I am looking for real experiences and stories:
Did you quit your job to become an indie or do you know someone?
Was it hard, scary, did it pay off?
How was your job before?
What would you do different when you knew it before?
Are you still an indie or are you employeed again?
I would love to hear your stories and advices :)!
I’m guessing the number is less then those who have quit indie to take on a full time job. 
If you can’t make and sell your first game in your spare time then make the game small enough until you succeed with that. That might seem difficult, but it’s actually a lot easier than going full time, and will teach any smart person what they truly need to know.
And if someone hasn’t already finished and shipped a game (no matter how small) before deciding to quit their job, then they’re total raving idiots, equivalent to quitting the job to start acting without any lessons or knowledge of their own limitations.
Try the litmus test on the side first.
I’m just very fortunately to be in a position to dedicate all my time to working on game dev stuff… Whether that’s making and releasing assets or anything else. The truth is, the emotional stress is the worst part of all of it, if you don’t have money at least. I’m just very fortunate I’ve had a loving family who’s let me stay with them and to push my knowledge and who believes in my enough to at least give it a good shot.
I’m far from a lack of education though, I’ve got enough certifications I could cover an entire wall in somebodies room from top to bottom. So I’ve got tons of fallback options if things just don’t pan out eventually.
So in other words, I do it full-time, but most of the time it’s truly not even worth it (financially). But that doesn’t mean not to do it. It just means don’t do it unless you are sure you have ways to live first and foremost. And don’t even try to do it if you don’t at least have some years of experience doing it first.
I’ve been learning game design sense the 90’s when I was around 8 years old when I discovered modding, so even if I didn’t have a belt of titles released, I still at least was well versed in the topics and things I should focus on.
But the truth is, the part nobody ever mentions is the mental stress involved when you spend so much time on something and for whatever reasons just didn’t work out the way you wanted. It’s the biggest blow to ones own confidence.
But don’t let that fool anybody, the rewards outweigh the cons. So despite the hardships involved, it can still be very lucrative mentally if one just sticks it out and does the goals they want no matter what.
It’s kinda inversed for me. My plan is to finish the game then take a day job. I know I can’t do both effectively at the same time (tried), so just want to cross thing I want to achieve before dead out one by one. The game is just a life’s to-do, I never conditioned my life so that I must be able to make games for living. Not all jobs has the same for-living potential. It’s not like I could cross-stitch to financial stability even if I like to do it so much. Making game is one of those things. Even if I can feel I perform better than average when making games it’s unfortunate that what I am good at is not aligned with income (that the normal job is good at).
May change if the game actually able feed me, which I planned to give the game 1-2 months before going to office. Then I might maintain it from the day job, where I could find normies happiness at the same time. I know I don’t want to miss that kind of office life too, I just want to experience various things.
I’ve quit my day job in the past, but by the time I did that in the game industry I had 6 other tech startups under my belt and had been working as a lead developer for over 10 years.
IMO the key is to understand the nature of tech startups. All of the hard skills are science really. Experience there lets you work more productively and not make big mistakes. That’s why the core teams on tech startups are comprised of people who have done it before. The hard skill stuff is all an implementation to them.
The rest is art, things we don’t understand well enough to reduce to code. And games have a lot of that. So you iterate more because that’s how you explore to find what works.
That’s why my advice is go work for someone else until what you will need to do, you have done at least once for someone else. But the flip side of that is if you happen to hit the art part right, you can overcome the technical side because it is inherently a much simpler problem to solve.
But the chances of just hitting on the creative side out of the gate are small. And having the science part down to an implementation generally means around 10x increases in productivity. So you have 10x more chances to hit on what will make the game work. So the math is pretty clear. Go get good at creating stuff for other people before going out on your own.
I quit my job after six years as an artist/audio person in big studio game development (EA, Midway, etc.)
It wasn’t really hard or scary. I knew it was time, so I did it. It paid off immensely. I started as an indie in 2000, working with my (now) wife, and we’re still doing it today. It’s been good to us. With that said, I sometimes wish I’d done something else with my time, and each year that goes by brings me that much closer to turning the page on this (very long) chapter of my life and starting the next one.
It was awesome. I got to work on some classic systems and some fun games. I hadn’t yet started programming so I was only doing art and music/sound. I love those more than the programming I do now, so I enjoyed it.
Firstly, I would make damned sure to hire a programmer and not try to do it myself. I’ve been programming now (in addition to art and audio) since we started the business and even though I like the challenge I just can’t get into it anymore. I miss being just an artist/audio person, really.
Secondly, I would not have made adult games, which is what we have done since the early years. We made one on a whim because it was goofy and we thought it would make money, and wow did it. Then we just kept going with them. They’ve done really well (working on two of them right now, actually) but neither of us has ever played those kinds of games and they’re not really our thing. We just do it because, well, that’s what we do, and we’re good at it. Sometimes you just have to pay the bills.
Still going, but I see the end in sight. It’s coming soon. Just hanging in there to finish off some things we started, and then we’re cutting the strings on game dev and finally being true to our real passions.
Don’t get me wrong, though. There was a long time where we were really excited to be doing this stuff. It’s a total rush to spend a year or more on something, put it into the wild, and watch it take off. It’s just been the past five years or so that we’ve been slowing down and trying to focus more on what we really want to be doing with our time. It’s been fun, for sure, but we’re just about done here.
Hi. I would like your input. I’ve literally started reading into game development. I’m also looking into possibly getting my 3rd degree in game dev. I used to fly small aircrafts and have educational and work background in aviation. Right now, I run my own e-commerce store, so I’m financially okay and I have the time to explore this newly found interest. I hear stories though that it takes certain wired individuals to get into coding. How true is that? My father is a career programmer with 30+ years at Wall Street. I’ve been pushed before to follow into his footsteps.
