Have you ever sacrificed something important for being a game dev?

Hey guys,

have you made the decision to sacrifice something important for being a developer? Perhaps a stable job, a relationship (with your boss, family or girlfriend), or simply a lot of time that you would have normally spent otherwise?

Do you feel your sacrifice was worth it, and would you do it any differently if you could go back in time?

I am sure some have experienced great personal (and/or business) growth, whereas others felt the force of gravity and grounding of reality. I would be happy your stories, whichever way they go.

 

Yeap, everybody and everything. Don't drink anymore, don't party anymore, stay at home and work work work work work work. Can't stand people, most are out to see you fail, at least the people around here are haha.

But yeap. Don't have or want time for a GF, would rather work. I love to work. It makes me happier than anything else. lol.

 

I believe the closest to what you're asking is likely any potential social life I may have had during my school years. I already didn't particularly care about fitting in so it was somewhat natural to me that I would sit down with technical manuals and study computer science during lunch and other break periods. Both the hardware and software aspects.

 

Yeah made a ton of sacrifices, all of them I regret.

 

Money. Definitely money.

 

Sometimes I worry how I've sacrificed relationships, mental and physical health, financial stability, wasted my natural talents, stunted my personality, and squandered the best years of my life on an altar of ephemeral dreams. It's cold comfort but comfort nonetheless that this is the way of it with all art. My day job involves teaching screenwriting, and the first thing I have students read is this ode to sacrifice.

 

Yes. Trying to find my way clear currently from never ending job by job freelance, spending days writing long proposals, meeting the short list and getting up to zilch in the email.. Frustrating as sh**. Something decent long term would change my tune and I have pro chops across the board, excellent communication skills, and know the industry... Here is my CV
http://www.mindreleaselabs.com/arts/my-cv/ and yet I cannot nail a contract or job for close to a month now?? Odesk/upwork sends me crap like create 20 realistic images of actors from a play in several poses..pay 20.00USD.. WTF??? rom some clown in London England?? Create five minute 3D animated video..pay 250.00USD. For what..50% of the time it takes my computer to render the 9000 frames???.FFS..I live in the US..And as with Flash the arena is now flooded with clueless noobs cutting and pasting their way into corners they abandon and you have to climb over and careen through them just to get an email to a prospective client. The prices they charge are lowering the amount you can get per hour/contract so the more experience you get over time the pay rate keeps dropping. On the making games for publication..the same thing is occurring there. Anybody have any prospects for me clue me in. Maybe I am clueless

 

Interesting stuff!

What do you mean? I think the atmosphere here is not that aggressive.

Sarcasm? I actually can't tell.

 

I think he is speaking of those around him locally. I get this.. I am over from him in North Georgia. A farmer with a grassfed beef store wanted me to do a site for him. I went there and other locals were hanging out. I started talking with him about it and they were all piping up.."You don't need no site." ."Who is gonna go look at it anyways..it's a waste of money.." trying to sabotage my business and make him rethink his business strategy. They would be pissed if I popped off when they were talking to a client about a house addition or spraying a paved lot and said they really have no need of your skills...just go starve pal and let the economy die piece by little piece. Money is useless if it is hoarded and doesn't flow. Four of my friends I made up here since three years back died of drug overdoses. Methinks N1warhead is in a similar social climate.

 

Time, you can always get more money and have new relationships.. But you can never get time back.!

 

You seem overqualified for everything and probably scare off potential employers because they think your rate will be way too high? Especially like you said that noobs are cutting corners for very low rates and getting the jobs...and I am not sure how you look for jobs obviously, but the newer generations may do it differently and the potential employers may be looking at different places now compared to 1-20 years ego.

This also may be useless info, but I like to browse reddit and there was a subreddit where the older generations are having troubles getting jobs, and their conclusion was to take off almost EVERYTHING off their resume down to the last 5-10 years. That way they don't scare off potential employers and made themselves look much younger.

I also saw Greed Monger on there...that may give you some bad rep lol from recent news.

