Should You Quit Your Job To Make Indie Games?

I've been really looking forward to talking to you because you kind of have a like an untraditional way of being an indie game developer and you you've definitely taking a big risk sort of taking the leap of faith in going full-time Indie yeah I am so I went to school for accounting originally and I realized about a year and a half in that that was not what I wanted to do with my life so I I dropped out and as I was figuring out what to do my roommate in college we were playing World of Warcraft and he he was a programmer and he wrote a script to like automate playing World of Warcraft and I thought that was like the coolest thing ever so I I went to school for programming after that and pretty much like the first day I learned how to write a single line of code I was like okay I'm figuring out how to make games with this I started dabbling with like 2D like iPhone Android games but I never really released anything I actually finished a game but I just was like not confident enough to release it so I had the code side of things down but the hard part was the artwork so when I was doing 2D stuff I was kind of just like downloading sprad sheets and stuff like I couldn't really make it myself and then at some point I started learning like blender and modeling and for some reason that clicks like I'm much more proficient with 3D than I am with 2D in terms of creating artwork and yeah it's just kind of been a long journey going from 2D to 3D and it's been like 12

years of dabbling and hopefully finally releasing a game for the first time this year so you've jumped in you've quit your job the indie game industry is volatile and you're using your savings yeah do you recommend this uh no I absolutely do not recomend this no God please no honestly I think I probably I probably jumped into this at the worst possible time not necessarily for me but just for like what's going on in the world like I I went fulltime in August of last year which isn't that long ago but since then like generative AI has blown up the layoffs in the game industry has has blown up you can't go a day without seeing another thousand developers laid off Studio shutting down so it was kind of a horrible time for this and I'm sure the people making these like really decisions to lay people off and whatever know a lot more than I do so they know where the Market's going all this kind of stuff really awful time to to jump in and kind of take this risk but I never thought it was going to be easy and I never thought it was going to be risk-free the reason I made the decision was really not like a prudent financial decision it was more just about you know I've been working at the time about three and a half years I'd been working on the game coming up on four years now and working full-time

and doing this on the side it was just like you know I'm never going to finish this if if I don't get some of that time back my kind of day job was at a point where it was just kind of made sense to take a switch I couldn't really like imagine starting another job and actually starting on a positive note while also like working towards all these deadlines for the game so I was like you know what I'm going to give myself like about a year and I'm going to get this game done and then we'll see if the game does well and it's enough to fund another game so be it then you know I get to be a full-time Game Dev and and continue this kind of Journey if it comes out and it flops then I'll have to just go back to to being a softare developer so definitely don't follow my footsteps like it was not a smart decision at least financially but um I mean I've loved every day of it so if you're privileged enough to have the savings to fall back on and and you can afford to have a Miss if it doesn't come out it's like the best job in the world and uh yeah I figure this just gives me a better chance to potentially get to do it full-time than if I kind of have that cozy job to fall back on all the time so you're just in this position where you're like look it's now or never dude I don't think you're taking a risky it's really not that risky of a decision when you think about it it's like it's going

to be a year of your life and you're just going to go for it and make it happen I think it's really cool first off what are you carrying currently when it comes to the games creation what are the various talents that you have to cover so many things that sounds egotistical but it there's just so much stuff to do so all the development so I write every line of code there hasn't been a single line of code that wasn't written by me all the shaders are hand authored by me C and unity right CP and unity yep yep and hlsl for the shaders all the artwork I mean there there's assets as well uh but all the textures and everything uh or or at least at the bare minimum all the textures are redone the story the writing the directing the voice acting directing the composer directing everyone who's working on it which I think people kind of underestimate how much work that is as well just because you have people working for you doesn't mean that you're going to be as productive as you were before there is time spent kind of directing these things preparing whether it's like you know sending videos over to chat over whatever there's time spent on that a lot of the animation not all of it but I still do cuz it's something I want to get better at so it's something I do where it seems appropriate for me to do it and all the level design all the managing play test all that kind of stuff so there's a ton

of things um that you have to do and you kind of just pick them up as you go like you enjoy it oh yeah I love it I get bored like super easily the only thing I don't get bored of is writing code like I absolutely love digging into technical challenges but other than that like I get bored pretty easy so I love being able to kind of shift Focus every day so it's you know every Saturday my my voice actor comes over and we run through a whole bunch of stuff so there's a lot of writing involved with that directing sound editing all that kind of stuff and that kind of breaks up my week nicely why don't you go and explore a bit and I'll get the canoe out or right YouTube's another one where I can go every few weeks just kind of focus on the game and then when things are starting to kind of feel a little bit tired I can shift focus and kind of go on some YouTube stuff for a bit that's probably my favorite part of game development is just being able to jump around and and have all these different disciplines that you're kind of always learning and um improving in I just wanted to shift gears here and let's kind of just I wanted to sort of get you to discuss the process of making this game like the the technical side and also how you put your schedule together cuz a lot of people listening are probably wondering how they can make a game a lot people don't even know how to

make a game at all and they really want to get somebody who's doing it to sort of tell them the road map cuz there's thousands of tutorials on YouTube about how to do it what's your process from start to finish with this game What's it been yeah so I mean this game started as like a a silly little game Jam game for a weekend and it kind of just spiled out of control from there but in terms of tools and whatnot so I'm using Unity I don't think that that necessarily matters just pick an engine and start mastering it cuz it's going to take some time to be productive in that engine and I think that's more valuable than chasing you know the latest Trend or the latest in terms of like schedule and whatnot uh so I'm a morning person and for two to sleep my wife's a baker which means she gets up early so we get up at like 4:00 a.m. and that gives me tons of time to start working before you know the day job started so by the time I started my day job at like 9:00 it's already 4 hours of work in and I find for me personally like I'm just not going to get anything done after work so it's really important to like kind of prioritize that time prior to work and just make sure I'm getting things done kind of prioritizing myself over the day job now that I'm fulltime on the game I'm still getting up at 4:00 a.m. every day and I'm working till like 5:00 p.m. most days just cuz cuz I'm kind of like

doing a bit of crunch trying to get this thing done so it's like 12 12 13 hours most days so that's been a bit of a grind and uh I kind of follow um there's a great talk by David wayy who I know you're you've you've had on this podcast there's a great talk by him about no 0% days it's something I've followed kind of religiously since the start of this project what do you mean specifically by a 0% day a 0% day would be like you didn't do anything you didn't work on the game you didn't do any marketing you didn't do anything at all maybe just like sat around play video games or went with friends or something like that gotcha gotcha yeah so the idea is to just make sure you're getting something done so on the days where you're you just absolutely do not feel like doing anything I like to have like a bunch of tickets kind of in my backlog or little tasks in my backlog that are like five minute things like change the color of something and I'll kind of intentionally leave these things for myself because I find once you cross one thing off it kind of becomes contagious and you kind of like build momentum from there and over time that stuff just adds up right like there's a million 5 minute jobs in in game development so yeah even even getting a few of those done is always a big help by the way if you want to go deeper into all of this I have a ton of free workshops for you in the description I've got a free Workshop about how to make a K with just demo and

yes I've actually done this three different times how to get a publisher for your game or even my course about the handful of ways to make money as an indie you can check them all out below they're my treat to you all free I just want to see you succeed