Freelance Level Designer Help! Pipedream or worthwhile?

[BluePineapple72]

Hey kids, looking around at my bank account and figuring that I need to erm... have it not be empty I figured that I should use my erudite and expansive set marketable skills to find work outside of my current job to help me not die of starvation or exposure.

 

Problem is, I've spent a great deal of time working on Doom levels in various formats and have a wide, erudite, and expansive set of game design skills; a buck fifty more than any sort of skills anyone I've seen on LinkedIN asking for.

 

I've been approached by and have worked on (actual) video games in the past, using my knowledge of builder tools and level design to crank out levels for games (they have not released yet so I'm not at liberty to speak more details). Though I liken these opportunites to chance encounters really. I was in the right place at the right time and managed to be lucky enough to have someone come to me to ask for my help in their project.

 

What I want to know is: how can I find more work? Am I being stupid? Are these easily searchable on the internet? Are my skills in UDB easily translated into other level design engines? How lucky would my dice rolls have to be to find consistent freelance 'GZDoom' based projects. ^{(that last one is a facetious question. I know how uncommon that engine is relatively speaking)}

 

As a bonus, this whole line of questioning too also extends into writing. Since I uh... write. And well, went to college to learn how to be good writer man. Me figured me find free lanz wurk as writer man.

 

Any freelancers out there with tips on how to make this shindig work? Particularly: where to find places to hop aboard projects looking for freelancers (either level designers or writers for whatever kind of projects need those); how to be good at committing to project workload; keep consistent; any other advice I may need (or may not want) to hear etc. etc.

 

 

^{Btw, realistically speaking, I highly doubt I'll be able to shoot for the moon with 'level design' as my primary goal of "hey this is what I gotta do!" I get it is kind of a pipedream. But I gotta weight my options for what I actually can do with skills I've acquired, and level design happens to be a particular path that I can take. Regardless of how fertile that land may be I still want to consider it as a potential option.}

[Lippeth]

I've been using Upwork, Fiverr and SoundBetter for the past few months to find freelance gigs for sound editing and mixing and general audio/music related gigs, but have had zero responses so I hope you are better at selling yourself than I am. Building a portfolio on Fiverr and Upwork might be a good start, there's always someone in the world looking for something you're qualified to do, though I can't say how saturated it is for competition in any field that isn't sound design.

 

The freelance gigs I do get are from contacts I made well before Covid, so luckily they get me through the hardest times.

[BluePineapple72]

57 minutes ago, Lippeth said:

Upwork

I found a few promising leads there, but I uh... don't wanna have to pay to apply for the jobs. I may end up biting the bullet though. We'll see.

[Baron T. Mueriach]

This is starting to make me think that a handful of the levels in WAD's I've played over the years have been ghost-produced.