“All the game jobs I see advertised require industry experience. Do any of the hobby projects/mods I am working on count?”

Development experience is not the same things as “Industry Experience”.

You get experience by making a game (alone or as a member of a hobby/mod team). You get better experience if some members of the team have proven development experience (as they can teach you what they already know). You get even better experience if you actually finish the game and ship it (that could be ship it free to the mod scene or sell it as shareware). However none of the above are “industry experience” as defined in a job posting that requires “industry experienced programmer – min two shipped titles”. You can only get that by working in a commercial studio on a commercial project that gets finished and shipped.

Put simply there is no quick way to get “industry experience” on your resume. That section of your resume must remain blank until you have worked in a studio. You may have lots of useful experience and that may get you a job at a studio but when applying you shouldn’t try to claim on your resume that you have “industry experience”. You have experience, it may even be relevant to the job but it is still low calorie sweetener not raw cane sugar and recruiters can taste the difference. The two things recruiters hate more than lack of experience are stupidity and lack of honesty. Six weeks work experience working on a customer database for your local hardware store isn’t “industry experience” yet people do put this sort of stuff on a resume in an attempt to have “industry experience”. Mod work is the same. It’s great experience but not “industry experience”. What it does do is provide you with portfolio pieces that you can show to recruiters. You still have to battle it out with all the other entry level people but at least you are a step up from those who just have a degree and no portfolio.

Logically the above is silly. Getting a project finished without the help of industry vets should count for more because you did it without a safety net. It doesn’t though because the actual development isn’t the only thing that an employer is looking for. “Industry experience” doesn’t just mean you made a game, it also means that someone else thought you were good enough to employ and that counts for a lot.

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