Author: Erik_de_Roos

This is an article in the ‘Behind the scenes’ category where I shed some light on what it takes to make games. I warn you: they are real, these articles might discourage you to develop games yourself.

As I see it now, there are 3 ways of starting a game company. They vary greatly in the change of success, but they all have their own dislikes.

• Find an investor
• On your own
• Just do something

I thought I did the ‘on your own’ kind of starting up a game company. But in reality it was more of the ‘just do something’. It did bring me a lot of experience, but the result wasn’t me being independent and having a job in my own game company.

Don’t get me wrong, I value the experience greatly, but if you (like me) want to get more out of it than experience alone… you have to do things differently.

Option 1: find an investor

• Catch
  • Build on trust.
  • Money injections on various moments in the development cycle.
  • You need to invest your own money and love time, the investments acts as levers for more success.
    
  • Biggest change of success, if you know what you are doing.
• Identifying characteristics
  • At least 1 dedicated core team, investors must be able to trust them in being able to deliver.
  • Your daily job.
  • Clear product goal and product vision (for this and future products).
  • You have ample and solid evidence you are making games for markets that want these game.
  • Investors have control over your company and products.
  • 1+ years of development per product.
  • Big budget for marketing.

Option 2: On your own

• On your own
• Catch
  • In theory fun, in practice not that good. You don’t know when you can support yourself or your family. Brings big issues with timemanagement.
  • The invested time is not worth it (time vs gains) for a long time.
  • In the end you have very few financial means, change of a (even small) success is small.
  • If it works you have full control and are completely self sufficient.
• Identifying characteristics
  • Part time (or dependent on cheap householding services of others like relatives).
  • Many small games.
  • Max half a year dev time per product.
  • Becoming a master in a niche (genre/style).
  • Small but dedicated fanbase.

One minor detail: the person in the video above made his fame before and in the Indy Apoctalyps. Things are different now.

Option 3: Just do something

• Just do something
• Catch
  • Fiddling around.
  • Watch out with what you think what you are doing: it is very easy to get lost thinking that you are making something great.
  • Very very few people are able to make money this way. Although we know the examples (I look at you flappybird) these are extremely rare compared to the amount of people that tried. Just buy a lottery ticket, you then at least know your chance.
• Identifying characteristics
  • You are just doing something.

This is an article in the ‘Behind the scenes’ category where I shed some light on what it takes to make games. I warn you: they are real, these articles might discourage you to develop games yourself.

“I have changed, and I really like my new self.”

This line could be from a self-help blog or another source of talk-to-the-mouth style information source.
But no, it is really here on this blog on games of GameFeelings.

I will give you an insight in my latest discoveries on how to better manage yourself when doing big projects, and what impact it has on me while delivering Find the Gnome.

Short introduction

For those who did not know it: I’m a guy, 30, married, dad to 2 kids, has a full-time job as a software developer, I like playing computer games in my spare time, I like to renovate my house… and I want to develop computer games.

This game I’m developing, Find the gnome, is my first game. I am using the development of this game to learn how to better develop games.

Reality

Being a married man and dad to 2 is a daytime job on its own. And then there is my ‘real’ job of being a software developer, with all the con’s attached to it: needing to stay relevant, additional meetings outside office hours…

So this ‘game development’ is more of a love work. I need to really like it to be able to get the needed hours into it, but to also get the needed amount of relaxation and the needed sense of achievement out of it.

Reality is that nothing comes for free. And that some things in life are more important to you than other things. And that everything always ends in a trade-off.

Pushing harder

But I didn’t want the trade-off. I want it all, and I wanted to earn it. So I just pushed for it.

I needed more experience? I tried something a lot. I needed new skills? I tried to make it my own. I wanted the game to be good? I tried to get every aspect of the game right. I wanted to get even better? I tried to get a good team of people around me to show me the good and the bad.

It did work out for me. For a while. You can see this in version v0.2 and v0.3. There you see a confident me trying to push for it, making every version increase even better than the previous increase.

Managing yourself

So there I was, working my ass off, and it suddenly stroke me: I wasn’t paying attention. I wasn’t listening to my body, I wasn’t on the look-out for easy shortcuts to just reduce the amount of work to do.

For not listening to my body, I got myself nearly burned-out. And that shortcut thing was very vague to me: I knew I needed something like that but it sounded like an empty promise to me.

At that moment in time I was also at some other crossroads in life. I was in therapy because of earlier near-burnout issues, I was desperately searching for new goals in my ‘real life’ job, at home my wife was going trough some near-burnout issues herself.

I wasn’t paying attention… the shortcuts were all the time right in front of me:
It’s all about priorities. About letting go. About ‘going with the flow’. ‘Trusting your gut feelings’. ‘Doing things you love to do’. ‘Listening to your heart’. ‘Clearly communicating your needs to others’. ‘Experience takes time’. ‘You need to fail to learn and/or progress’…

The world is full with books, movies, coaches, religions… people. The best they can do is teaching you something of yourself.

That enabled me to start managing myself. And then to take action. And cut in the workload of life and then to find those things that will keep me going.

Back to the subject

So, what has this to do with the game? I promised you all a game!? I should just deliver on that promise, shouldn’t I? With the exact content as described in all blog posts and al comments please… And I need to stop talking about ‘managing yourself’. In the time I took by writing this blog post I could have completed a new gnome model!

Yes that is true. But no that is not the right thing to do. Not at this moment.

Watch this, in version v0.4 you see mee finding out that the game is not the game I wanted it to be. I found out that for me, to love building the game, it needed to be something else. And while iterating on my new idea’s, I also found out that I had enormous scope creep in the project starting from the earliest versions. And right after the v0.4 release I took a break to do some home improvements (yay, new kitchen!) and I realized how much I was demanding from my body.

So I picked a new pace. That’s what’s visible in my last post.

Back to the future

This new pace is one I can sustain for a long time. I will finish Find the Gnome, that’s a feat I really want to accomplish. And then I really like to get on a new idea.

There is one thing left I like to add: I know what I like about building games. Support old ones (20% of my time), build new ones (50% of my time) and spend the remainder on company related things.

“I have changed, and I really like my new self.”