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Feedback for my portfolio

Started by
1 comment, last by ChristopherRinehart 11 years ago

Hello GameDev,

I am looking for some feedback for my portfolio, tell me what you think I would love to hear what you say. Here is the link http://rinehartworks.com Thanks in advance.

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First the website: lots of animation, mystery-meat navigation, cross-site links, and so on. The mystery-meat links are inconsistent: Why is the big white text "The Sphere" a link but the same visual style "WSB App" not a link?

My first impression before I can even find your resume (still looking after two minutes) is that your information is not clearly organized. If I were considering hiring you, the site destroys your credibility.

I'm ignoring that and stumbling through your site...

"The Sphere : 3D Platformer programmed in DirectX". I see a picture, and a link to your wordpress site that does not impress me ("Let's get this finished!!!") nor does it inspire confidence in your ability. Also I cannot find a video, an executable, and source code. Without those you don't really have a portfolio.

WSB App: image is broken, description says that this has nothing to do with games.

Flak: Link is broken. Again no video, executable, or source code.

"Stay Alive" takes me to another site. No source directly, I need to open it up in Chrome's source inspector and manually load the JS files. ... and I can see it is a 500 line game. It is certainly interesting, but it shows me only that you can make very simple javascript games. Are you applying for a job as a javascript programmer? If no, then this is mostly irrelevant.

In Progress: No images, no links. As far as I know "In Progress" means you have only named the project and then gave up.

"About Me" This is an opportunity to show yourself as a professional game developer. It does not. There are innumerable ways to make it look professional, exactly how you do it is up to you.

And I finally found your resume! It says you are still a student even though your site says you have graduated. Update it. The "Classes" section is sadly necessary because you did not go for a computer science degree; consequently I need to actually do work to compare you against your peers. You are missing mathematics courses that I personally feel are important (calculus and linear algebra) but I'll attribute that to your degree choice. The bullet list of items is mostly useless to an employer; writing "ARM assembly" could mean that you looked at it once or that you studied it for a semester. It is unlikely that a fresh college grad with the portfolio you presented has any serious experience with Ogre, SDL, PyGame, Bullet, Havok, OpenGL, GLSL, HLSL, OpenAL, ODE, OGRE, and Unity. You might have some passing experience and you might have downloaded and played with them. You might have even actually used one or two of them enough to become familiar with their quirks. The list itself reeks of inflation. Show me what you actually did, not a description of the project. The "Contract Work" is the only section that does that. A senior project with "15+ people" saying only it is a 3D shooter tells me nothing. You could have been the person who did nothing, because every senior project seems to have that person. Stating you were in a "minecraft club" for four months does NOT give me any incentive to hire you. But enough about the resume. Read previous resume reviews because yours suffers from most of the same common problems.

Finally on your site I find some code. It is not impressive.

A 60 line piece of Javascript. Four functions. I'd be more impressed if you had written the grid and animation system. As it is, it's a school project where I believe the teacher likely spoon-fed you most of everything you needed to know.

A 56 line implementation of a math formula that was clearly part of your coursework, does not have any documentation, assumes I am comfortable with names like A, B, C, D, ax, ay, fgens, invDist2, and so on. Not impressive.

A simple Vector class, and another unimpressive 125 line program.

It needs a lot of work. Finish your games and post videos, executables, and source.

Thank you for the feedback, it was truthful and helpful. I am currently working to improve it and will continue to do so.

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