What they don't tell you about being a game developer
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n.b. This is broadly true of all software businesses, not just video games. (Though I think running a software business is in many, many important respects easier than running a software business which makes video games.)
n.b. #2: This is also broadly true of many businesses which have, shall we say, anomalously high status. "I love cooking... I should open a restaurant! Then I'll have total artistic freedom to serve the food the way it should be made! And every day will be totally awesome!" <-- Not predictive of successful restaurateurs.
That way you don't burn through your life savings, and you're very much aware of the day to day. Bonus points if you've had failures in between your successes. Patrick is dead on here - it's not all roses.
If you can't succeed doing it for 10-20 hours a week as a hobby, it's doubtful working even 80 hours will work. Game development is sort of like being a musician. If nobody likes your songs, you can't make up for it in volume.
Game development is an irrational choice in terms of return on investment. Patrick is also dead on here. Even the successful developers would have made an order of magnitude more money if they had applied themselves equally and had the same luck in other industries.
You have to genuinely find the prospect of working on your craft full time more important than financial returns. And having the perseverance to hone your skills and produce successful games in your spare time, even if it takes years, is a good litmus test for that.
(I'm awkwardly referring to patio11 by his name even though I was replying to him to differentiate the you [him] from the you [in general]).
Not necessarily. Speaking for myself, sometimes it's all or nothing. I can't imagine having the same enthusiasm and persistence for a hobby than for a full-time effort, particularly if the latter involved burning a few bridges.
I'm not arguing it's rational, or that one should blow one's savings on it, but sometimes full-time is your only choice.
Development of even a simple game takes so much time I don't know how practical it is on 10 hours a week. Game studios have armies of employed people on 60+ hours a week each.
You can easily make a decent Flash game or experimental iPhone game part time. My first Flash game, with over 200 million plays, was made in two weeks including the time it took to learn Flash.
The additional hours will get eaten up by business stuff and maintenance once you're full time anyway.
I dogfooded my own advice, for what it's worth.
http://www.miniclip.com/games/stunt-pilot/en/
Two people, two weeks, normal working hours (Coffee Hero was an absurd crunch).
You may or may not have heard of the 48-hour game development event GameJam? http://globalgamejam.org It's possible to create something playable even in that time.
Also, Minecraft was originally developed part-time, according to Wikipedia.
Working on something serious part-time is hard, and I'm impressed by people who manage it. But it's doable.
Game studios that employ armies of developers usually have tons of artists and spend ridiculous amount of time on graphics and assets. That's why a massively complex game like dwarffortress are never created. So there's tons of niches for complex games with ASCII graphics. (Sorry, pixel arts also takes ton of time)
As everyone else already said, control your scope or otherwise you never finish the game. Dwarffortress got where it is today by simply not aiming for great 3D graphics.
Also, Dwarf Fortress isn't done yet. It quite possibly ends with beautiful procedurally generated graphics (though I can't imagine that would happen with Tarn keeping it a solo operation.)
Love it.
"Bitter Brew: I opened a charming neighborhood coffee shop. Then it destroyed my life."
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/a_fine_whine/2005/12/bitt...
I'm a professional filmmaker. I happen to also be the kind of person who hears the phrase "owner/operator of a taco truck" and immediately thinks "ooh, that sounds cool. I'd need to optimise the menu to minimise ingredient costs, obviously, and - ooh - I wonder if I could use extremely locally targeted Adwords stuff to market it and -"
(I've never even eaten a taco. )
Nonetheless, I also know a lot of other people who make films. Many of them don't have the particular bit of their brain that automatically starts writing a business plan when it hears any cool idea. However, they still make films - often really good films - and enjoy it. Sometimes they enjoy, or at least appear to enjoy, making their movies more than I do.
A very large number of those people also have an actual bill-paying job.
There's nothing wrong with creating just for the love of it. "Amateur" - one who engages in an activity for the love of it - is not a dirty word, and contrary to popular belief is not automatically inferior to "professional". You can achieve a pretty astonishingly large output if you're focused - I have a friend who was averaging >1 (published) novel a year whilst also running his startup. You can create great work. And you don't have to make the inevitable compromises that you do have to make if job #1 is "make enough money off this thing to live".
You seriously need to fix this.
Or, next time you're in Spain, you can find a taco place there. There are a lot of Latin Americans there (mostly Ecuadorians, though), and they'll probably be able to serve you excellent tacos.
It's important to quickly get desensitized to this, because if you're even moderately successful, the volume of YouTube quality feedback directed at your very own pride and joy can quickly become overwhelming.
The really mean stuff never bothered me, nor the comments that seemed like they were Markov chain generated.
My biggest weakness was always idiocy - and trust me, I picked the wrong profession for that. Comments in the form of:
Great game! (rating set to 1/5)
Clone of [shitty clone of my game]
How do you shoot??? (rating set to 1/5) (game has no weapons)
[complaint about another game on the front page that day] (rating 1/5)
Got [incredibly low score]!!! (game has global high score functionality)
I bought this where do I download (game not for sale)
There should be a website aggregating stuff like this. It would cheer me up.
And yes, if you're doing any kind of work that you pour your personality into, you need to develop a rock-steady sense of self-esteem, or it will destroy you.
Reminded me of the Weekend Web series on Something Awful, so I went there and watched a few. They're funny, but almost too crass for my taste (so I won't post a link here). I guess I'm getting old.
Jesus, the stuff I watched as a youngling!
If you're an Android developer:
1/5: Unstable garbage. Constantly force closes on my
overclocked phone running nightly builds - patched over
with a custom kernel.
Sigh, but we can laugh about it: https://plus.google.com/106913700595933476859/posts
Lots of this is applicable to founding a startup too. Good advice tbh.
