working freelance tips and suggestions

[Lee3dee]

I received an offer to work on a game for a small local dev studio, but since I've always been salary, I never had any experience with freelance/contract. Anyone have any experience in this area, tips and tricks

thx

Lee

[Zacker]

Be sure to get a real salary for your work and not just some royality. Not that I have no anything about it though.

[Hourences]

Payment is higher than a normal salary you would get when you are really employed by them. Likely you are going to have to pay taxes yourself + other stuff, depends on country and situation tho

Make sure they pay regulary and not 1 payment after 6 months.

Ask how indepedent they expect you to be, like they might even ask you to get your own pc, that happens altho I would get afraid if they ask that

[zaphod]

just make sure you collect a tidy sum from it, they are paying you for the work + the money to live on in between contracts.

[Kosmo]

The work I have done as freelancer the hardest part is to get a big project done with what I have, as a one man "agency" I don't have the resources of a big company that has several prople doing different things, now I have to be a one man do it all machine. But often I have been in a situation where I have had to turn to a freelancer, usually I have bought stock photos to use on my ads and websites, or bought fonts and illustration when the deadline has been tight. I can do all that, but only when I have like 3 months time to do it.

Try to picture in your mind you doing the job, and try to set it on steps, it is very hard to estimate the time spent doing it, but it is easier when you got your plan laid down, as for me I have steps when creating a web page, step one: back end, step two: design, step three: beta test, step four: populating the site, now all these steps can be broken down to smaller steps but usually these are also the things that are also questions, do they have back end already, do they have a design or old design they want to use, are they going to populate the site themselfs and so on.

Usually when doing creative work, artists blocks are not uncommon, some days you just don't have any ideas, so make sure that you have something usefull to do when this happens.

Make sure that your salary, deadline and resources are all clear when taking a job, with these things laid down you should not have any big problems.