Leaving job and becoming a self employed game developer

Nexus said:
Nope, it was someone else.
But like I said, I'm not going to say who it is, as I'm not at liberty to be name dropping. :)

I'd definatly say to the OP that your best bet is to start working on small things in your spare time, that way you can building up some time doing it to see how you like it and whether you have a chance of being successful.
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Sid? :eek:
 
Write an iPhone/Ipod Touch/iPad game and if it sells well you'll be in the money. Of course you have to a: write it, b: get it past the Apple App Store Nazis and c: get noticed in the huge signal to noise ratio that is the App Store.

Do all this WHILST still working at your current J O B.
 
Nexus said:
Nope, it was someone else.
But like I said, I'm not going to say who it is, as I'm not at liberty to be name dropping. :)

I'd definatly say to the OP that your best bet is to start working on small things in your spare time, that way you can building up some time doing it to see how you like it and whether you have a chance of being successful.
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why what harm would it do?
maybe Peter molyneux or Tony Crowther then?
 
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.)
 
Have you considered writing one of them as an iphone game?

zero risk, just write it in your spare time, put it up for a couple of £ each. If they start paying by their droves, you can make yourself a packet and realise this is definately for you.

if not, and nobody buys it, it enables you to take a long hard look at whats required. Apple has always been good at supporting developers, which is why the iphone app market is massive. Just have to look at the number of people with iphones / ipod touches to realise how big the market is.

look at this

http://www.businessinsider.com/ipho...lion-downloads-over-1-million-in-sales-2010-1

The game took $1 million and it got him a deal to distribute the game to other platforms that could easily be worth as much again.

Get started i reckon

http://developer.apple.com/iphone/program/
 
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I echo the iPhone / Andriod game development comments. I think it's all too easy to be a half decent programmer with a strong interest and think you can develop a professional game, quite simply in todays market, you can't.

Giving your job up for this pipe dream is pointless.
 
im not advocating that he can become an iphone millionaire overnight

just that it may be a good idea of a risk free way to put his toe in the water. If he really is an amazing game developer full of ideas that nobody has thought of, he should have plenty of sucess.
 
I say go for it if you never try then you never know . If people didnt try such thing we be all be a lot worse off. Look what codemasters did in the 80s
 
Don't do it...

You could make a really great game, polished, great storyline, great gameplay, etc. and for some reason it just won't take off and you make pence from it... or you might make a rather ropey game but for some random reason a certain element of it is a hit and you make millions...

As someone whos having a go at it in my spare time... the problem with going it alone is you get lost in the detail and never complete the game as you lose the bigger picture.
 
I can't make it out without reading everything in detail... but do you have animated character modelling skills? as most games these days require it and its one of the hardest aspects.

I'm an accomplished programmer, level designer, reasonable skills at sound and graphic design and not too bad at static prop models, but fall down completely when it comes to animated character models - especially humanoid ones.
 
What game dev skills do you have?
I know you listed a few skills above, but specifically do game dev, what can you do? (engine/code/max/zbrush maybe/photoshop and your away!)

You do sound pretty "head screwed on" though!
 
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PanMaster said:
I heard Carmack rewrote the Quake3 engine in C in just one weekend. If you're a genius, its possible.
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The engine is only one part of a game tho.

I doubt he re-wrote the entire engine from scratch in 2 days tho - I have around 10 years of development experience with the idtech3 engine and its not physically possible to redo it that quickly even if you know exactly what your doing.
 
codec said:
lol first 2 comments are although valid pretty funny - do you think most iphone games developers have a 200 strong army of games designers? no. So many solo developers because the games aren't hard to develop. Heck a flash game can be made in a week.
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From the way I read the OP he seemed intent on targeting the windows platform with quite large scale games. I did recommend the iPhone as a way to develop on your own so I don't really see the point of your post.

wush said:
I think Darg is laying on the industry pessimism a bit thick.
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I don't mean to put anyone off, I'm just going on the experiences of people I know and have heard of that have been trying to find jobs in the industry. Less then a quarter of the graduates from last year have found jobs after 6 months out of college.
 
Rroff said:
The engine is only one part of a game tho.

I doubt he re-wrote the entire engine from scratch in 2 days tho - I have around 10 years of development experience with the idtech3 engine and its not physically possible to redo it that quickly even if you know exactly what your doing.
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I think it was the Doom engine
 
Look for another job and spend some of your free time working on mods or some personal project. I remember Carmack talking about that, aside from the odd exception, working on mods was a far better way to get in to the industry than having just qualifications and less of a portfolio.

What differences there are in America in comparison with the U.K. I've no idea.
 
UncleBensSauce said:
[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.

...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.
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I think it's great that you want to go self-employed (I'm in that transition myself, though not to games development). However I can't concieve any realistic scenario where you would be able to meet the goals you set above.

With software development, you either need to have significant financial backing in place already, or you will need to do tens (or hundreds) of man-months of development without pay. In order to obtain financial backing, you will need to have a pretty convincing prototype; investors are particularly wary about taking on software projects, as so many simply do not get finished. Of course the other, much "easier" route is to simply apply for a job at an existing games development studio - this way you will guarantee yourself an income and also gain experience with the industry.

Anyway, if you are serious about going self-employed, you need to significantly extend your timeframes. Spend the first year bringing together as many like-minded and intelligent people as you can. Sketch out a design for your prototype software (the primary purpose of which is to demonstrate your combined skillsets and to show something innovative and marketable). Then, you will need to build the prototype. I have some experience trying to fit group-developed software around a full-time job... Believe me it is like trying to run through treacle. It's hard work for everyone to fit an extra 10 - 20 unpaid hours per week around full-time jobs and all the various other commitments of life. As the months go by and progress is slow, then motivation rapidly wanes.

Personally, I think you need to be looking at a five-year timeframe before you can expect to be bringing in any real money. Also, you need to accept that you will not see a penny from your work until you have either a marketable piece of software, or a sufficiently advanced prototype to attract funding.

I'm not trying to put you off here, just trying to add a dash of realism to your perspective.
 
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If you've not written any games before it may be worth looking at writing smaller games such as phone based ones (iPhone can support OpenGL and you then have a publishing and reasonably efficient revenue channel).

One important thing to understand is that games are expensive projects unless you find an ingenious way sell independent. Codemasters isn't a good example because the time when they appeared was before games got so expensive to produce.

I should add I used to program games at uni with a mate who i published and then went on to work for Psygnosis etc.
 
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NickK said:
If you've not written any games before it may be worth looking at writing smaller games such as phone based ones (iPhone can support OpenGL and you then have a publishing and reasonably efficient revenue channel).

One important thing to understand is that games are expensive projects unless you find an ingenious way sell independent. Codemasters isn't a good example because the time when they appeared was before games got so expensive to produce.

I should add I used to program games at uni with a mate who i published and then went on to work for Psygnosis etc.
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You weren't at UMIST per chance?
 
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