Tyler Brooks
Most first-time game studio founders hire wrong. Not because they don’t care, but because they hire the person they like talking to rather than the person who can actually ship the thing they’re trying to build. I watched three separate indie studios collapse in 2021 and 2022 partly because of that exact mistake, two of them people I’d worked alongside. Liking someone is not a hiring criterion. Let’s get into what actually is.
Match your game's primary technical bottleneck to the right first hire-wrong role selection is the most common indie studio hiring mistake.
| Your Current Blocker | Hire This Role First | Key Portfolio Evidence | Typical Hourly Range (USD, Contractor) | Red Flag to Watch |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Prototype code is fragile/unscalable | Generalist Programmer (mid-level) | Refactored or maintained someone else's codebase; shipped at least one complete project | $35-65 | Only shows game jam projects with no post-jam polish |
| Art placeholder blocking funding pitches | 2D Artist or 3D Generalist | Consistent style across 10+ pieces; assets that shipped in a real game | $30-55 | Beautiful concept art but no in-engine or export-ready work |
| No build pipeline for multi-platform release | Technical Artist or DevOps-savvy Programmer | CI/CD setup experience; has shipped to Steam + console or mobile | $50-80 | Only worked on single-platform projects |
| Game feel is off (controls, juice, feedback) | Gameplay Programmer | Playable demos with tight controls; iteration history visible | $40-70 | Talks about systems but can't show a 30-second feel-good loop |
| Narrative/dialogue system doesn't exist | Technical Writer or Narrative Designer with scripting skills | Ink, Yarn, or Twine projects; branching dialogue samples | $25-45 | Writing samples only, no implementation or tool experience |
| No sound and you're 3 months from release | Audio Generalist (SFX + music) | Audio implemented in a shipped game, not just standalone tracks | $30-50 | Sends a SoundCloud link but has never integrated with Wwise/FMOD/Unity |
General information for comparison, confirm specifics for your situation.
Know What You’re Buying Before You Shop
Before you post a single job listing, you need brutal clarity on one thing: what does your game require in the next six months, specifically?
Not what would be nice. What is actually blocking you from shipping a vertical slice or hitting your next funding milestone. If you’re building a narrative adventure in Twine and you can’t write dialogue systems yourself, you need a programmer who knows JavaScript or Harlowe. If you’re making a physics-heavy platformer in Unity and your prototype is held together with Stack Overflow answers, you need a mid-level generalist who can refactor a mess. If you’ve never built a build pipeline and your game is releasing on three platforms, that’s a specific hire.
Most people posting “game developer wanted” ads skip this step entirely. The listing reads like a wish list for a fictional senior engineer who also handles UI, audio, and “a bit of design.” That person either doesn’t exist or costs $140,000 a year and won’t answer your Itch.io forum post.
Write down the three things that, if undone, mean your game doesn’t ship. That’s your actual job description.
Where to Actually Find Candidates
Job boards work if you pick the right ones. For indie games specifically:
Itch.io has a jobs board. It’s small, it’s free, and the people browsing it actually understand what indie game development looks like. No one on Itch.io expects a AAA salary. That matters when you’re working with limited budget.
Discord is genuinely your best first move. Servers like Game Dev League, r/gamedev’s Discord, and engine-specific communities (Unity’s official server, Godot’s) all have job posting channels. Post there before you pay for anything else.
LinkedIn works for finding senior or mid-level people who want to leave a studio for something smaller, but expect to sift through noise. The signal-to-noise ratio is honestly rough.
Reddit’s r/gamedev and r/gamedevclassifieds work depending on how transparent you are about budget. If you’re paying below market, say so upfront and explain why (equity, passion project, revenue share). People hunting for those things will self-select. Hiding your budget until the fourth email wastes everyone’s time and tanks the relationship before it starts.
Handshake is worth a shot if you’re open to recent graduates. A junior programmer fresh out of DigiPen or Full Sail who shipped even one student project is someone to talk to.
Reading Portfolios Without Getting Fooled
Jobs in Game Development [Team Management] · Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games on YouTube
Here’s where non-technical founders usually get burned. You look at someone’s portfolio, you see a polished game, and you assume they built it. Sometimes they did. Sometimes they were one of twelve people and their actual contribution was a single system that another engineer designed.
