than organizing them by project. So if you have made
environmental and character art for three different projects, group all the
environment art together, then all the character art. Or if you’ve been a systems
designer on two different projects, show the design, spreadsheet, etc. work
 you’ve done on each to show your skills in each area. Then if you want to have a
page for each project and what you did on it, you can -- but employers are
primarily interested in what you have done, not in the projects themselves.
3. Your portfolio should clearly highlight your skills and be easy to navigate. Don’t let
anything get in the way of a potential hiring manager quickly seeing what you do well.
4. Show your best work first. Avoid the temptation to pad your portfolio with crappy work.
5. Talk about your process along with your work: what were you trying to accomplish, how
did you go about it, and what did you learn along the way? These are often as important
as the work artifact itself.
6. Show in-process work, but be careful of showing too many unfinished projects. The
best things you can show are professional-grade work on finished projects. As with the
process comment above, don’t be afraid to show the arc of development in your work --
how a character or design changed from original idea to finished product.
7. Keep your portfolio up to date! Do not let it go stale. Yes, this means you need to
keep adding new work to it all the time.
8. Make sure your URL is easy to type in, whether you have your own domain or use an
existing service. A custom domain is going to be seen as more professional (excepting
artists using Artstation).

Details - including common mistakes to avoid

Overall Look and Navigation

1. Make your portfolio easy to access via a public webpage. The URL should be
simple. Include this on your resume and business card. The best way to do this is to get
your own domain ($12/year through domains.google.com) and a free site. That said,
sites like Wix, Weebly, etc., and for artists in particular, those like Artstation are perfectly
acceptable.
a. Don’t require any plugins or other technology to view your portfolio.
b. Test your portfolio in all major browsers to make sure it works well.
c. If possible, test it on mobile too.
2. Make absolutely sure every link on your site works for someone else. It may work
fine on your machine, but if a google doc or similar shows up as unavailable for
someone else on their machine, they’ll eject immediately. (Testing in incognito mode and
on someone else’s computers both help.)
3. Make sure your portfolio is super easy to navigate, and (if you’re using a third-party
hosting site) that the visitor experience is welcoming, without unwanted popups, etc..
You want anyone visiting to be able to quickly and easily get an overall sense of what
you have done,and to get details if they want.
a. Test this using others who don’t know what you do (and aren’t friends/relatives).
b. Be sure to include clear links to get back to the main page, and header links if
you want for Resume / About / etc.
4. Do not use a splash page, huge intro image, or anything that gets in the way of a
quick visitor quickly learning about your top projects and skills. Keep the site as well-
 organized and as flat as possible -- don’t make anyone click through layer after layer just
to get to your content.
5. Your name, skills, and your top projects should be what greet someone when they
see your portfolio. Keep personal details, resume, etc., on separate pages of their own
within the portfolio. Anyone coming to your portfolio for the first time is far more
interested in what you can do than who you are.
6. Avoid using a big stock art image at the top of your portfolio as well: the work you
show should be yours, or a project you have contributed to.
7. In addition to being easy to access and navigate, your portfolio must also look
professional. A potential employer absolutely will judge you by the overall quality of
your portfolio. Everything, including layout, font choice, color, etc., says something about
you. If you’re not confident in your aesthetic choices, keep it simple. You can use an
existing template (there are tons of these available online), but go with something that
communicates who you are, while still looking inviting and professional.
8. Keep your format simple and consistent across all the pages. Make sure your name
and contact info (email, LinkedIn -- you do have a LinkedIn profile, right?) is at the top of
each page, and that you use the same format for each project you talk about.
a. Include a short statement of the kind of work you’re looking for (“Systems
Designer,” “Concept Artist” etc.) along with the other general information. Put a
little more detail regarding what you’re looking for on an “About” page.
b. Make sure your email address is professional too. If necessary, get a new one.
c. Be careful of your text and graphic formatting: make paragraphs of text left-
justified, not center or fully justified. Be sure all your graphics support the text
they’re near too.