 

I can beat most youngsters in a foot race..outplay them on metal guitar and smoke them under the table Yeah.. GreedMonger should come off (just did). Clown still owes me money and I see his puss on linkedin all the time. He had to change industries.. I look for jobs everywhere. The job boards here, odesk/upwork, frikkin' craigslist.. If I could find other places I would be all over them. Some of my biggest jobs were over ten years ago and they are well known artworks..landmark sculpture and largest art install at the 96 Olympics. I can see what you are saying but I show that I worked across a variety of fields..so I don't know how to handle it. I just uploaded my resume to GlassDoor and they had a service where a pro resume company reviews the resume and gives feedback. I will bet they want money and I ain't got it currently.

Thanks for your reply and info. Every bit helps. Where are they looking for talent these days?

 

The ode is true and sobering to alot of folks. I am the story of the basketball player. I just could always draw and my textbooks were filled with stickmen animations from cover to cover all through school. I had talent out the yin yang but at this stage I wish i had pursued something else with a retirement ahead of me. I'll be 102 in 50 years or so and doing caricatures at 20 bucks a pop in Key West..LOL

 

You be crazy ippdev.

 

Well in University or College they have their own job posting sites, and it's employers offering jobs from all ranges where students can easily access without having to do much.

Here in Canada, Kijiji is huge for some reason and getting any type of job / freelance work appears to be the way to go.

 

Nah.. I am just a sober old fart with a walker and a Depends if I can't trundle to the bathroom with it quick enough, don't know my arse from my elbow but got my salt shotgun all loaded if'n them thar revenooers ever show their puss around.

 

Interesting. I am from Canada and was thinking of moving back. I may take a look around and see what get's offered there. The political climate sucks here in the US. I do enjoy my Aframe on the lake with no neighbors being a Canadian nature boy at heart. I was glad to get out of Atlanta where my former arts and musician neighborhood I was unofficial mayor of for 25 years got infested with gangbangers and not being one to see weaker folks and women being bullied/robbed/scammed/raped nor put up with their lowlife aggressive BS directed at me I would end up getting in brawls at the age of 50 with teenagers and 20-somethings and often more then one. I never lost..they were over in seconds..but boy it sure hurt the next week or so

 

Until recently, no I have not. And until recently, I haven't really produced anything I enjoy playing.

Plus, it's not really sacrifice, it's prioritizing. Sacrifice implies you get nothing in return. When I could play Minecraft for 6 hours a night, building ridiculously elaborate bases and monster traps... I wasn't developing games. I could stay up til 2am playing Statecraft 2 and never get sick of hearing "SCV Ready!"... but I wasn't developing games. Now that I'm spending the time to make what I imagine real, I don't get to play those games, but I do get to play my own game and I get to tell people I meet that I'm a game developer. So for me, it's just picking between two all consuming passions... one of which costs me lots of money and gives nothing lasting in return, and one that is work but brings way more cool things into my life.

 

The past 5 years I've been working on my racing game (which has gone through many iterations), I've sacrificed a lot of things.. here are a few...

- My entire life's savings
- Most of my weekends and evenings after full time job
- Portions of my sanity
- My eyes, oh my poor eyes
- Socialising with friends and some friendships
- The joys of living a regular, normal life
- Starting a family
- Holidays

Thank goodness it's almost over (soft launch is in August). And after that I'm going to take one well deserved break, I haven't had a proper holiday in years.

 

Yeahhh..the eyes. If I start oil painting again it won't be super detailed but more like impressionism if I don't wear glasses.

Congrats BTW. 5 years is one tough slog! I hope you do quite well

 

Cheers, I hope so too, otherwise I'm definately hitting some monastery and going for the simpler life.

 

Are you gonna get it greenlit (assuming its not already)

In the same boat with my rts thats been in development for farking years... although there have been some big time frames when I couldnt even load Unity (burnt out etc)

 

Nah, releasing on Android first, going to soft launch in a few countries, run some analytics, make some improvements and adjustments. Then do a full Google Play release. I also have some regional publishers from China and Latin America that are interested in an Android version, so I will be involved with them too.

