How I Became a Full Time Game Developer

I was 21 years old sitting with my brother watching the indie game documentary I was a couple years into getting a printing degree from Clemson University and at that moment I realized I wanted to be just like Jonathan Blow and Edie McMillan I wanted to make independent games full-time suddenly everything about college everything about working in the real world at a desk job it sounded like a nightmare at that moment I was gonna do everything I possibly could to become an independent game developer my name is Thomas brush and I make indie games for a living I really wanted to share with you guys how exactly I got to this point making games full-time before we do that I do want to thank our sponsor because they can actually help you guys in your journey to become an indie game developer Skillshare is an online learning community for creatives where millions come together to take the next step in the creative journey for 2020 now

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probably experienced that rush when opening up our very first console on Christmas Day or that sense of wonder is suddenly banjo flips onto us back carried by Kazooie that sense of camaraderie or Brotherhood when playing Goldeneye on a tiny TV left over from the early 90s in four little squares growing up the video game world was a place to bond for me and my brothers it never really got old before of us sprinting up a wooden staircase to burst into the play room hop over the couch blow into the cartridge and start shooting each other no matter what was happening in the real world we could always rely on the fact that we'd hang out with each other after school in another dimension I'll be honest though I never really played video games with my brothers I was actually the youngest and I would sit there and just watch them play video games I wanted to figure it out how did rareware or Nintendo or

Neversoft how did those small teams make these amazing games thankfully my brother and I were given a piece of software called CorelDraw this was basically the 90s version of Photoshop it came with a clunky animation add-on called Corel move while my brothers sat watching Cartoon Network or playing in 64 Xbox I would sit across the room in Windows millennium Edition trying to recreate Dragon Ball Z honestly all I can remember from those days was the Twin Towers Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and making really crappy animations showing them to my family and thinking I was the next Walt Disney [Music] life was good and I felt like I could see my future I was gonna make video games and I was gonna be a filmmaker my confidence in being a game developer being an animator was solidified in high school I graduated from Carell move to this shiny new piece of software called

flash MX I bought a copy from a website called cheap software's comm with my dad's credit card - my dad's dismay it was more like a copy of a copy of flash MX from China but in the end I got it running and began to create some bizarre and sometimes cringe-worthy animations looking back it's no wonder it wasn't until graduation that I was able to find a girlfriend which actually ended up being my wife I guess she found something special in this scrawny newgrounds.com obsessed teenager I think I kind of got lucky because I was able to prove my skills to her when I released a small game called coma online to my surprise it received over 7 million plays as you can imagine my head got a little big and I felt I had made it I decided I'd go to college see what they knew and then jump right back into

game development [Music] so college was actually where the real world started to set in the money from coma and a few other flash games I made began to dry up and that's when I realized making indie games for a living was really hard I stuck with it though and spent most of my time either studying in my dorm watching Prison Break with my fiance or working on my next game on my little MacBook in the basement of the library it's kind of depressing looking back I wish I had made more friends went to a few parties maybe had that college experience but I couldn't let go of that dream there was always this ticking clock in my head it felt like time was running out to really solidify my career as a game dev well that clock eventually struck midnight and the time was up she was still in school and I knew I needed to provide for my new family so I took a

job at a business-to-business marketing firm as a graphic designer making about thirty seven thousand dollars a year this was pretty good money relative to what I was used to and my wife and I rented a little house a couple acres of land we started living in the real world but it didn't take long for me to begin feeling anxious and depressed after about a week I came home from work sat on the couch and started to cry I was trying to explain to my wife why making emails for tire companies in refrigeration companies was causing me to feel stuck to feel trapped it's weird though looking back because I was lucky enough to have a job at a really great company that treated me well I was lucky to be making money I was lucky to be married but like many of you there was something in me that was screaming to tell stories through video games [Music]

at that moment sitting on a couch with my wife that dream that self-assurance that one day I was gonna make video games for a living it came roaring back that's when I decided that at six o'clock in the morning I was gonna wake up before work and I was going to make Pinstripe I was gonna make it through lunch and then I was gonna make it in the evenings as well after three years of mustering up creative energy in the midst of being a full-time student then a full-time employee travelling across the country and participating in very small indie game competitions I was eventually ready to show the world Pinstripe my next game which was a story about a minister in hell of course it wasn't that easy I didn't just finish pinstripe and then launch it the game was riddled with bugs and it received terrible reviews before it launched from IGF and indicate judges it wasn't without a ton of quotes about failure

printed all over my cubicle until I realized that I was ready to muster up the courage to do a Kickstarter campaign I knew I needed to quit my job to be able to fully focus on making Pinstripe perfect so I needed some funding with the help of my sister-in-law and her camera some footage from unities documentary and my wife holding a laptop as a teleprompter I recorded a Kickstarter video in my parents backyard it wasn't perfect and I knew that it was kind of embarrassing asking for people's money especially friends and family and telling them that I was going to use their money to finish a project that was kind of clunky at the moment but I finished creating the Kickstarter campaign after several months and I was ready to launch it it was lunch time and I snuck down to the basement of the marketing agency I was working at and I was nervously waiting to click the launch button on the Kickstarter campaign and this really needed to work mainly because I knew my family and

friends they had watched me spend 3 to 4 years making this game and now I was asking for their help I clicked the launch button and honestly my jaw dropped within the first hour the campaign had raised over 7,000 dollars throughout the day I was obsessively refreshing the Kickstarter page on my phone and within the first 24 hours the campaign had exceeded its goal of $28,000 that night I knew I remember I looked at my wife and I said it's finally here I'm a full-time indie game developer with the help of my Kickstarter backers and a publisher I was able to finish pinstripe and release it on Steam and consoles to great reviews it's honestly been a wild ride ever since that day sometimes I feel like this is all a

glitch that it's not real and I'm gonna end up working in a cubicle somewhere but it's really only gotten better since that day I've just launched my second game called never song it's a game about a boy in a coma and it's got a 9 out of 10 on Steam from over 300 reviews and we're about to launch it on console and here's the thing every indie game devs path is going to be different for some indie game developers they release one game and they make a million bucks and they're set for others like myself it's a lengthy process of launching Kickstarter campaigns partnering with publishers relying on patreon support and even building a loyal audience with the help of some mega youtubers and that's perhaps a story for another time so I'm about to turn 30 and I'm sitting in my tiny little indie game studio and I could not be happier with my career things have been amazing and it still

doesn't feel real and looking back it's kind of a blur I always thought it would feel like landing a plane once you've landed you've landed and you've made it but it doesn't really work that way and that's what I want you to know making indie games is exactly that you're making them for me I don't ever just make a game and then stop it's a journey and it's hard and you keep changing and evolving it's exhausting you're going to cry and if you're married or dating you're gonna fight your family's gonna think you're crazy some people are gonna wonder what you're doing with your time but I truly believe that if you're hardworking if you're diligent if you're brave if you learn to take your failures and turn them into successes anywhere and that includes you can learn to make into games [Music]

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