Wow! That's neat! I tried to get into gaming industry in the past (mainly tech support and QA) and I know how hard it can be. Did you follow some pattern when creating design docs? If so, where did you find an example, if that's not a secret? Good luck on tomorrow and don't forget to tell us how it went!
My road so far has been self-learning and trying to get any kind of test task from companies. I did a few, including QA test, a gameplay programmer in Unity task and a level design - all received ok-ish, but the companies always went for somebody with actual experience. And that makes sense, for me these tasks were experience points I needed.
Then I got a bit lucky and got in touch with somebody working in the industry. And during a month or so of "bootcamp" I created my actual first portfolio and I learned a ton from the feedback. Seriously, just one session resulted in more quality feedback that months of test challenges during recruitment process. Now I am hoping I will be able to forge this into actual breakthrough.
How did your journey go? From QA you can - in theory - go in multitude of directions, so it's a place I considered and kinda still consider as a starting point.
You're so right about the motivation pitfalls, and the value of consistent application. My problem is more having too much on the plate, but learning some lingos for biz will tie in with dev hobby somewhat.
Man, you have no idea. Let me tell you of my interests from IT perspective alone, not including gaming:
- programming
- gamedev
- web dev (was freelancing years ago)
- cybersecurity and hacking
- hardware
- lots of small things like troubleshooting, software testing etc.
And that's just IT. Now add to that constant passion for metal music (I swear I added like 20 new albums to my endless list of stuff-to-check-out), trying to learn Japanese, following SC2 esport scene (including from inside, as I am fortunate enough to know some people), gaming....
And that's not even all. I basically have a broad field of knowledge - but very shallow. It's both a blessing and a curse.
Add to that I am extremely lazy. Yeah, what can go wrong