2020 was for me a very rewarding year. I started freelancing on the 1st of January, and tried to pursue both a career in Game Dev and Software Dev at the same time.

This blog is a look-back at what 2020 has brought me and has taught me.

Where to start

I had this idea in my head that I could be of use to the game development scene because there were some apparent issues with working conditions, and I could help out with my knowledge from software development. This would be an easy thing to do, so I thought, because this would be more of a ‘sideway move’ where I could leverage my old profession, rather than having to learn a whole new skill. So I did some initial market research in November and December of 2019, and continued in January 2020.

This continued through January and a bit of February. I attended a game jam, got to a game dev conference and attended 2 game dev meetups. I wrote a few articles on my blog. And I met a lot of people during this time and talked with them about game dev.

However I learned quickly that I had made a lot of assumptions. First of all, I want to be a business and needed to make money. That is very hard with research and journalism: these are both difficult product to sell. On top of that: to be good at it I needed to have experience and I very much lacked actual experience with the industry working condition issues and writing about it. And the cherry on top was that it turned out that these toxic-working-environment-issues aren’t that common in the Netherlands.

So: you could say that I did the research and things turned out to be very well… problem solved 😀

Well… not all problems, because my main ‘problem’ is that I need to make money to pay the bills. I need something else to do.

On to: Plan B

When I started with GameFeelings, I already had planned to work 24 to 32 hours a week on software dev. At least for 3 years, until I had enough customers in freelance game dev to provide services to.

I landed a job with Strukton (through an intermediary) and enjoyed my work there as a backend software development specialist. It made good money, my first actual hard earned money as ‘a company’ of my own.

This ended abruptly by a let-go due to COVID hitting the streets. They had planned to utilize me for at least 2 months longer, but since they did not know what was coming at them they closed all flex contracts.

Renewed: Plan A

While working for Strukton I realized that I really did want to do actual game dev work. Strukton was ‘just sofware dev’ and I have been doing this for the last 10 years already. This was not my idea of how I wanted to fill my time while freelancing.

So this brought me to Escaperoom 071. This was the perfect entry for me into the game dev scene, or so it seemed. They needed someone cheap but with game dev experience and knows about how to make a multiplayer game.

I was really exited: within 5 months of my freelancing I landed my first actual game dev job, that I personally acquired by looking at the right places and talking to the right people.

My first ‘own’ freelance job turned out to be a massive learning, but not the way I expected. I really enjoyed ‘working on an actual game’. But the organization of the contracts was bad, and the project itself was very unstructured. I learned that while I love to do the actual coding, and my software dev skills transition nicely to game dev, the contracts and project management are not my thing.

Another consideration I had while working on this game dev contract, is that I concluded that I had made substantially easier money with software dev so far. It really did work out to be a ‘part time’ game dev and ‘part time’ software dev. My wife and I had to carefully look at our expenses, but the freedom was totally worth it.

Back to: Plan A

With COVID really hitting hard, even the software dev turned out to be having a difficult time. In all kinds of business the freelancers where the ones that had to search for new opportunities, so the market became very crowded very quickly. With that, hourly prices fell at least 15% and the working conditions became much more requiring.

I did not want to stop being my own boss and work 40 hours a week again for somebody else. And, if I took a freelance contract, I wanted to do this 24 to 32 hours max per week. That seemed to be something that ‘the market place approved of’. However, the ‘short, max 3 months, contracts’ was something the market said ‘nope’ to.

All in all I concluded that I would be better off working on my own games, while having freelance software development contracts as a main income (but for max 32 hours a week). It was sure to make me more happy: better working hours, working on games, and being my own boss.

Happy times

While working on my own games I lived the best times of 2020. While everyone was experiencing a rough year due to COVID including me, I at least had something to look forward to every day.

I started the year working on a small project with Bart. That quickly turned out to be too difficult to continue due to the whole COVID thing and personal energy levels. So i put this project on the shelf again.

I started working on a new game idea of my own. However it turned out to be very difficult to start a game project from scratch with my lack of project management skills and game design experience. Especially since I wanted to do it professionally and make money out of it, I had to take it serious. I think I overdid the seriousness part there, because it caused a lot of stress.

