For the last 3 and some change years, I have been working towards the goal of being a professional Game Developer. I have worked hard to learn as much as I can and after applying to job after job it seemed like the biggest problems were that I didn’t have enough experience. Having no degree and only a few personal projects under my belt were not enough to convince a company to hire me. To mitigate this I decided to create a gig on the freelancing site Fiverr to try to get some professional experience with game development. Now, I plan to conclude this with my personal thoughts on freelancing on fiverr but in the beginning I knew it would not be profitable. I would need to compete with the hundreds of other developers who were selling their services for pennies. But I never intended to make money on fiverr, I just wanted to gain experience and as many 5 star reviews as possible. So I created a gig to create a simple 2D game in Unity expecting to get a few purchases from people looking to get a personalized game for a loved one or something in that nature, but in the beginning, I got nothing. For almost 2 months I forgot that I even had the listing because even the spammers stopped messaging me. Then all of the sudden I got a message out of the blue that someone purchased my gig.
This was not what I expected to happen, they didn’t message me before hand to ensure that I could do the job or anything. And they didn’t even want me to build a full game, they just wanted a prototype. I did what they asked and I finished it in about a day or two and they payed me $10. Then the same person came back with another prototype and I finished it in a few days and made another $10. Then two weeks later they bought it again and asked for another simple 2D prototype which I believe took me a week and that time I made $30. It was not much but with each prototype they left me a 5 star review, which is just what I was after.
After I made these 3 prototypes I was approached by someone who was also looking for a prototype, but he wasn’t looking for me to build anything from scratch. He had a project that he was working on, but was stumped due to his lack of programming knowledge. He told me he was an artist and was trying to learn to code to get his dream game made but couldn’t even finish the prototype. So I set up a custom gig for him and took 2 weeks to get the prototype that he wanted finished. I was really proud of this small game. It was a simple isometric pixel art shooter but I felt as though I was able to make some pretty snappy movement and I was able to do it all while sticking to the original style of his code base which is something that I don’t have a whole lot of experience in. I typically only work on things by myself so it was a fun challenge to create something that someone else will continue to extend. This project earned me $200 which works out to be roughly $10 an hour but none of this felt like work and I had this overwhelming excitement over earning money from Game Dev. My Fiverr had really picked up at this point and I was getting messages daily about projects. Most were things I was not interested in, things like big 3D experiences, blockchain games, or multiplayer projects. But then I got a message from what would be my biggest project up to that point.
I got a message from someone asking me if I was able to make a word puzzler, somewhat similar to wordle. I knew that would be a fairly easy task so I asked for more details and he described Smixed. Something that would be my life for the next several months. Now I am going to make a whole separate blogpost on smixed, but it seemed like an awesome project with a guy that was super passionate about his idea, and I was all on board! I initially made him a working prototype for $200 in a week from my fiverr gig and then after that I moved off of fiverr and continued to work on smixed.
I left my gig on fiverr but wasn’t actively planning on accepting anymore gigs unless they seemed really interesting but I had at this point raised my base rate to $200 and changed my gig to reflect that I would make a prototype in Unity. I honestly figured that this would filter out a lot of messages but I don’t know if it was due to all of my reviews or what but I was constantly getting messages about making prototypes with people willing to pay even up to $500 for a week turnaround. However I didn’t take any of these as I was working a lot on smixed but it felt reassuring that people wanted me for my Game Dev skills, and were willing to pay for them!
Conclusion
I think Fiverr is a great place to get experience, but I don’t think it is a great place to make money. I did end up finding a long term gig that payed me well on it but I feel that was more luck than anything. Fiverr is full of people who are likely better developers and willing to work for less. When you are starting you will not be able to get away with charging more than $10. Also people often expect things in a week or less and from my experience will try to add features on as you develop. It was not an environment that I would love to rely on, but it did help me learn a lot and undeniably made me a better Game Developer.