Showing Your Work

9. Put your top projects at the top: list these by most impressive, not chronologically. If
you have finished, published work, list those first.
10. Include only your best work. This isn’t the place to show everything you’ve ever done,
and don’t try to fluff it up with crap. More crap is still crap. By putting something in your
portfolio, you’re saying “this is the best I can do.”
a. A corollary to this to curate your portfolio regularly: weed out the weakest pieces
as your skills grow. Keep older ones only if they still fairly show your skills.
b. Make sure that what you’re showing clearly supports the position you’re looking
for. If you want to be a systems designer, don’t have a portfolio full of levels. If
you want to be a concept artist, page after page of anime figures isn’t going to do
you a lot of good. It’s okay to put some additional work outside of your focus area
in your portfolio to show you know how to work in other areas, but make these
clearly subsidiary to your focus.
c. If you want to show multiple kinds of work (programming, art, sound, design,etc.),
clearly separate these on your portfolio.Most industry people will be looking at
you for one type of position. It’s best to make separate portfolios entirely, one per
discipline (and each has to have sufficient high-quality content), but at minimum
 separate these so that anyone coming to your site can quickly and easily find
what they’re looking for.
11. While you want to include only work that shows the best you can do, take the time to
do enough work so that your portfolio doesn’t look threadbare. This means of
course that you can’t rush creating a strong portfolio. It will be clear to anyone looking at
it if that’s what you’ve done.
12. When talking about your projects, use short bold headlines to help guide the (tired,
overworked, distracted) reader through your portfolio. List your top projects clearly,
ideally with a text headline, image, and brief caption mentioning the highlights, team
size, and length of project-time. Remember to use the same format across your portfolio.
Enable the reader to use these as a link to tap or click through to a page focused only on
that project.
13. Throughout your portfolio, show what you did, including the process -- how the
design, art, or code architecture evolved along the way. Talk about what you did
specifically.
a. This shouldn’t need to be said, but never take credit for someone else’s work. If
you rigged a figure but someone else did the textures and animation, go ahead
and use the animation, but clearly state what work is yours and what isn’t. In
addition to simply being honest, giving credit where it’s due is professional and
makes you look better -- showing how you worked well on a team is a good thing.
14. In addition to the overall process, talk about not just what you did, but why and what
you learned from it. This is “production with intention and reflection.” You want to show
what you produced, what you were trying to do, briefly discuss how it succeeded or
failed, and what you learned from the experience.
a. It sometimes helps to put these explanations on their own pages using a link like
“More details” or “What went right and wrong” so that someone can dig into this if
they want, or they can just pass them by.
15. No matter what your area of focus (programming, art, design, narrative, QA, etc.), show
and describe what the project was, what you did, and what others did.
16. Feel free to show work on your portfolio that’s in-progress or that was experimental
and never finished, so long as it is some of your best work.
a. HOWEVER: particularly for designers or one-person projects, it is typically a
huge red flag to employers if you have a bunch of almost-finished games on your
site and none that are completed. They all know how difficult it is to get through
that last 10% of a game’s development to finish and release it. They want to see
that you know that too. If all you can show is that you can do the first 90% of the
work and not the other 90%, you’re going to have a tougher time.

General Advice
17. Be careful with buzzwords. Be prepared to talk in-depth about anything you list as a
project, process, tool, or skill. If you’re listing tools or languages, measure how well you
know them by the number of years you have used them. Keep in mind that 2 years of
using C# in school will not be given the same weight as doing so in industry (which is
why being able to show what you can do in your portfolio is so important).
18. Use as many images and short video segments as you can, but make sure they’re high
quality and large enough to be clear. One primary “beauty shot” for each item on the
main page, and then a few others on a detailed page.
a. One short 30-60 second trailer video is often a good idea for a major project but
DO NOT autoplay these, especially with sound.
b. Animated GIFs can work well, but also become tiresome quickly -- and multiple
GIFs beside each other create visual cacophony (avoid this).
c. Use explanatory text along with any images/videos, but keep it brief. If someone
reading your portfolio wants to know more, they can always ask you!
19. If you’re showing code, show snippets and talk about why you wrote it that way.
Definitely include a github (or similar) link -- but don’t expect anyone to actually page
through your code.
a. Do not show any uncommented code. No one is going to take the time to puzzle
out what your code snippet does.
20. If you’re showing design docs, either show these as links that open a new tab or window
(so the reader doesn’t lose their place on your main site) or as an embedded scrollable
window. As with code, don’t expect someone to page through tons of lore for your game:
highlight what you think is most important to show what you did and why it’s valuable.
21. Provide a link to your finished games if you have them, but don’t make this the primary
aspect of your portfolio -- most people are just not going to have the time or inclination to
go play yet another game. Again, you want to make it as easy as possible for a potential
employer to understand your work, primarily via images and text.
22. Use spell check. Then have someone else read it just for spelling and grammar too.
23. When showing your portfolio or going to an interview
a. Never depend on there being good wifi. Have a backup of the whole thing on
your harddrive, on a separate USB, and to be really careful, printed on paper.
b. Clean your screen!
c. Make sure your device (laptop or tablet etc.) is fully charged.
d. Check your desktop and background for anything that might be at all offensive or
embarrassing and remove these.
24. Do not let your portfolio go stale. You should always be adding work to it. If you show
something as “in progress,” make sure you show progress regularly. If you’re going out
looking for jobs and you don’t have anything to show on your portfolio for the last year…
what were you doing? How serious are you about getting a job, really?
a. As a corollary, write text that’s future-proof. Read what you write and ask if it will
still be true in five years: “I have been making games since 2018” vs. “I have
been making games for the past three years.”
25. Remember that your portfolio is not enough on its own. It will not attract people to you
just by being there. Your portfolio is what you can send people to after you’ve
exchanged a business card at a conference or networking function (because your
portfolio address is clearly shown on your business card, right?). You need to get
yourself out there so that people know your portfolio even exists.