During the work on the various game related things I was a bit stressed but I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. I could do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. And I could spend time with my family whenever I deemed necessary.

With my wife working as a nurse at the hospitals lung ward, there was much more pressure on her to deliver due to COVID. So I was happy that I could be the ‘stay at home dad’ during this whole COVID thing.

Aaaaand, back to: Plan B

But with the end of the year approaching, the COVID thing became a dark cloud on the horizon again. This time however the money had dried up and I needed to get a new job before February 2021.

I really did not want to work for a boss again if things didn’t work out in February 2021, so I was extra motivated to look for alternatives. Another thing I had learned, was that I have very valuable experience in software dev that is worth a lot more money per hour than my game dev experience so far.

So I turned to the worldwide market to land a software dev contract myself, on my own turns. And that turned out to be waaaay more easy than I thought it would be. I got a contract at Tevent for a reasonable hourly pay, fully remote work, flexible hours, and only a minimum of 25 hours/week.

And that was the end of 2020! Happy new year everybody!

2020 In numbers

I like numbers, here are a few numbers of GameFeelings in 2020.

I did log 304 days of work:

• 6% writing articles
• 6% traveling and commuting
• 8% of administrative tasks like logging hours, planning, and setting up and changing my work place
• 11% talking to recruiters and doing all kinds of marketing for game dev
• 33% worked on my own projects
• 36% worked for clients

I started 12 of my own projects. Cancelled 8 of them. Completed 1. And 3 are still ongoing.

I attended 1 game development conference. I joined 1 game jam.

I release 1 game to 2 platforms. This game is ‘Gearful’. It was played 54 times on Itch.io and installed 5 times on Android.

‘Find the Gnome’ still sold some units, around 25. And I got 50 wishlist’s for it.

My Gamefeelings.com website: 863 visitors, 1615 views. I made 33 posts with 19,689 words in total.

My best content: The Jenkins Unity 3D CI/CD article with 207 views (released in January) with attached video, seconded by the same content but then applied to Azure DevOps with 147 views (released in August). Their YouTube statistics: Jenkins had 948 views with 3998 previews and 66 hours of content watched with a click-through of 13,3%, DevOps had 338 views with 1225 previews and 30,4 hours of content watched and a click-through of 8,2%.

Summary of my learnings

There are a few things I learned I want to share with you. I tell them from my perspective, but maybe it resonates with you. Think of your own learnings and accomplishments of 2020: even with the COVID disaster, 2020 was not a lost year.

• Family: to have a place to call home, to be able to reside in it/with them for days even when in lock-down, that is something to cherish.
• Having my own business: I really like the business side, being my own boss.
• Working on my own: I need other people around me, to stay mentally healthy and to let them do the work I am not good at. For instance, hiring a bookkeeper was one of my best decisions and worth every penny.
• Constant change of plans: It caused a lot of headache, but it lead me down the way of the least resistance. It learned me to let go of control, trust my own skills, and make more of the here-and-now.
• Inventing games: I don’t have to overdo it, I just need to make sure I can feed my family while I enjoy creating games. I will eventually get better at my craft, just have to give it time.
• Software dev: I am good at my craft, enjoy it, and can make good money with it. So I should continue doing this kind of work.
• Research and journalism: I don’t think this is my calling…
• Writing blogs: fun thing to do, really resonates with my way of thinking and structuring my thoughts. And it makes sure I stay on track with game dev.
• Making YouTube video’s about development: very time consuming.
• Escaperoom 071 project: I learned so much about communication and expectations. And how I could better trust my own gut feelings.
• Part time work: there are very few companies that like part time workers. Especially in software dev and game dev. If I want to work less than 32 hours a week on software dev, that is very hard to accomplish.
• Remote work: There were few to none Dutch companies that allowed remote work, but that (luckily) changed a lot during COVID. Still, they insist on physical contact being the norm. However, I discovered that globally oriented companies are much more freely structured when it comes to working times and thus the feasibility of remote work.

So, I am still searching for my place in all of game dev. But after one hell of a year, I am still in business with a healthy projection for the future. That alone is something I can be proud of.