Hi,
I'll share my experience with this. It will be a bit more than just answering your question because your thread title will likely attract many members asking this question in probable broader terms, like how can I make a living out of what I enjoy doing?
- for end products:
Your best bet is not to sell yourself as mastering a specific tool, but mastering Unity in general. A black-smith isn't advertising his work and expertize by saying he's using a special hammer, what counts is the end results. Show your end results, your cv doesn't matter, it's your body of work that will get you where you want.
- Within Unity community:
I got literally ALL my gigs, jobs, clients, by being hyper active on Unity and PlayMaker forums. I am still ranked at page 5 out of 30011 on Unity Answers!!
https://answers.unity.com/users/index.html?page=5&pageSize=35&sort=reputation and I haven't posted for years... this means that the mass of developers doesn't reach that level of sharing: you have rooms to make yourself stand out from the crowd.
People contact me because I answered their questions and ended up hiring me to finish the job, some lasted several years and I got to travel for work to many great places, and to this day I am a lucky Moderator for PlayMaker because Alex asked me to provide support for you guys because I was basically doing just that already and Alex noticed it.
I think you should no seek work, but instead become the de facto contact to reach for that work. If you like to work on a particular aspect of Unity, go all out, make a website/blog that describe in details your work, and it will eventually start to speak for itself and people are going to get back to you. You need to be humble, because some devs out there are killing it! I don't consider myself as a good developer, many coders would do a far better job at everything I do, but they are not me and the combination of my character, skills, attitude makes the difference in many cases. So don't give up because someone does a better job then you, do it still, learn form them, try to improve and bring what is unique about you on the table.
Real case: My excavator simulation:
http://www.fabrejean.net/projects/excavator/Before I jumped into Unity, I was using Adobe Director, and it clearly was dying. so I gave myself 30 days ( the pro license trial of Unity 3 at the time), to port an excavator simulator in Unity, if I could do something, then I was going to use Unity as my main development tool.
So I spend all of july month working on this excavator, and to this day, if you search "Unity Excavator", my forum thread is at the top. I made a website ( I tried to do my best there too, everything counts), I documented and shared the core of the components I used to achieve this, I answered questions, provided samples, etc etc.
The forum thread (
https://forum.unity.com/threads/excavator-simulation.66871/) I created is still popping up on google search at #1 out of 3 millions results...
This very humble and average work got me where I am today, a studio was looking for someone special for non games simulations, presentations of technical products, etc, and when he bumped into my simulator, he knew he found the right person, and contacted me, we are now doing private apps for major aerospace/automotive/defense corporate.
and I remember the look on peoples face when I was telling them I was doing an excavator simulator... like it's not a proper job or activity... this is just for fun as hobby... sure... let's see now how these people do, and how much they love their job now... but at the time I kind of had to agree with them for lack of better understanding on what the future was holding... Even at school, teachers would try to discourage me to take this path...
All that to say that if I actually wanted to get this job, I would have totally failed to find it ( and I did a lot of search after my university years...), so I made the job come to me instead by doing what I love the most and show it to everyone and not be shy on sharing how I made it. And I do not think that this was luck or like winning the lottery, you have to keep a positive and truthful attitude, create your chances and be ready when they knock on the door.
Make noise, release your work for free, it will pay off, don't be scared of that, make some paid assets sure, but that's a likely dead end for growth in my opinion. I mean the Asset store price tag is ridiculous... some assets worth litteraly several thousands of dollars, and you get it for $20 and people even complain... this is not viable unless you make a hit, which is rare and very expensive to produce.
So, it's a very contradictory situation, because I feel that if you try to make money instantly, then you limit yourself for a potential stable/sufficient income. You need to see long term. Easier said than done of course...
Bye,
Jean