We always talk about software and degrees and how cool or passionate you need do be when starting out in #gamedev. But those aren't enough.

Here are some tips for soft skills and professionalism:

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- Keep your head down and focus on learning
- Ask all the questions, all the time
- Build your technical skills
- Work on your portfolio
- Communicate, communicate, communicate
- Create workflows and plans and share them with you team if needed

- Cut out or minimize unnecessary chatter on social media
- Keep distractions to the bare minimum
- Clarify and double check tasks and directions
- Move on when you're stuck
- Ask for help, doing so doesn't make you weak or stupid
- Respect your teammates time, they have work too

- Let your team know in advance if a task won't make the deadline
- Assign more time than you initially think you need for a task
- Keep meetings short and to the point
- Cut out noice from messages, be laconic
- Be kind, say please and thank you
- Listen to feedback

- Remove all ego out of the equation
- Resolve issues the moment they pop up
- Learn to apologise and move on
- Don't make people feel uncomfortable, keep that shit out of a workplace
- Don't assign blame to others
- Proving yourself doesn't mean working late or doing crunch

- Create a document and fill it daily with all the positive feedback your team gives you and use at appraisals and salary reviews
- Document your achievements and how you have accomplished difficult tasks

- Be proactive, supportive and helpful
- Take part in tasks outside your department (mocapping, voice recordings, playtests, etc.)
- Work is work, free time is free time, don't feel pressured to go to the pub with your team
- HR is not your friend but report anything serious

- Do not CC everyone on emails
- Create group chats if more than one person needs to know the content of the message
- Let all relevant parties know after a decision has been made or something changed
- Update your team with your work progress daily if needed

- Work smarter not harder
- Don't worry, you'll do better next time
- Take breaks
- We all started the same way, keep working on your skills
- Negotiate a better salary
- Work in stages. First stage, second stage, etc. and figure out how much is enough per stage

- Your first stage might looks like a second stage a year later and you will get there in half the time
- Collect a list of ideas that will help you achieve your tasks better and share them with your lead often

- If you work too hard expect that you will be dumped with more grunt work. Choose your work process or others will choose it for you
- Don't be too eager
- Say NO more often
- Say I can't, I need more time, I need more help, I need other department support

- Be yourself unless you're a dick
- Appreciate help from others and let them know
- Understand that games take a lot of time to make and that might alienate you from your work
- Directions change and you will iterate a lot
- Don't get too attached to your work

- You might not have as much creative input as you think
- Know when to share your ideas, office politics is a thing
- Making games does not equal playing games
- Don't join a company because it is prestige or made popular games, join them for their philosophies

- Learn from your mistakes
- Try to make positive change with your work, push for better
- Don't let anyone bully you
- Free overtime food is not an incentive to work more
- Prioritize your health/personal life over work

- Experienced developers can still be wrong
- Test before submitting anything
- Give proper names and descriptions
- Follow development standards no matter how tedious
- Takes notes when learning something new if it's not already documented

- Take initiatives and deliver
- Document your new systems, implementations, standards, etc. so the rest of the team learns easily
- You will spend a lot of the day doing tedious work
- Don't go into games because you want to be famous
- Quantity doesn't always equal quality

- Don't get into games because you want to be the idea person
- Get used to thinking "what does the game need?" and not what you want
- Don't be afraid of restrictions, they are what push creativity
- Ask for feedback often

- Know how to share feedback, "this is fucking shit" is not cool nor appropriate
- Be precise when giving feedback and explain your thoughts
- Don't be afraid to talk in meetings
- Sort out your email in folders and create rules for them
- Clean your inbox and be on top of it

- Don't promise something if you can't deliver
- Be reliable, deliver your promises
- Do not mansplain but mentor people if they need help
- Take your lunch break, 5 more minutes turn into 30 and then it's over
- Ask for a bonus

- When you assign tasks/bugs to other departments be as precise as possible in your description, add all necessary logs and debug + screenshots/videos
- Make sure you ask your lead/teammates about an issue before assigning anything to another department

- Make sure your lead knows if someone assigns a task/bug straight to you
- Don't panic if you get bugs that are A class priority, sometimes it's a simple fix
- You might spend your mornings passing over tasks (that were passed to you) to the correct departments

- Other departments will break your content, that's no reason to get angry. Communicate on creating a more suitable workflow
- Having more bugs doesn't mean you are bad at your work
- But sometimes it also does, know the difference

- Make sure when you submit your work you watch over the build status to fix any errors ASAP
- Do not submit anything late in the day because you might get errors and then you will need to stay overtime to fix them
- Keep your submits clean and revertible

- Depending on your tasks, you might want to submit them all together or separately. Case by case basis
- Never submit anything broken
- If you need a file but it's being used by another person let them know so you don't end up working on the same task or override changes