Objective achieved 
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Iām only in it for the women, but thatās not on the poll
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I donāt see an option for āYes, but not for ten hours everyday if I donāt feel like it, and Iām my own bossā?
Oh wait, I guess Iām echoing a previous post 
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OK Cliffy B 
Iām not sure I really want to know, but anyway howās that working out for ya?
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Not great, but it may be for certain reasons
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I most likely wonāt continue doing it after I release this title. Way too much work.
But I gotta get this mofo done already, good lord. Fighting an uphill battle against the odds is fun and all, but I am pretty done with having to compromise all the time, finding work arounds for everything, trying to find some way to work a narrative around limited, often crappy art, etc.
The work itself isnāt bad, but being wildly, wildly under funded and having to scramble constantly and jerry rig everything is just too annoying.
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LMAO, the ultimate way to be a misanthropeā¦ Donāt shower.
Iāll shorten this downā¦ Changing a camera perspective can make all the difference. In terms of art quality, time needed, optimisation, expectation and complexity etc.
For e.g. a top down game like torchlight is much more ācoderā focussed than my Sci-Fi FPS thingy or your 3D thingy (no innuendo there).
If youāre working in a small team or as a lone dev, youāve got to be kind of multi-talented these days. I wonder how far you can actually get in a 3D FPS / RPG without being at least competent in terms of art?
I say no matter the challenge give it a proper go, itās all part of the journey.
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It gets better ! Or so Iāve been told.
You might get a post launch rush that keeps you coming back -
Your next idea that pushes you to form a small team where you regularly are managing people coming and going cleaning up content, and moving forward while doing the same stuff, but with more experience doing it.
Then post launch rush -
next idea
ā¦
ā¦
ā¦
.
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The only way I would consider another game is if I make a dump truck full of money and can hire a good artist full time for the duration.
Otherwise there are just too many dumb and unfortunate compromises.
Itās just not really worth the huge time investment unless you can produce something high quality, and realistically without a skilled, dedicated, professional team the quality suffers too much. So either Iāll use the game as portfolio piece to join a company thatās hopefully doing good work, or I maybe back to writing trading systems or something.
What I really want to do is have lots of money and get tons of ego-fuel from my adoring fan base. And if thatās wrong, then I donāt want to be right.
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#1 priority for me is eventually working for myself. I donāt feel like as you get older you can rely on stable employment, seen too many companies axe my friends during RIFs and watch them scramble to get new crappy jobs until they are just kind of biding time until retirement at jobs they hate.
Iām working on #1(not gamedev though gaming related). I think gamedev as a hobby probably suits me better because quite honestly I would quit after the first crunch I hear about in that world. Been there done that, now Iāve got a kid and other crap to do besides work. True solo indie gamedev would interest me but I donāt think I could support myself on it, so maybe the question is do you want to do gamedev for others or for yourself.
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Iāve spoken to Sara about this (Iāve been in Copenhagen this week getting up to speed!) and we agree itās an interesting point and something we may consider for the forum overhaul in the future. I donāt want to make promises but we will at the very least discuss it
In the mean time, if someone would like to start a thread to contain biz talk in General Discussion, we can make it into a pinned post.
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I write a game because I always wanted to write a game, donāt expect to make much money with it, I just want it to be something unique that people would want to play.
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But while everyone was making games. Our robots slaves would take care of all the manual labour so it would all be fine?
Funnily enough, I watched a Star Trek episode where theyād become so technically advanced stories were a form of currency. Maybe itāll get to that point eventually?
Like anything, it depends on where you work, and at what level. It is still a creative industry, not an assembly line. Certainly on the massive games there are entry level type positions, but if you donāt have experience, you have to start somewhere. If you are at professional level, there really arenāt ābossesā breathing down your neck, at least not in a traditional sense. Certainly there are producers and project managers who keep track of schedules and progress, but their role is more to facilitate the developers.
To better illustrate, here is how I (we) work:
We do two week sprints, meaning we plan everything basically two weeks at a time. (Anything bigger than two weeks is broken up.) At the beginning of each sprint each pod and/or discipline meet to plan and divide up the tasks. Any task that I take on, I provide a time estimate and any requirements. I take on roughly 60 hours of work, leaving another 20 for padding, meetings and fires. (itās never perfect). We do have to meet deadlines, but we are the ones who determine those deadlines. (in that way, it is similar to contracting, we provide an estimate and are expected to deliver on that estimate) If there is too much that is unknown, and canāt give an accurate estimate, then we have to plan time to do exploration/prototyping to find out how it will be done. (a lot of my work involves of that) If anything goes sideways, or I get blocked, my producer is there to sort it out. At the end of the day, we all have the same goal. Itās much like any other professional creative job, weāre not punching a time-clock and warming seats. We are paid to be creative. Our team picks the projects we do, and have pretty much full control over them. Though since the are all IP based, art and story have to be approved by the teams that own them. But we have been working with them long enough, that it is rarely an issue.
Iāve done the indie thing, small teams/studios and large. All have been good times. In the rare cases they werenāt, I left. I never saw the point in doing something or staying somewhere I didnāt enjoy. My current team are some the most fantasic people, some I have known and worked with on and off with for over a decade. For this kind of work, its all about your team. Sure, some days are rough, but in context, itās pretty hard to complain too seriously.
For me, it is as @aer0ace said, itās is my passion. I canāt say I āloveā every single minute of it, but who can say that about anything? I love the work, and it constantly varies. Sometimes several times a day. This job is not only is a great fit for my ADHD, it often relies on it. I started my career as an artist(print/advertising), and bounced back and forth that and software development. Games are wonderful because they let me do both. And I get to teach game development, both to kids (several times a year), and to co-workers who want to learn more about the other disciplines.
Iāve been doing this professionally for over two decades, and simply canāt imagine doing anything else.
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This is actually great, because this is complementary to my other post. I had forgotten to talk about my previous experience at the AAA studio, and this pretty much describes that. Itās always more about the people you work with than it is the actual work. It makes going through Alpha, Beta, and Final that much more endurable. Whatās funny, is I always treated working at that studio as a āstepping stoneā, just because of the exposure of working with brilliant minds, and other creative thinkers, and that in itself pretty much kept me there for 10 years. Especially near the end of the development cycle, when the game already shipped and you start working on an expansion pack which isnāt the most exciting thing in the world.
I wanted to separate those two experiences, because my first post was all about āgoing indieā, and @GarBenjamin grouped the two together, as if the reasons to work in the game industry would be the same. Well, in that sense, @zombiegorilla linked passion as being the common quality that game developers have towards their craft.
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Yes Iāve heard of that before @zombiegorilla , I believe it is the āscrumā workflow which yields the best results for game dev.
It sounds interesting almost like mini burnouts but it has advantages over the letās carefully plan the thing from start to finish, where you can end up near the end with something that needs to completely rewritten or changed.
Can an indie doing that by themselves stick with such a deadline, or goal without any real motivation? Especially from nobody else.
@Ony if you would like to share your experiences, preferably something other than for the $$$
Thanks