W4D4: Freelancing, indie, employment and the interview

The last proper teaching session of the course, and there’s no Unity in it. This one is about what happens after you can build things: how to get paid for it, which of the three working models suits you, and what actually happens in an interview. Lucian says it’s aimed at anyone with under five years of experience, though he hedges that even people past that mark might pick something up. It’s two and a half hours of opinions from someone who’s freelanced, co-founded a project, published a Unity asset and sat on both sides of a hiring table.

What’s covered

Freelancing

• Why starting your career as a freelancer is a bad idea unless you got lucky with timing or already have a client lined up
• The tax question: don’t set up a legal entity for your first few thousand dollars. Lucian did it the other way round and calls it inefficient and wrong
• The proposal trick — send a piece of actual work with your application, even if it took you an hour. Fewer applications, better hit rate
• How to get your first reviews when you have none: near-free work, or bring your own client onto the platform and split the job into two or three contracts
• Platforms: Upwork, Fiverr, freelancer.com (he’s not impressed), and Discord servers like Game Dev League
• Invoicing basics and free tools for it
• The advice to chase fewer, bigger clients as you go

Going indie

• Indie as a spectrum: hobbyist, part-time serious, small studio, 100-person “indie”
• Community as the actual engine. The basement dev who emerges after six years is doing it the hard, painful way
• Devlogs and putting your face on camera — social proof, the same reason a bad 7-second Amazon review video works
• Publishers: how revenue splits vary, what to demand for the percentage, and running the contract past an LLM and a real person
• The PDF diff habit for spotting what changed between the contract you agreed to and the one they sent to sign
• Crowdfunding on Kickstarter and Indiegogo — stretch goals, tiers, the misconception about what you actually owe backers
• Game jams as a way to learn Unity by force

Employment and the interview

• Salary tax as a “tax on laziness”, and why he’s not going further into the politics
• Scrum vs Kanban, roughly, with an admission that the theory isn’t his passion
• Negotiating: research, the friend-at-another-company line, and negotiating perks when the number won’t move
• Team structure and who does what in a bigger studio
• Where to apply: jobs.gamedeveloper.com, Well Found, Remote OK, Hitmarker, LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Indeed
• Why 800 applicants on a LinkedIn post shouldn’t scare you
• Rejection, ghosting, fake job postings, and being rejected for being overqualified
• A full interview simulation with bad answers and good answers side by side

Timestamps

• 00:02:30 — What the session covers and who it’s for
• 00:05:00 — Freelancing: why it’s hard as a first move, and when it isn’t
• 00:09:00 — Taxes and legal entities at the start. Don’t build a company for your first $1,000
• 00:14:00 — Getting your first reviews with no track record, and the send-work-with-the-proposal trick
• 00:18:00 — The social side: meetups, conventions, and why face-to-face doubles your odds
• 00:26:00 — Rates, contractors vs agencies, invoicing, and moving toward fewer bigger clients
• 00:33:00 — Upwork, Fiverr, freelancer.com and Discord job channels compared
• 00:38:00 — Building a simple personal site so your reviews live in one place
• 00:43:00 — When to get an accountant, and how write-offs actually work
• 00:47:00 — What “indie” means across the spectrum, and the community problem
• 00:52:00 — Devlogs, showing your face, and the fear of your idea being stolen
• 01:00:00 — Publishers: revenue share ranges, what to demand, and the 70% line
• 01:08:00 — Reading contracts with an LLM, PDF diffs, and getting a second opinion from the community
• 01:14:00 — Recommended channels: GDC, Extra Credits, Game Maker’s Toolkit, Thomas Brush
• 01:18:00 — Kickstarter and Indiegogo: video length, stretch goals, backer perks, keeping people updated
• 01:26:00 — Game jams, and why beginners should go anyway
• 01:34:00 — Employment: salary tax, scrum vs kanban, and how sprints actually run
• 01:40:00 — Negotiating salary and perks, plus the “pay me less for a month” gambit
• 01:48:00 — Team structure, roles, and who a team lead actually is
• 01:53:00 — Where to apply, and why 800 applicants isn’t 800 competitors
• 01:58:00 — Rejection, ghosting, fake postings and being rejected for being too good
• 02:02:00 — Interview simulation begins: company research, why we should hire you, salary expectations
• 02:20:00 — Overtime questions, red flags, and the “exception not the rule” answer
• 02:30:00 — Describing a challenging project, staying current, and handling pressure

What you take away

A working map of three career paths and a realistic sense of what each costs you. The freelancing section is practical enough to act on this week — pick a platform, write a proposal with a sample attached, get two or three reviews, then start raising your rate.

The indie section is more about mindset than mechanics. Lucian keeps coming back to the same point: your audience is built while you build the game, not after. Post the devlog. Show your face. Put the thing where people can see it.

The interview simulation is the most immediately useful chunk. Each question comes with a bad answer, a “goodbye” from the interviewer, and then one or two answers that work. The pattern underneath is consistent — when they present something that costs you (unpaid overtime, constant crunch, work outside your role), the answer is a version of “yes, if it’s the exception and not the rule.” One question he made up entirely: “Are you understanding that sometimes it’s not possible for us to pay overtime work?” The correct response in his simulation is to stand up and leave.

His single loudest opinion runs through the whole session: projects. He says it repeatedly, almost impatiently. Not one-day hacks — things that took two weeks, a month, that someone can look at and understand what the game is. Two decent projects beat seven that took a day each. If a company looks at your portfolio and doesn’t care, he calls that a lack of intelligence and tells you to run. He also says interview tests exist mainly to trash a large pile of applicants and that he’d rather see the work.

A few other blunt takes worth keeping:

• If an employer tells you not to use ChatGPT or Claude, leave. His words: “what the heck.”
• Roughly 30% of job postings are fake in the sense that nobody’s being hired. Factor that into your rejection count and stop taking it personally.
• Don’t go over 70% revenue share to a publisher, and think in absolute numbers, not percentages.
• 40 hours a week is already too much.
• Take care of your body. Don’t work eight hours and then game for four. Don’t turn up to an interview smelling like you slept in the office.

Who should watch this

Anyone who’s finished the technical parts of the course and now has to turn skills into income. It’s most valuable if you’re pre-first-job or one or two years in, because most of the advice is about getting past the gatekeepers and building a track record from nothing. Skip it if you’ve already been hiring people for a decade, though the publisher and crowdfunding sections still hold up if you’re thinking about shipping something of your own.