Two areas I’m explicitly interested in is medieval fantasy. Sandbox titles like Ultima online comes to mind, a childhood game I’ve played many years ago as a crafter. I also love gacha/ hero collector turn-based strategy rpg games similar to summoner’s war for mobile device but I’d like to create it with medieval-realistic assets and top down or isometric view. What genre would you recommend for someone just starting out. Btw, I dislike flat 2D games, simply because I can’t interact with the background and games with first person view.
Hope to hear a feedback!
Completely untrue, in my experience. There are some things that can make coding more difficult to pick up (some learning disabilities, etc) but I came from a humanities background before switching into games just fine.
@BlazingOnyx : That’s good ol Hollywood for you. Put’s a perspective into peoples heads that only geeks with glasses are the only ones who make games. There’s probably people you see every day of your life that are coders and you’d never even realize it.
Heck look at me, I living in the deepest part of South Carolina, wearing Camo, carrying my pistol everywhere I go (legally), hunt, etc. People never expect to see someone like me coding/making games lol.
But not here to talk about opinions of if someone likes my lifestyle or not, to each their own lol.
But the point I’m trying to stress is: people from all walks of life are coders/game devs.
But yeah, the perception so many get is from Hollywood that we are all strange geeks, etc lol.
Well I’d be lying if I said I didn’t geek out on some Zelda/Super Metroid though ahhaah.
Whoa awesome, totally off topic but any chance you were at midway in the N64 days? I loved the Rush games
Quit my job twice to be an indie. I’m a sucker and a slow learner. First in 2004 & then again in 2009.
In 2004 it wasnt scary because I hated my job. Not enough pay to deal with the crap I was getting and a long(ish) commute every day. I only kept my head above water by taking on non-gaming contracts + part time job so no, it didnt really pay off.
Got a good job on decent pay in 2007 thanks to what I had learned during my indie time (J2ME) and in 2009 I quit again for a couple of reasons. I was bitten by the game dev bug, got used to the comfort of working from home, no bosses, no commute etc and the last couple of games I made brought in just enough money for me to live on. Then the iPhone came along which meant dev’s could actually reach an audience without going through greedy publishers which at the time took 50%.
Test the water properly. Yeah so you can make a game, it might even be a good, but can you sell it?
There’s a lot more to being an indie than just making a game. You’re running a business that MUST make money.
So I would make a game, get it to market and see what comes back. WHEN it fails, learn and make another and keep learning.
OR
Have 2 years salary in the bank.
Still an indie but only just. I’ve not done any contract work in 12 month to focus on my current project. I saved a bit to help get me by during the dev cycle but nowhere near enough. If this game fails then I’ll go back to contracting and then “maybe” do something in my spare time. Or I may just decide to get a life instead because this can be all consuming sometimes.
I’ve been game deving since 1993. Unfortunately I have never made enough with it to support myself and have to work in commercial software development to pay my bills and continue to develop my games on the side knowing its a hobby.
I quit my job to start my own business, though not game dev related. But at is turned out I also started my own product company at the same time which is game related
This is what I’m shooting for. I’ve released small games for mobile on the side, they are neither what I enjoy or want to make but it was a good learning experience and what I have time for.
To make the game which is my main project I need more time and a rested mind. I’ve consistently tried to work on it after work and I am just too mentally wiped out at the end of the day after working a full time job. Luckily the job pays very well so I am close to having a couple years saved up so I can pursue the dream without putting my personal finances in peril, and I don’t think a year or two away from the industry will present too many problems with the 20+ years I already have banked in it. Although I guess with how fast titles change it wouldn’t be the same title when I came back to work(currently “SecDevOps”).
I worked on a few N64 racing games (not Rush, though), including one for Midway, yeah, but I wasn’t at Midway proper. N64 was probably my favorite system to work on. SNES runs a close second. The Rush games are awesome. 
I couldn’t agree more, I worked for larger companies, did contract work, and work for many clients. Before making my own company. I was into sports, I also race cars as I used to be an auto mechanic by day… ( I been programming since the old Commodore 64 days, and later in life I wanted to do more on the art side… ( so I tend to go back and forth between programming, and 3d modeling, texturing etc. I’m glad I went off on my own, it was time for me to, and make what I wanted and liked to do. But ya I couldn’t agree more about how people think its only guys with glasses, code etc… So not true…
i was going to college for piloting but i quit that to pursue 3d fulltime. Been at it about a year and a half. will start applying for jobs a little later this year, so we will see how that goes.
i have a small amount of income from a dog boarding business plus disability from the army. and my wife works which doubles that. so we are comfortable financially.
as others said, you’d have to be seriously naive or maybe even straight dumb to quit a job to pursue something you have no proven experience in. people only think about the things they know, but it’s what you don’t know that kills you. If you only tally what you know, you are missing most of the equation. But how can you know what you don’t know? Experience. So get a job doing what you want to do but for somebody else first. Let them take the risk.
Hard work != success. Hard work is only a prerequisite. You have to mitigate risk, plan for failure, and always, always, always know exactly where you are and where you need to go. If you aren’t actively and continually practicing these things you are taking on much greater risk than necessary.
In the early stages of development of SuperTrucks Offroad, we’re talking about 3 years in here, I actually quit my job and lived off savings for nearly a year, working on the game. Needless to say a year later, I was still not happy with where the game was, and had to go back and get a job again, and continue to develop the game in my spare time.
I’m happy now to putter away at it in my spare time, its getting a massive update soon, and right now I’m focusing on building it as a free to play multiplayer racing game business that I hope can become profitable.
If anybody quit there job to do this full time and is happy and successful with the decision 5 years later
Please, tell me what I am missing?