garzek

Senzu bean!

Not OP, but have a master's degree in game design with a few shipped titles and my first major release coming out on Thursday.

Younger is better. Like any creative field, it's important to learn how to make bad games (and why they're bad) on your way to making good games. The only real qualification for games is making them. I know that's ridiculous but if you're a good artist, designer, etc. and can prove that (especially on your resume/portfolio), that's really all you need.

When first trying to get into the industry, most hiring managers prefer seeing you developed a feature all the way through than seeing 10% of a game. Be good at ONE thing but be REALLY DAMN GOOD AT IT. I have been learning this the hard way: my primary skillset is as a games writer and while I do quite a bit of design and coding I'm not at the level of other applicants in those fields. Same with my production resume.

What do you recommend those of us with major depressive disorder who have no health care, are unemployed, and are living in extreme and abject poverty on the brink of homelessness to do?

Getting help is neither free nor accessible.

Ooh, I can actually answer this! This just happened to me with my own game coming out on Thursday!

So with decently sized teams (in my case, we have 25 credited people on this title), you often divide work amongst people. This means you create a pipeline for individual assets: for example, we had 4 different level designers on the game, 3 different lighting designers, 10 different 3D artists, 2 different 2D artists, etc.

My job as the creative director for the game (also audio designer, narrative, and producer) was to basically just validate people's work. This means I dont always have time to thoroughly comb over absolutely everything: if something is hidden in a dark corner and I dont have a gameplay reason to go look at it, I'm not going to.

So for example, I discovered only a couple weeks ago that in one of our levels, a monster is sitting on a ledge eating a cheeseburger. It's a pretty tough Easter egg to find, but it's fantastic so its staying.

Another example is an artist snuck a picture of the studio's old lead producer into the game, but you honestly cant see it unless you max brightness.

So even though our team wasnt really that huge, and I was honestly hyper involved with the game so I've caught most of the Easter eggs at this point, it's not hard for me to imagine a world where they go missed, especially since some of them were in engine for weeks before I found them.

Masters in game design and an indie dev, not OP but I will expand on the other answer. Documentation is super useful if you actually want to get something finished. Prototyping (especially physical prototyping) is incredibly useful.

Take an idea, a hook. A core concept. What's the one sentence pitch for it? If you had a 7 second clip to sell me on the game, what does that look like?

From there, build out. What's your target demographic? What's the story behind the game (why are you making it)?

From there, move to a GDD. Start exploring your systems, gameplay loops. What's the minimum viable product for your game? What does the fully fleshed out version look like?

Finally, I strongly encourage making a feature list, master task list, and schedule. Disorganization is the bane of all solo projects (and communication the bane of all group projects).