Earlier this month, I quit my job. The problem was I didn’t have a full-fledged plan about what I would do next. All I knew was that I wanted to remain in the video game industry and that I wanted a remote job. I spent the two months of my notice period trying my best to find something that satisfied both these conditions, but nothing materialized.
In the last week of September, I had to choose between withdrawing my resignation or moving on and taking a gamble on building a plan with all the extra time I would get. I chose the latter.
The first few days, I decided to relax and played Destiny 2 for an unhealthy amount of time. As I kept fighting aliens on distant planets, I also kept thinking about my next steps to fight the Bill monster on Earth.
Then I went back to an idea I had during my school days: I would make video games.
In the early 2000s, this idea was unfeasible. I was a teenager from a small town in Southern India, and the video game industry in the country was hardly considered stable. Even assuming there were good options to study game development back then (there really weren’t any), there was no guarantee that it would lead to a job, let alone a well-paying one. Downloading Unity in the morning and coming out with a finished game in the evening was not an option in those days. So, I passed on that idea and took up a more traditional computer science engineering course.
However, over the years, I have kept tabs on the industry, if only as a consumer. I figured now would be a good time to dip my toes into game development. Even without formal education, one can learn game development using freely available resources and start publishing their work to a worldwide audience. Get good enough at it, and people will even start paying you!
With the initial direction in place, I now had to decide how to start. After some research, I found that for me to learn how to make games, I had to choose between two routes:
- The PC/Console Route: Start from scratch and slowly learn how to make a PC/Console game that could take several months or years to build and perfect. After spending so much time, I would have a single game to pin all my hopes on and pray that it would sell well. If it doesn’t, I’d have to take whatever I learned from the project and apply it to the next one, once again spending several months/years. The cycle may get shorter if I can hire freelancers to help me, but it will be a long process, nevertheless.
- The Mobile Route: Start from scratch, and learn how to make tiny mobile games, which are feasible to prototype in as little as a week. The first game’s probability of failure is still extremely high, but at least the entire development cycle won’t take more than a month (or two since I’m still new). On to the next game, and it’s still the same calendar year. With a few of these attempts, I will have built myself a portfolio of multiple releases, each (hopefully) showcasing what I have learned from the previous projects. Once I gain enough experience and generate some revenue from in-game ads, I can use the learnings and the funding to move into PC/Console game development.
I also had to look at the risks. If I can’t make any money with my own games, I have to look for jobs at game studios. And most of the successful game studios in India right now are mobile game studios. Keeping that in mind, I have decided to travel down this path for now. While Mobile and PC/Console games can vastly differ in how they are made, they are made using the same tools. So as long as I get good at using these tools, I can always step into PC/Console game development, at least in theory!
This blog will document my progress. I don’t know how frequently I will post updates about my Gamedev journey, but I will mention the highlights at least once a month.
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