What Kind of Business Do You Want?

Some choose freelancing as their main career path, while others do it part-time while holding a regular job, or on an intermittent basis to fulfill specific goals, like saving for a vacation or a down payment on a house. Whatever your situation, you must know the skills you can sell, and the companies likely to buy them.

Generalists

Generalist freelancers take on a variety of roles, often at a moment's notice, and routinely handle multiple projects of wildly different durations in parallel.

For example, in the past year, this author has received assignments in game design, translation, artificial intelligence, business consulting, book and magazine writing, Web design, press relations, teaching, and comedy writing. Some lasted 30 minutes and had to be completed within 24 hours; the longest took about 200 hours over a period of three months.

Generalists fare well in most environments. They can often rely on a small stable of regular clients to provide most of their income, particularly in geographical areas where few experienced developers live.

Content Specialists

3D artists, audio specialists, some programmers, scriptwriters, and other professionals who provide well-defined, isolated game components fall into this category. They can literally set up shop anywhere; well-designed character models, for example, can be plugged into an engine with a minimum of back and forth between freelancer and client, so it doesn't matter if the two are next door neighbors or if they live on different continents.

The amount of repeat business that a content specialist will receive varies a lot; an artist can work on a project for years, while a piece of code might be paid for once and used in several products. If your perspectives are weak in this regard, do not hesitate to take advantage of geographic freedom and market yourself far and wide.

Process Specialists

Producers, lead designers, and project salvage specialists are intricately involved in the corporate process. That makes it difficult for them to become freelancers; the ones I know are very senior people whose tremendous credentials overwhelm clients' natural reluctance to risk so much of their projects on external resources. Even then, process specialists must spend significant amounts of time in their clients' offices, interacting with the rest of the team. Thus, they tend to live in high-density game development areas, like California or Texas, or travel extensively.