[nullish_signal]

I think the two most important things are Your Portfolio of Projects, and Who You Know. My first gamedev job (Unity/C#) was thanks to a friend who had just been hired in Design. He let me know they had an opening, and I sent them my application including links to a small fluid-based character controller, and during the interview the 3 guys had a lot of questions about it, and I was clearly very excited and deeply knowledgable about the project (ie, I had not stolen it).

I don't have any certs besides my 4-year degree in Computer Systems. As for Building Projects, look for problems you want to solve, have a grasp of what Language/Tools you will explore, and just Get Started.

chatGPT was very useful when I wanted to host a php forum, having tried and failed webdev multiple times. Great at linux owners/permissions/nginx, stumbled a bit with emacs php packages due to being out of date, led me on an infuriating logic loop until I resorted to Google->Stack Overflow.

Good Luck!