Posted November 10, 2024 by MrTiagoSanV1
#indiegamedev #gamedev #transition #industry #restart #quitmyjob
Hey there! 👋 Welcome to my first 📝 devlog in this crazy journey of being an Indie Game Developer. If you're here, it's because maybe you're also thinking about jumping into the adventure of indie development, or at least, you're curious about what it's really like to live on the other side of the screen 🖥️. Is it fun? 🤪 Exhausting? 😫 Maddening? 😵 Spoiler: it's all that and much more.
This story begins after a few years working 💼 at various companies in the video game world 🎮. No, I didn't work for Rockstar or Blizzard, but I'm sure some of the games I worked on ring a bell: "Tetris Beat" (on 🍎 Arcade), "🍪 Jam Blast", "🐾 Pop", "❄️ Adventure"... yes, yes, that frozen girl also had a sequel in a game by Osmo. Things like that happened while I was still trying to figure out if ☕, 🍵, or 🧉 helped more to endure an endless coding session 💻.
But let's go back to the beginning. It all started when I was a 13-year-old kid 👶, full of curiosity 🤔, and with a computer 🖥️ that still booted with MS-DOS. My first "games" were small programs in C that compiled something with the Windows console 💾. In fact, one of my first achievements was a rudimentary trivia for terminal, but hey, I was 13 years old, and the console was my Promised Land 🌈.
The big leap came in 2013, after a bunch of adventures and odd jobs 🎢. I decided to revisit those old times. Everything seemed much more complex than I remembered, but I wasn't discouraged 💪. I started to rearrange my ideas, and after trial and error, I realized I wanted to create something fun and challenging for myself 🎯. And so, with the same conviction as a kid choosing their first Pokémon 🐉, I thought: “Let's make video games! It's going to be fun!”. Spoiler number two: it's fun, but it's also crazy 🤪.
The best tool I had at my disposal was Unity 🔧. I already had some experience with C, and the jump to C# was quite natural 🌱. So, with Unity under my arm, I set out to code 👨💻. I spent an entire year glued to the screen, 20 hours a day, seven days a week 🗓️, doing tutorial after tutorial 📚, creating my own little “things” (let's affectionately call them “💩”) and breaking everything over and over again 🔨. But that's part of the process, right?
It was during that time that I stumbled upon the concept of virtual Game Jams and jumped in headfirst 🏊♂️. I learned a ton, and in fact, some of those creations were lost forever because at that time, I didn’t even know what Git was 🤷♂️. My backup? An old hard drive 💽 that, unfortunately, one day said “goodbye” forever 👋. First advice: use Git, folks! 💡
And now, the present ⏳. I'm still working for a video game company, but I have to confess that every day I feel less motivated to stay in the “official industry” 🏢. Maybe it’s because of the endless meetings 🥱, or seeing friends getting laid off overnight due to “necessary cuts” ✂️. Job insecurity and the lack of empathy behind those corporate decisions have left me a bit burned out 🔥, to be honest.
And that's why I've decided to migrate back to the old and beloved field of independence 🌾. Where I'm the one who decides what stories to tell 📜, where, and how to tell them. Where every mistake is a lesson 📖 that I choose to learn, and every small success, a personal victory 🏆. This is just the beginning of my journey as an Indie Game Developer, and I can't wait to share it with you 🤗.
This devlog is not only a record of my progress but also an invitation ✉️. If you also feel that spark of creation ✨ or are considering diving into this world, come along! Let’s discover together how deep the indie development rabbit hole 🐇 goes.
To be continued... 👇🏻