Here's a funny quote from him:
why do you have the best parking spot? John Lasseter "Because my car hasn't moved in 3 days"
But, I would move on too.
Whats the name of the documentary btw ?
But Pixar wasn't all roses either - during the tight production of Toy Story 2 (because they changed almost all of the story and had to rush it for christmas), a couple (who were both animators) forgot that their 1-year old was in the car (and not in the day care!), and the girl was there for almost 10 hours... She lived, but still a pretty horrible story.
The source for this unpleasant anecdote is [2]. It's a long talk by Ed Catmull, but I can't recommend it enough. It's really, really awesome.
Success hides problems (Ed Catmull)
Still, Pixar Story is a great documentary really, and if you have the chance read the book as well.
The audiobook version, I think. I got it for Steve Jobs parts, but the whole book is, as you say, we'll worth a read.
http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Indie_Game_The_Movie/70229...
about indie games
Or maybe you're working in the wrong industry. The cynic in me cannot help but label enthusiasm for creation of games as a severe economic handicap - one that many companies have no qualms taking advantage of. You love games? That's great, you'll also love unpaid overtime.
Optimism is good but I think this is the wrong kind of optimism. Especially the part about people who rip on the game will buy it any way. Besides the whole piracy thing, what's more likely is that people just won't care. In this world of increasing choices, it's more likely you'll be ignored rather than either hated or loved
It completely obscures the content when I zoom in to read the text.
Why do so many sites do have annoying behaviour?
It should. "Marketing" details like that will make as much or more difference in the game's success as the quality of the game itself. Go add this NOW, before the Hacker News effect tails off.
Even if one is indie it would seem sensible to treat it like a business, and make the ponies-and-handbags games until there's enough cash to make whatever one wants and damn the commercial viability.
When I was 20, I actually had a chance to work on MechWarrior 3. After the interview process, I decided to run very, very far away and to never consider it.
I'm 30 now, and actually have been working on a game for the better part of 8 months. My mindset is that it's a hobby that has a small chance of making enough money to live on, but I've set things up to ensure I can actually dedicate real amounts of time to it periodically. Rather that quit my day job, I moved into the consulting business (thanks to folks like patio11) to provide a financial runway for what I would prefer doing (making video games). Right now the balance is 7 months full-time consulting, 5 months making video games. However, (again, thanks to patio) I know I'm undercharging and as I'm able to raise my rate that will shift more to 5/7 or 4/8 over the next 18 months. I already have customers waiting in the pipeline that are willing to pay the new rate as soon as I'm available.
Oddly enough, my current customer is a AAA video game studio, and I've a few friends in the industry as well (also mostly at AAA studios). Personally I couldn't deal with the idea of surrendering so much creative input. There's also the fact that they literally can't pay me enough to work there. I will say that by and large the industry is filled with a tremendously nice group of passionate folks, but I "wouldn't want to live there".
It's a fickle market though, which is why I decided to mitigate the financial risk of financially unsuccessful projects by funding it with a consulting day job. The consulting affords the video game making. For me, the financial risk would've been real. I'm developing on a platform that's not taken seriously, with an art style that might put off hardcores, but with hardcore gameplay and a simple monetization strategy (you buy the app. There'll be some expansion packs, but that's it) and no IAP currency nonsense. Things a normal studio would never dare try.
Agreed on the fickle idea, as well as trying gameplay that a normal studio would never touch as it's not been proven. All I can say is keep up the effort - if its enjoyable and interesting then it will succeed. Looking forward to seeing the completed product, and I wish me, you and everyone else pushing out interesting Indi games massive luck!
Cant stress this enough. Start with the simplest possible game project to test out the waters! You will be to naive and want to tackle big things but you will probably regret that. Theres alot to be learned by starting small and then create something bigger once you have some experience with the market.
This applies to all creative "package" projects. Learn to ship.
Is this a common detail with game devs? With most jobs? It sounds awful.
They even got their knickers in a twist when they learned I work on my own projects and help out friends and OSS, in my own time, on my own equipment, but there's not thing one they can do about it.
I've also had a friend be told that he would need to give up his personal, part time, income generating website in order to take a particular job (not here). The website business was not in competition with or even the same general industry as the job.
Personally, I would just ignore clauses like this. I know of no examples of stuff like this ever being held up in court. At least not at our level. You might have to worry if you were an executive or something.
They really believe that if you are working on something then you should be working on something for them 24/7 (without overtime, of course)
{long personal crap fest story here}
I think these contracts, for anyone, junior, senior, or exec, are quite unproductive. Outside stimulation makes us, programmers and designers, better at what we do.
If I only ever worked on work related projects, I wouldn't be able to provide the kind of input I'm paid for. The contract writers know this, when they stop to think about it, but they are very scared.
Because, if I had requirements like that in my contract, I don't think I could work for that company, even if I were in very real need of money. I have entrepreneal plans of my own, and they'd start out as just moonlighting.
It depends. If you live in California, you are protected by the California Code, section 2870.
http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=lab...
It's a bit difficult to summarize, but basically something you do on your own time, without using any equipment supplied by your employer, that is not related to something your employer is planning on doing, and doesn't use any trade secrets, can be yours even if you are a salaried employee. The "trade secrets" clause is probably the hardest to meet, since it's easy to claim that something was a trade secret in retrospect. If you work for a megacorp, the "planning on doing" bit may be problematic as well.
You almost certainly cannot use these protections to work on games in your spare time if you are a game developer. But it can be helpful for working on unrelated projects, including open source ones. If you really want to do your own thing, contracting provides strong protections.
If you live in another state, you probably are bound by whatever pound-me-in-the-ass contract your employer drew up, which almost certainly assigns copyright and patent of everything you do to them.
Which is ironic, given the amount of work I've done for them out of hours.
Stop the presses!