Take an existing game/genre, analyze its mechanics/emotional experience, and try to recreate it. This could be a straight one-to-one recreation as practice for your own benefit, or it could be attempting to put a unique "spin" on the genre to make your own game! This is a great way to begin a game dev career as you have an existing "end goal" to work towards, and you will be able to learn how the game's developers decided to build the game by making it yourself.

Genre "Rehash"

Working with a small team to begin a multi-month/multi-year game project? Not sure how to best structure the development cycle or how to organize a team? Not sure even how to even start? As I spent my graduate career and this past year post graduation building several small games in small teams, I can help to structure your team to work most efficiently, and keep every member feeling happy with the project. Of course, during this process we would also analyze your team's game from a design perspective throughout the project to try to make it as engaging and unique as possible!