Does Indie Game Dev Get Any Easier?

this has been a really enjoyable conversation and the question i've been wanting to ask you this whole time is how does it feel you mentioned you are married how does it feel being married having bills to pay but knowing this is your full-time gig and you've got money in the bank how does that feel it's a little bit stressful to be honest because of the way like the game sales are so um i don't know they spike so you get this big like lump sum of money and then it's like nothing and then maybe you get another spike and it's like nothing well i have this like lump sum of money that i'm sitting with but it's like always going down yeah so like with all my bills and things my my wife is in school so we're paying for that and so there's like this constant stress of

like okay i need to like get the mobile app out to like get more income whereas you know having a steady stream of income you can kind of budget and say like okay if i spend this much per month i can like just sustain myself forever whereas i'm like okay i have this many months till i'm out of money yeah you know it i wish i could encourage you and say that it'll change it doesn't change at least it hasn't for me uh uh what i mean is the there's always a desire in your well for me i'll speak speak about my position there's always a desire to grow and to keep making increase income increase your team size increase the scope of the project so as the scope of the project increases and the amount of people you're paying and all that then suddenly you know that you would think oh my freedom my income and my

income level it's making me feel more free but the truth is is that as the project scope increases you know that that tight feeling it's still there it's still with you but i will say your brain gets used to it and you just get a thicker skin you get calloused and that's a good thing because you know if you're going to be a business owner and that's what you are if you're going to be an entrepreneur you have to be okay with this constant feeling of transition and it's the j the journey never ends it really doesn't um maybe one day it will i i don't but i think if you're gonna be an entrepreneur you need to be okay with that journey and you'll get used to it you know yeah that's that's helpful um but yeah i think you were saying like that there is a trade-off between like

you the freedom you have and the scope of the game yeah like the more people that are involved the less freedom you have but um i definitely would like to to work in a team eventually just because working by yourself um it can be lonely and stressful which i know you've talked about in your in some of your videos you have why i'm never going solo again yeah it's lonely it's uh the loneliness isn't really the worst because i have kids and i have a wife and a dog and so i i'll go downstairs and hang out with them so i'm not too lonely necessarily what i found is i can't keep coding and keep developing um i'm just i'm only 31 but i feel like i'm so i feel tired and old

uh so i'm just like it's such a great feeling when i reach out to somebody and i'm like hey you want to work part-time on this project for six months or something and they're like yeah i'd love to i'm like oh yes so i can just give them a task list of things like you you've got probably a list of bugs in your head right of all these things you got to fix and all these features what if you just wrote a list and then you sent it to somebody who wanted to do it like that's how it feels it's great so you just send this list of things that you need and they're happy they're so thrilled to work on the project my team i i assume guys that you like working on the project they seem to really enjoy it so i just i'm right now i'm doing project management art direction and project management and it's such a good feeling because you can go you can really look at your game from a bird's eye view and really see like all of the idiosyncrasies of what it should be doing how it should be playing and so you can really focus on game feel and game play but when you're in the

thick of it and when you're like doing the code if you go man man i really wish that that enemy like not only did do i wish it would like blow up in blood sprays everywhere but i'd really love some brains to blow out of the enemy as well well when you're like in the middle of a ton of other bugs and a ton of other features and you're working on everything you're like i'm not gonna do that that's ridiculous that's gonna take forever but when you're an art director you can go okay i'm gonna give that to this person and i really i really wanna see that and so you're you're not emotionally attached to the stress of your game and the stress of developing stuff um now it sounds like i'm a bad person because i'm just putting all that stress on one person that's not that's not what i'm saying what i'm saying is you have like multiple people working on something and so you can give it to people who want to do that someone might want to do the blood and the brains you know and someone might want to handle the bugs so yeah i think i noticed that you with

your your dog game you had a stream where the whole stream was focused on this little the like accent when the the area title shut up yeah you were like animating that out and i'm like man i would never have time for that yeah and that's what i was saying earlier when you and i are very different is i'm a very visual person like visuals are so important to me and i'll often get lost in those um and so it's great to have people like you it's great to have people like me and i think as you as you grow in your studio and maybe one day like you work with apple arcade they might say hey we want some more graphics and more colors and more visuals in your games i can imagine apple would probably say that about this game um uh you'd have to convince them that black and white is great but they would probably selling points well you know that that's i know

i know how people in higher ups how how higher ups are and that includes me uh when i'm looking at a game i'm like i'm i'm not willing to well no pun intended roll the dice and say black and white is going to be fine let's take the risk so you'd have to do some convincing there but i guess my point is is your team size will probably grow as you continue to grow and you can lean on your fortes and then offset all the things that you don't really care about you know by the way guys feel free to download my free 2d game kit below it's totally free it's my treat to you i used this exact 2d game kit to make a game for pewdiepie in 14 days and then i got to play it in front of his subscribers which was really awesome so download that use it however you want it's my treat to you yeah okay