My game is free to play, so I'm not sure how well it will do on Steam, but it's definately a platform I'm thinking of hitting down the line once its stabilised on mobile and released on iOS too.

 

true, for some reason I thought it was a pc game.

derp, just looked at some pix from your sig. Obviously a mobile game.

 

I'll answer your question backwards.

I've actually sacrificed starting game development sooner, for a nice, stable job at a animation studio.

Prior to this, I just had quit my first job, a smaller animation studio, which was in its beginnings... The job wasn't bad at all, but I wasn't satisfied with the pay anymore, and I felt like I wasn't learning enough... but deep down I wanted to learn more about game development, not animations for tv ads and such.
So I figured I could make about the same money, doing freelancing with low poly modelling, learn more, AND also get more into gamedev.
But an ex-coworker called me soon and offered twice the pay in a different studio he was working at... still wasn't much money... but was more than I've ever made. I was basically like... "mo' money, less problems woohoo", so I went there and worked for a few more years.

Back to present day, I'm finally trying to get into the gamedev "career". If I can get income out of this, it'd become a much much better career than anything else I've done.

 

Sure, plenty of stuff, but no regrets. My career has far exceeded my dreams, and I can't imagine doing anything else.

 

Wow, some of the responses here make me really happy I'm taking the path I'm taking. I often worry that it's slowed down the game dev side of my ambitions, but I made a conscious decision to not sacrifice relationships, financial stability, time to enjoy myself, etc, and I still do get to do the game dev stuff I love as well.

I did spend some time sacrificing those things a few years ago, and realizing the potential cost early is what lead me to stabilize my course a bit. Then I got genuinely lucky with opportunities that helped me to do that, where it otherwise could have taken far longer.

I guess the take home lesson from that is that it's ok to take risks and work hard, but know where you want to set your limits so it doesn't take over the whole rest of your life. Working towards your ambitions is important, but it's not the only important thing.

 

Couldn't agree more. Sometimes we need a rock to real us back into reality. For the last three months I've been stressed out of my mind. I'm taking a bit(read: a lot) too many hard college courses while working full time. Blew past one or two deadlines at work. The last month my girlfriend has been mentioning my irritableness and overall S***ty mood exposing itself, something she's never seen(nor I) from myself. Truthfully, the only time I was feeling like myself was out with her, the rest was myself unknowingly visiting some nasty places in my own mind. Once she pointed this out, I made a conscious effort to *never* let my work affect any of the things I care about. It's really not worth it. I repeat, your succeeding at work or achieving ambitions is not worth sacrificing the things you love. Last Thuresday my family forcefully packed my bags for a week long vacation, after some hair pulling on my part about making the next deadline at work. I just let go. Explained it to the team, and have been trying to forget about it for the entire week. I've forgotten what it's like to not feel dead inside most of the day.

TL;DR: Focus on your happiness and the things you love. While work may(and should) be one of those things, don't let it destroy the others.

 

I find when you're in these situations, you have to be exercising and going to gym (or doing a home workout) at least 3 times a week. I can't cope if I'm not exercising, things just get too much. And it's got to be intense, stress-busting workouts, not naffy light cardio a few times a week.

 

Ditto. I do game dev over my lunch break occasionally, or over a weekend every now and then if my wife is visiting family or out-of-state friends. But I always put my family and relationships first. I like my day-job of software dev, but if I had to give it up for my wife I'd do it in less than a heartbeat.

 

Heh, I still do way more than that. I probably do 20 hours on my game work some weeks. Largely because when I'm in the groove I enjoy doing that rather than, say, watching TV or playing games. Then it swings the other way for a while.

 

Once the home office is finished I plan on getting more done...maybe >.> Right now all the places in my house are mentally associated with not-development, so I tend to not do it instead of games or honey-do.

