Leaving job and becoming a self employed game developer

[UncleBensSauce]

Hi All

I'm not really happy in the field I work in (IT Managed Ops) and though it could be just the comapany I work for at the moment, I don't think changing to another company in this field is going to cut it.

So I'm considering packing it in to start developing games. I thought I'd check here because obviously this would be quite a barmy thing to do - and its good to gather some alternative opinions.

I've worked in IT since finishing uni in 06, and started at my current company just shy of 2 years ago (large multinational).


Why a games dev?
Been my hobby since I was around 14, fits my skills, allows me to be as creative as I like.

My concerns:
Though I could carry on along the career path I'm on now - ultimately I don't find it satisfying or creative enough (and that's with an arty emphasis on the creativity - my job does allow me to be creative for technical tasks). Though I gather many people just stick at it because that's life bla bla - I'm 25 soon, if I'm going to change direction it needs to happen before my life becomes a sitcom (single income, two children, oppressive mortgage). If I wait it could be too late?

It won't be possible to live on less than 1200 pcm for me, so I need to have at least this amount of income reliably from games development before leaving my current job. Its going to be hard to get to this kind of income without a substantial amount of work, and this work will be hard to do with the job I have now. Ultimately I want to match or exceed my current salary within 12 months of leaving my job, this gives me a target of at least 40K pa - and I'll be needing that kind of income, as I live in rented and need to buy (my partner earns around 8k).

Teaming up and finding other people to work with is a nightmare, but realistically its the only way to get enough man hours on the table to finish anything remotely decent? The effort involved in managing a project and organising unpaid people to work on the game (while balancing a life and job) will be very time consuming (these people usually work for a slice of future profits). I intend to work pretty much solo (some art & media from my misses I would imagine) - everything I've read suggests the one man army approach will generally fail, but 99 games in 100 fail to get released anyway (team or not), so at least I can remove the burden of managing people from my limited time?


My Plan:
-Use middle-ware solutions such as Unity and the UDK to remove a lot of programming overhead.
-Use free software everywhere possible (Blender, GIMP,)
-Purchase texture packs (some very high quality stuff around for less than 100 US) – to remove some of the art overhead
-Develop tools to increase productivity and manage work flow to allow me to maximise my time.
-Target Windows (biggest market) first, use unity to port titles to other platforms.



Sorry for the post of incoherent babble - so many decisions to make and stuff, thanks for reading, what should I do?

 

[UncleBensSauce]

Thanks for all the great responses so far - this is exactly the kind of straight talk that I need.

Just to be clear - I don't intend to leave my current job until I'm reliably able to hit the 1200 pcm figure (I didn't make that very clear I'll admit), I'm on a 3 month notice period if I want to leave & my skill set is rare so I would not have a problem retracting my notice - even if a direct replacement was found. I'm more interested in trying to release some titles before trying to get a job for someone else in the games biz - as there is bugger all chance of hitting my current salary in such a competitive industry (I could live with a cut if self-employed, but may as well go back to my current field if I'm working for someone else, as I'd likely get much better money).

In terms of the kind of titles I intend to focus on - I'm not ruling the Iphone out at all, but as mentioned above I can see a lot more issues competing in this space than on PC. Also my existing skills do not compliment the IPhone as well as the PC (would need to learn this from scratch unlike PC) - I can bring a lot of experience from industry to bear on things like client-server networking and application servers to support online components of my games too, so if I can add value here I will.

I have decent CSharp skills so I may focus on XNA and XboxLive Community games as a first dabble - though like the app store, this market has its drawbacks. Though XNA games are easy to port to Windows & the dreaded Zune.

In terms of specifics about the kind of games I wish to create - I have a large amount of material I have produced to cover around 5 different titles. This material includes lots of code, textures, research, models, animations, photos et. I intend to sharpen the skills I have with specifics to game design over the next few months - before committing to a title/design doc. Obviously I need to pick something with a reasonably light load in terms of art, with market appeal etc. I'm the kind of person that would have a decent business case before committing to anything anyway (my dream game probably wouldn't sell very well, and there's no point making something that doesn't have wide enough appeal.)