Thank you for being here!
The act of reading these words means that, like us, you care about indie games and the people that make them. You’re on this very page because you want to give back. And as our friend Dora says, those of us lucky enough to be in games are here because someone helped us along the way. Thank you for paying it forward and being that someone for others.
Why Write?
We hope that writing for us will be beneficial to you in other ways as well.
If you hire through Work With Indies, you’ll enjoy cross-promotion between your articles and job listings. Potential candidates will discover your jobs through your articles and your articles through your jobs.
As an individual, you'll codify your learnings while establishing yourself as a subject matter expert in your field.
Published works will be shared on the blog, in our Discord (15k members), on Twitter and LinkedIn (30k followers), in the newsletter (6k subscribers), and cross-promoted on relevant pages across our website (150k+ monthly views) - each frequented by your peers and hiring managers.
You’ll also get an author profile page with 1. a collection of your writing, and 2. any open roles that you may have on your team.
To get started, submit an article here.
Writing Ideas
Not sure what to write? Here’s a few ideas:
Job hunting and career development tips: Share your advice for:
- writing resumes and cover letters
- creating thoughtful portfolios
- making friends in games (aka networking)
- preparing for and crushing your interviews
- getting the most out of game jams
- all of your game dev examples, behind-the-scenes, and tutorials
- your better ideas
Game dev tutorials: Tell us how you do the wonderful things you do. You can:
- write guides and tutorials
- provide a look behind-the-scenes with actual examples of your work
- share examples how you did X and fixed Y
- tell us what you learned and how to avoid the mistakes you made along the way
Hiring guides: There are a bunch of indie devs that use Work With Indies to hire for the first time. You can help them (and their candidates and employees) by sharing your best practices for:
- writing job descriptions
- assessing applications
- conducting effective interviews
- onboarding new employees
- creating a diverse and inclusive workplace
- summarizing your company handbook
- the tools you use to do all the above
- your better ideas
Speaking of Hiring
Wish there was more consistency in applications so you could review and respond faster? Have a list of frequent errors that derail applications at your company? Are you the one person that actually likes those skill bars on resumes?
Help your candidates help you! Write an article once and it will appear below all your job listings, surfacing insights that will improve your candidate’s applications and your review process.
Here’s an article every company should write: Tips for Applying at [My Game Studio]. Also good: Introducing [My Game Studio] and My First 90 Days at [My Game Studio]. You could write an entire How We Hire article or series that details how you:
- Assess / screen candidates
- Interview
- Onboard new employees
- Grow / develop your team
Recurring Series and Events
You can also contribute to the following series of live events (in our Discord) and self-guided interviews:
- We’re Hiring, AMA: Join us in the Work With Indies Discord server for a 60 minute text, audio, or video chat with a group potential candidates. Answer questions about your culture, your games, how you support and grow teammates, specifics about your open roles, and more.
- Success Stories: Were you or a team member recently hired or promoted? We’d love to hear your story! Inspire others like you with an inside look into the exact steps you took to get hired or promoted. Then, tell us more about your current role and company!
- A Hero’s Journey: Ask 100 people how they got started in games and you’ll get 98 different answers. Share your path from where you started to how the heck you got the awesome role on the amazing team that you have now.
- A Day in the Life: What is your role in games and… what does that even mean?! Tell us what your job looks like on a day to day basis so we can learn from your experience. Help us imagine ourselves in your shoes, and decide if a similar role is the right fit for us.
Send a note to community@workwithindies.com to schedule an event in Discord (events are transcribed and posted as an article a few days after each event). Or click here to complete a text-based interview on your own time.
We’re also looking for contributors to help us launch several new series:
- Ask an Indie: Pose a community-submitted question to our network of indie developers every month, then curate and share their responses in an article.
- Workspaces: This one is just for fun. Let us gawk at photos of your workspace (both individual and teams) while you tell us about your favorite desk-orations and software.
- Watch Party: There's so much great educational content out there already. But where to find it all? Or more apropo, who? Find talks and tutorials to view during live Watch Parties in our Discord server and / or summarize and share them on the blog.
- Community Q&A: Do you frequent the #career-advice channels in our Discord server? Then you may notice how fantastic the Q&A is between community members. Curate thoughtful questions to surface to the broader community, then recap the responses in an article.
Have a better idea? Of course you do! Volunteer for one of the above or pitch us on your own series at community@workwithindies.com.
Writing Tips
The best articles:
- are relevant to indie games
- seek to inspire, inform, and educate
- share personal (relatable) stories and anecdotes
- include narrative to support your insights
- reference quotes, tweets, etc. from reputable sources
Also important:
- You may wish to draft (or review) your article in a tool like Hemingway to edit for grammar and readability.
- Share your Google doc with edit access so we can copy any images from your article (or include links to download).
- It’s ok to re-use content that you’ve published elsewhere and link back to the original source.
- We won't accept sponsored articles (i.e. an ad for tool or software). That said, if you love a product that's core to your job and want to share how you use it and why it will make our lives better, please do!
Thank you again for your your contribution to Work With Indies and the kind and talented folks that frequent our website, community, and now our blog.
Share your story with us here.
We can’t wait to see what you create!
