W4D2: Your profile, resume, GitHub and communities

This is the non-coding session in Week 4. No Unity project open, no scripts — just Lucian going through four sample resumes line by line, showing what a GitHub profile looks like to a recruiter, and listing the communities he thinks you should join. He says himself it’s about 5% game development, which means it applies to anyone in software trying to get hired. If you’ve finished the project work and are wondering what to actually send to a studio, this is the one.

What’s covered

Four resumes, side by side

Lucian keeps the same amount of information across each example so the difference is presentation, not content.

• The bad junior resume: loud clashing colours, a tone that reads like you’re texting a friend, “Photoshop — I can make memes” as a listed skill, and a [email protected] contact address.
• The good junior resume: same person, simple layout, specific skills with levels marked, projects with what you actually implemented, an internship entry with dates.
• The mid-level resume with roughly five years of experience: reverse-chronological employment, quantified results, an awards section.
• His own real resume from resume.io, with the sections he’s comfortable showing publicly.

The rules he pulls out of them

• Creativity is fine in games, but if you’re not sure your design is good, use the boring one. Ask someone who’ll give you honest feedback.
• Irony doesn’t survive a resume. Some readers won’t get the joke, others won’t know it is one.
• Dates on everything. Projects, jobs, education, all descending order.
• Quantify whatever you can. “Went from 50 fps to 60 fps” is worth more than “optimised performance.” Downloads, time saved, team size.
• Write the job you want next, not the job you have now. He acknowledges not everyone agrees with this and tells you to do it anyway.
• Volunteer work counts as experience and you’re helping someone while you’re at it. His framing: having no value on the experience section and giving no value to anyone is a double negative.

Seniority labels

He’s blunt about this. Nobody gets to tell you how many years make you a mid or a senior. You can hit mid in a year if you have no life. There are people with ten years who prioritised other things and aren’t advanced, and that’s fine. Rough guide: junior one to two years, mid two to four, senior implies you can mentor juniors without being a team lead.

GitHub as your second resume

• The contribution graph is the first thing a technical recruiter looks at, and you can pick a year to highlight.
• Private repos still show activity, so you don’t have to build in public.
• Set user.email in your git config or your commits won’t attribute to your account. Use GitHub’s users.noreply.github.com alias if you don’t want your real address on every commit, and turn on the setting that blocks command-line pushes exposing it.
• The tradeoff: privacy means nobody can reach you five years later about a repo that took off. You can’t be both.
• Never just hand someone a zip of code. No redundancy, no logged activity.

LinkedIn

The tagline and the About section are what recruiters search on. Keyword-stuff them within reason — C#, Unity, game developer, whatever you know or are about to know. Lucian’s take on listing a skill you’ll finish learning in two weeks: you’re technically lying but practically not, because hiring takes longer than that anyway. Real lying is showing up on day one without the skill.

Also: put a photo up. He repeats this several times. A photo with a mediocre About beats no photo with a great one.

Communities

Reddit, Discord, LinkedIn groups, the Unity forums (now migrating to Unity Discussions), and Facebook groups. He lists the specific subreddits and Discord servers he’s in and tells you to screenshot the slide. Reddit skews negative partly because of bots farming engagement, so don’t take a harsh comment on your game personally — it may not even be a person.

His argument for joining at all: you need to see that there are people better and worse than you, at every level from zero to thirty years. Introverts should push toward the middle, extroverts likewise in the other direction.

Timestamps

• 00:00:40 — What this session covers: profile, image, communities
• 00:02:10 — The four example resumes in the profile folder
• 00:03:30 — Intern, junior, mid, senior — why year counts are meaningless
• 00:07:50 — Opening the bad junior resume, loud colours and creativity vs safety
• 00:11:20 — Tone that’s too casual, and why irony backfires on a resume
• 00:14:40 — Vague skills, no logical order, no dates, unprofessional email
• 00:18:30 — The good junior resume: summary, skill levels, specifics
• 00:20:40 — Volunteering as a legitimate experience entry
• 00:25:10 — Achievements and quantifiable results in the experience section
• 00:28:00 — Write what you want to be next, not what you are now
• 00:30:00 — Question from chat: is the game dev job market dead
• 00:33:00 — The mid-level resume, reverse-chronological order, download counts, fps numbers
• 00:36:20 — Game jams as an awards section, and a personal site on GitHub Pages
• 00:38:40 — resume.io, sending your resume as a link, the design he uses
• 00:43:00 — GitHub profile: contribution graph, private repo activity, git config email
• 00:47:30 — Noreply email alias, blocking pushes that expose your address
• 00:51:00 — LinkedIn tagline, About section, certificates, technically lying
• 00:56:00 — “If you aren’t getting two or three offers a month you’re doing something wrong”
• 00:58:20 — Three projects beat a perfect profile, and the aggressive slide
• 01:01:00 — Reddit, bots, and the subreddit list
• 01:05:00 — Discord servers, LinkedIn groups, and put a photo up
• 01:08:30 — Unity forums moving to Unity Discussions, Google vs LLM cutoffs
• 01:12:00 — Q&A: publishing on Steam, breadth over depth, six games in six months
• 01:16:00 — Q&A: which cities, remote work, salary ranges by region
• 01:21:30 — Lucian’s own path: CS 1.6 servers, a SoundCloud link on his resume, Ubisoft

What you take away

Four resume templates you can copy the structure of directly, plus a checklist of what makes each one work or fail. A GitHub setup that actually attributes your work to you, including the email config most people get wrong on a fresh machine. A LinkedIn profile written for how recruiters search rather than how you’d describe yourself to a friend. And a list of subreddits, Discord servers and forums to join the same day.

The hardest line in the session is also the most useful one: if you don’t have three projects, stop polishing your profile and go build them. He’s fairly direct about it — if pressing New Project and figuring things out doesn’t bring you any joy, you’re probably built for something else and you’ll do that thing better. On project scope, he’d rather see twelve small projects in twelve months than one beautiful one, because searching wide beats searching deep when you’re starting out. Publishing something on Steam, the $100 fee included, more or less gets you looked at.

He also tells a story about getting his Ubisoft internship partly because he put a Virtual DJ mix on SoundCloud and a poetry blog on his resume. His point: creativity transfers, and when you have no experience, showing you make things at all is the signal.

Who should watch this

Anyone who’s finished the build work and now has to turn it into applications. It’s also the session to send to a friend outside game dev, since almost none of it is Unity-specific and the GitHub email config alone catches most people out. Skip it if you already have a job and a profile you’re happy with.