Ask specific questions during that first conversation. Skip “tell me about your best project.” Instead ask: “Walk me through one technical problem you personally solved on that project. What broke, what did you try first, what actually worked?” Anyone who built it can answer that in detail. Anyone padding their resume will give you a vague answer or deflect.
For programmers, look at GitHub. Not just whether they have one, but what the commit history shows. Consistent commits over months tells you way more than a polished demo. One repo with 400 commits in a two-week burst followed by nothing is a red flag.
For artists, ask to see the early stuff: the blockout, the first concept pass, the thing that didn’t make the final game. People who understand craft can talk about their failures. People who only show the finished work are riskier.
If you’re hiring a programmer and you have any technical chops, give them a small paid test. Not spec work, not “build this for free.” Pay them $150-300 for 3-5 hours to solve a scoped problem that mirrors what they’d actually work on. A 2D movement controller in Unity. A Godot shader that does X. You’ll learn more about working with that person in one test than in six interviews.
The Contractor vs. Employee Question
For a first hire at an indie studio, hire a contractor unless you have a really good reason not to. I know that’s not the answer some people want, but it’s honest.
Employees mean payroll taxes, benefits obligations, state compliance headaches, and in some places, strong protections that make ending a bad fit slow and expensive. If you’re a two-person LLC with $80,000 in seed money or Kickstarter funds, you cannot afford to get an employment decision wrong.
Contractors give you flexibility. You scope a contract to a milestone, a feature, a vertical slice. If it works out, you expand. If it doesn’t, you pay out and move on. Deel or Gusto make contractor payments and 1099 generation straightforward for US studios; Deel handles international contractors well too.
One real exception: if you have meaningful funding (say, $500,000 or more), you’re building a team of five-plus, and you want someone deeply committed to long-term success, a full-time employee with equity makes sense. Just don’t skip the legal setup. Use Clerky or work with an actual games industry attorney (Zachary Strebeck is well-known in indie circles) to get your offer letters, IP assignment agreements, and contractor agreements locked in from day one.
Here’s the thing about IP: every single agreement, contractor or employee, needs a clear work-for-hire or IP assignment clause. This is the most common legal mistake first-time studio founders make. Code, art, music written on your dime belongs to your studio, in writing, before any file gets created.
Running the Actual Interview
Skip brain teasers. Skip “where do you see yourself in five years.” You’re not a Fortune 500 company and pretending to run a corporate hiring process will feel hollow to everyone in the room.
What actually matters for a small game team:
Can they work with uncertainty? Small indie projects change constantly. Scope shifts, design pivots, features get cut. Ask directly: “Tell me about a time a project you were on changed direction significantly. What was your reaction, and how did you adapt?” Candidates who describe pivots as exciting or at least manageable are different from candidates who describe them as frustrating or someone else’s fault.
How do they handle feedback? Show them something from your current build, ideally something you know has problems. Ask what they’d do differently. You want someone who engages critically with your work without cruelty and without false agreement. Both extremes break small teams.
Can they communicate asynchronously? If you’re working with a remote contractor, their Slack and Discord messages matter as much as their code. Ask about their preferred working style. Have they worked remotely? What tools did they use? Do they send long detailed updates or short check-ins?
References still matter. Ask for two people they shipped something with, not managers, collaborators. Ask those references one honest question: “Was there ever a point where they frustrated you, and how did they handle it?” That gets you real information. “Would you work with them again?” gets you yes or no.
What to Actually Pay
Sources
This is the section most guides skip because it’s awkward. Don’t be awkward. Money is information.
Contractor rates for game developers in the US in 2024 vary a lot. A junior Unity programmer with one shipped title runs $35-55/hour. A mid-level engineer with 3-5 years and solid portfolio sits at $65-100/hour. Senior generalists who know your stack deeply hit $120-150/hour or higher. Those numbers drop for people outside major metros and outside the US.
Revenue share deals are fine as a supplement to real pay but not as a substitute. “50% of profits when we launch” isn’t compensation. It’s a lottery ticket. If you don’t have budget to pay something real, be straight about that and find a co-founder instead of pretending it’s a job.
For tracking budget and contractor costs, a no-code spreadsheet works at the start. Once you’re managing multiple contractors, Notion with a proper template or Airtable keeps things organized without $50/month software costs. For project management once the hire’s made, Linear is genuinely great for small game dev teams. Simple enough for one or two people, structured enough that it doesn’t fall apart at ten.
Photo: Zayed Hossain via Pexels
