My Personal Proposal

I'm Abel Oliván, 31 years old, and I've been building my own websites since I was 13 (obviously, at different levels of professional commitment over the years). My main profession and strongest skill has always been SEO, but working independently and ranking my own websites forced me to develop other skills along the way: content writing, web design (for many years I relied on WordPress, but in recent years I've expanded my knowledge to other frameworks like Astro), and some graphic design/branding (in this case, just enough to be functional).

This self-taught path means I'm not the "typical" profile you'd find applying for a position like this — I haven't worked for clients in web development, so I don't have a traditional portfolio to show (my web projects are private, focused on monetization through AdSense + SEO — a different context, but with directly transferable skills). That's why, to demonstrate my abilities, I've built several functional prototypes showcasing my capabilities for the position offered by Anego Studios. The work you've seen in the prototypes, analyses, and documents is the result of 4 days of work, roughly 20–25 hours in total.

I'm at a point in my career where I'm looking for new challenges, prioritizing passion over money (which is already covered by my personal SEO business). While exploring Vintage Story and its ecosystem, I came across a tweet from the CEO mentioning the job opening, and I couldn't resist putting together my own proposal. I've genuinely enjoyed the process — and even if just some part of the work in these prototypes and analyses proves useful to this fantastic indie project, that alone would make me happy.

Honestly, web development is not my main profession. But I do offer a skill set that very likely no other web developer candidate will have — one that happens to align quite well with the specific needs of several areas of this project:

After over a decade organizing and developing the content of all my websites, I've developed a strong analytical and strategic sense for how web content should be organized and presented. This skill would be particularly useful for the Mods, Wiki, and Blog/Devlog sections.

By monetizing all my web projects through AdSense, I've developed strong analytical and strategic capabilities around all the numbers and metrics that need to be optimized on a website: conversion rates, bounce rate, performance, time per visitor, impressions per visitor, etc. While there are differences between an ad-based conversion business and one where the conversion is a sale (in this case, the game), I believe this is a crucial skill for this project. Specifically, I see two key areas to focus on:

1. Increase the website's sales conversion rate — meaning that with the same number of visitors and interested people, a higher percentage of them actually buy the game.

2. Increase the total number of visitors — meaning improving user acquisition for the website, which is the main point of sale. Improving strategies around YouTube, X, and web content creation (such as a more polished devlog) would be the key focus areas.

Even a small improvement in these two areas could consistently increase game sales without any internal game processes needing to change (the game's development pace and update quality is outstanding — it just needs better external promotion, in my opinion).

While I'm no expert in fields like branding or social media marketing, I'm a reliable complement who learns fast, adapts, and knows exactly where his limits are. The clearest example is branding: I'm not able to develop a fully professional brand identity worthy of a project like this, but I can identify what's needed and what should be sourced externally. I expand on this idea in more detail in the Web Development Proposal section.

I'm very good at optimizing web performance (the current website's performance has significant room for improvement). My career in independent SEO forced me to learn how to optimize my websites' performance to the maximum — an extra edge over competitors — and many of my sites achieve a score of 100 across all PageSpeed metrics (or very close when the project's characteristics don't allow a perfect score). It's secondary compared to the other points I've mentioned, but I felt it was important to note.

I'm up to date with the current AI ecosystem, with a particular focus on Claude Code, which I've actively integrated into my workflows over the past 6 months. I keep learning every day, improving how I integrate it into my work processes. I don't use it as a replacement, but as a multiplier.

I've been a gamer since my teenage years. I'm starting to immerse myself in Vintage Story and its community (I have a playthrough planned with a friend). If I were to join the project, one of my top priorities would be to become a genuine expert on the game in order to maximize my understanding, so that my contributions would be as precise and informed as possible. Understanding what real users want is key (even though I can't represent every different type of person who might be interested in a game like this).

The functional prototypes I've developed are the best demonstration of my capabilities in this area. I believe they speak for themselves. Obviously, having dedicated a limited number of hours, there are many details that could be polished and improved. However, beyond time constraints, I think it's important to explain where the main limitations in the prototypes come from, as they stem from factors external to the web development itself:

To speed up the development of the different prototypes, I used multimedia assets found across different pages of the current website. Putting some care into creating custom assets could significantly improve the results shown in the prototypes. A custom trailer for the main page's Hero section (I used a fragment of the 2022 trailer, which is obviously not ideal) or screenshots specifically selected for each location would have a significant impact on the visual quality of the result.

I put all my effort into developing a branding proposal prior to building the different prototypes. While I'm pleased with the result (given that I'm not a professional in this field), the final outcome in web development depends heavily on this preliminary work. I'm comfortable building websites at a technical level, but I have my limitations in the "aesthetic" or branding field. Typically, branding and UI/UX are handled by a different professional, while the frontend developer focuses solely on bringing that design to life on the web (something I am fully capable of).

I've done some research to illustrate what I mean. Looking at the official Valheim website, you can see in the footer that the web design was handled by Fully Illustrated (I recommend checking out their branding work to understand what this kind of professional effort can bring to a website/project), while the web development that brings that design to life was done by CodeThirtyTwo. With professional design work like Fully Illustrated's, the visual quality of my output would improve dramatically (as is natural). I could handle the work equivalent to what the development studio does at a high performance level, but I'm light years away from what the design studio can offer (which is why I see an outstanding ROI in hiring a studio or independent professional to do this kind of work for the Vintage Story project).

I know the current opening at Anego Studios is for a Frontend Developer, and I'm applying for it with confidence that I can deliver strong results in that role. But I can't pass up the opportunity to pitch myself for a position that, while not explicitly listed in the job opening and hard to "define", I believe would unlock my full potential on this project.

I've been looking at the full Anego Studios team, and I believe a profile like mine could be an ideal complement across different areas — not just Vintage Story, but the Studio as a whole. It's hard to define in a few words or pigeonhole into a specific area what I could contribute, but it could be seen as a kind of versatile, multidisciplinary contributor who can take on different types of tasks and challenges, helping wherever I'm needed. Some concrete examples:

I could take charge of or assist in developing the web content across Anego Studios' different projects. Content development is without a doubt one of my strongest areas of expertise, after many years creating and organizing all the content for my SEO projects — focused primarily on search visibility and making content as useful as possible for the user.

My analytical and strategic capabilities shine in everything related to web analytics. I could analyze the website's metrics (the main point of sale) and take action to optimize key areas like the conversion rate, directly impacting sales and revenue.

I've noticed that beyond the main project, Vintage Story, the Studio has two additional projects (one of them with just a single person in development). In projects of this magnitude, unexpected and hard-to-plan tasks always come up — tasks for which there's no "truly defined" position. I thrive especially in that kind of diversity: I enjoy taking on all kinds of challenges, as long as I can identify that they're within my reach. And when something falls outside my capabilities — as happens with branding — I have no problem admitting it and proposing a better alternative than myself.