Written by Tool 3 of 5: Working Out Loud — Building a Portfolio That Works While You Sleep
There’s a version of this story you’ve probably told yourself.
“I’ll put together my portfolio once I have something worth showing.”
“I’ll start posting when I actually know what I’m talking about.”
“I’ll launch my website after I finish the next project.”
I know this story well because I lived it for longer than I’d like to admit. And I can tell you exactly what it costs you: it costs you the opportunities that go to people who started showing their work six months before they felt ready.
The game industry — and every creative-technical industry like it — does not reward perfection. It rewards visibility, consistency, and the courage to share your thinking before you have all the answers.
That’s what working out loud means. And it might be the single most powerful career move available to you right now, regardless of where you are in your journey.
What “Working Out Loud” Actually Means
The concept was formalised by John Stepper, but the practice is older than the term. Working out loud means sharing your process, not just your outputs. The thinking behind the work. The decisions you made and why. The version that didn’t work and what you learned from it.
It is the opposite of the “finished product only” portfolio, where you wait until everything is polished before anyone sees it. And it is vastly more powerful — for two reasons.
First: It creates a body of evidence over time. Every post, every prototype share, every reflection you publish is a data point that says: this person thinks professionally, works consistently, and understands their craft. A single polished portfolio piece says “I can produce something good.” Thirty posts showing your process say “I can think, iterate, and grow.”
Second: It makes you findable before you’re famous. People in the industry who are looking for collaborators, employees, or interesting voices to follow are not searching for perfect portfolios. They’re searching for people who think interesting thoughts and share them publicly. Your next opportunity is more likely to come from someone finding your LinkedIn post or your itch.io prototype than from a cold application.
The Platform Stack: Three Levels, One Presence
You don’t need to be everywhere. You need to be somewhere, consistently. Here’s how to think about it across three levels:
Level 1 — LinkedIn (Lowest barrier, largest professional audience)
LinkedIn is where the industry lives professionally. Hiring managers, studio leads, community managers, educators, and peers are all there. And the barrier to contribute is a single paragraph.
You don’t need to post thought leadership essays. You need to share one real thing about your work, once a week. What you built. What broke. What you decided and why. What you’re researching. What a tutorial taught you that you didn’t expect.
This is exactly how I started publishing around DASUD and AI governance. I wasn’t an authority when I started. I was someone thinking out loud about a problem I was working on. By the time I’d published consistently for several months, people I had never approached were reaching out to me. The content did the networking while I slept.
That’s the mechanism. And it works the same way for a game developer documenting their design decisions as it does for someone writing about AI governance frameworks.
Level 2 — itch.io or GitHub (The technical portfolio layer)
This is where you prove you can build, not just talk. Itch.io lets you publish game builds — even prototypes, even unfinished experiments — with a free account. GitHub lets you show version history, code, and project documentation.
The key insight here is that the bar is not “finished and polished.” The bar is “real and documented.” A game jam entry with a clear description of what you were trying to solve is a portfolio piece. A prototype with a devlog explaining what you learned is a portfolio piece. A GitHub repo with a well-written README is a portfolio piece.
Studios hiring junior developers are not looking for finished AAA-quality work. They are looking for evidence that you can define a problem, attempt a solution, learn from the result, and do it again. That’s the loop. Document it.
Level 3 — Personal Website (The hub that connects everything)
This is where everything lives together. Your LinkedIn posts link here. Your itch.io builds link here. Your game design documents, your blog, your skills inventory, your contact details — all in one place under your own name.
The tools to do this for free have never been better. Notion, Carrd, and WordPress can all get you a clean, professional-looking site in a single afternoon. You do not need to wait until you can afford a web designer. You need to start now with what you have.
A personal website also signals something subtle but important: this person is serious enough about their work to have a home for it. That signal matters more than you think.
Your Game Design Document Is Already a Portfolio Piece
Here is a reframe that matters enormously for anyone studying ICTGAM422 or working on their first formal game project:
Your Game Design Document is not a school submission. It is the first page of your professional portfolio.
The moment you complete it — the client brief analysis, the market research, the technical specifications, the scope definition — it has value beyond the classroom. It demonstrates that you can think through a complex creative-technical problem from end to end, document it professionally, and communicate it clearly.
Treat it that way. Clean it up. Remove any assessment-specific language. Add an introduction that explains the project context. Publish it — on your website, on LinkedIn as a post series, on itch.io as a devlog.
That document, made visible, is the difference between being a graduate with a qualification and being a professional with a body of work.
The Fear That Stops Most People
Let’s name it directly: most people don’t share their work publicly because they’re afraid of being judged before they’re ready.
This fear is understandable. It is also, in practical terms, holding you back more than any lack of skill or experience.
Here is what I’ve found to be true after years of publishing work publicly before I felt fully qualified: the response is almost never what the fear predicts. The people who engage with your work are not waiting to catch you out. They are interested in what you’re building, curious about your thinking, or grateful that you articulated something they were also working through.
The people who don’t engage simply scroll past. That’s it. That’s the worst case.
The best case is that someone you’ve never met reads your post, sees themselves in your problem, reaches out, and changes the direction of your career. That happens. It happened to me. It will happen to you if you start.
Practical Tips: Start This Week
1. Write your first LinkedIn post today — one paragraph.
Describe one thing you built, learned, or decided in the last week. No polish required. End with a question to the reader. Post it.
2. Publish your current project on itch.io — even if it’s unfinished.
Add a clear description: what it is, what problem you were solving, where it’s up to. That’s a portfolio piece. It exists now.
3. Set up a free personal website this weekend.
Carrd takes under two hours. Notion takes one. Pick one, put your name on it, add three things: who you are, what you’re building, how to contact you. You can improve it later. Start it now.
4. Treat every project document as a public artefact.
From today, every game design document, project plan, and scope definition you produce should be written as if a studio lead will read it. Because one day, if you make it visible, one will.
5. Commit to one post per week for eight weeks.
Not one per day. Not perfect, polished essays. One honest post per week about your work. At the end of eight weeks, you will have eight pieces of public evidence that you think, build, and grow — and you will have built the habit that compounds over time.
The Bigger Picture
You don’t build a professional reputation by waiting until you’re qualified. You build it by showing your thinking, consistently, over time. Your portfolio is not a destination. It is a practice.
The game design document you write this semester, the prototype you build this month, the decision you made today about a mechanic that wasn’t working — all of it is content. All of it is evidence. All of it can become visible.
Start before you’re ready. That’s not recklessness. That’s how careers are built.
In the next post, we tackle Tool 4: networking — specifically, how to build genuine professional relationships when you’re introverted, new to the industry, and the word “networking” makes you want to close the laptop and go back to your game.
This post is part of a five-part series on the professional tools every game developer needs — whether you’re leaving school, changing careers, or ready to take your first project from idea to greenlight.
Nigel D'Souza 