Edit: Disclaimer: I violated both personal rules of not posting after 11pm and not posting whilst tipsy...I claim all responsibility and potentially no rationality for the content of this post. >.>

 

Mostly hygiene.

I kid.

But seriously, the more code I do the less my brain can handle mundane activities. After a long day of coding I can hardly have a conversation with others.

 

Yeap that's what I meant, people where I live. Everyone, including family has major doubts that it will never amount to anything more than a couple dollars. But I will prove them wrong, I'm sorta like John Lock off the show Lost. "Don't tell me I can't", because I will, just to prove a point lol.

 

Sorry to say, and no offcence, but that is a S*** attitude. It's defensive thinking. In my opinion if you want to do something, do it out of your own motivation, because you have a vision and you believe in it.

 

This.

 

Yup. That's me too. Stability might not be as exciting, but it's often worth sacrificing game development for.

 

Making a bit less sport in the last, so that is a detriment and currently low pay but no regrets

 

My physical fitness, was gonna join the army but my attention to game dev had me doing next to no exercise

But then again, drinking and smoking isnt exactly helping that either

 

At the risk of going a little off topic I'd just like to re-iterate this point. Exercise is so, so important and has helped me immensely. A lot more than you would initially imagine. If you're feeling S***ty and depressed, or just out of sorts, do some exercise, it really helped me, and I've found out recently that there is solid science behind it, so get to it

 

Im still in high school but I did miss a lot of things. I never went to prom, any school dance, didn't meet a lot of the cool kids (always in my own bubble), didn't socialize much, grades have been falling from A's to B's now, don't get much time with friends or family, and I really don't ever go outside and enjoy the amazing community Im in right now. Everyone here is so nice and the grass is always green, no matter what season. I am missing it all but I am so close to finishing my game. Im soooooo close; I can see the finish line. I hope to cross it before school starts because it is my last year. I want to get another chance I really do

Hopefully it was worth it (college?)

 

The cool kids?

Hey, look... the prom is a pretty dumb tradition. Yeah, you're missing out on something alright. High school friends aren't really your friends, they're more like inmates you shared a cell with. As soon as you can get away from each other, you do and quickly realize that you like the space. Just chill, you're making decisions that will benefit you even after you're 30 years of age. A lot of people only plan 2-5 years ahead max and a lot of people have a crisis when their twenties end, because that was all they ever envisioned in their lives.

You're doing what makes you happy and ultimately, if you are happy you're in a huge minority on this planet. Everyone else is missing out on what you're feeling.

 

Hahahah no most of my school isn't like that! It's very surprising actually. Almost everyone you meet in that school is a drug dealer but they are actually nice people. I went to two high schools. The last one was filled with a bunch of rich kids who were all self centered. This school is filled with nice people. It's crazy. Whenever you walk by someone they will smile and say hi (Im not joking everybody does this). Not a lot of cussing going on either. But either way, you always get those kinds of kids who will end up in fast food anyways.......

 

What is your definition of drugs.

 

Mine.. That is what doctors sell you after they misdiagnose you as they have a Mercedes payment coming due. And those crap white powders that intel agencies flood the streets with to get money flowing into their black budget coffers..

 

Yeah those are drugs.

I was wondering if @calmcarrots meant the now virtually legal one.

 

That is a God given herb. Making a plant lifeform illegal is silly and a dangerous precedent...as has been proven in spades.

 

Can't believe I'm agreeing with you.

Remember when fermented grains were made illegal? Good times in America.

 

My goodness.. Am I that disagreeable On the distilled grains.. Look at the rise of syndicated crime from that era and compare the rise of drug cartels in the modern era.

 

I regret that I couldn't do this sooner! I would have loved being in this world as a young person, with so much to learn and do. It would have been great to actually work in the business, for a big company, making games. Alas, games that existed at the time for me would not have very been exciting.

I did get to have a great social life as a college student, lots of friends, met a great guy, and raised (almost) four kids..so I have nothing more to regret. I have loved every minute working on the games and wish I had more time to to do it.