MY VOYAGE INTO THE GAME INDUSTRY

It has always been my dream to own a gaming studio, and I thought it was high time I made good on this dream. So, I did what any man in my shoes would do – research about owning an indie game studio. I read a lot of content about people that had failed trying to create the next big thing. It seemed there was more failure in the gaming industry than other places. This wasn’t the first time I would venture into something were it looked like the road ahead was steep. I couldn’t afford to be discouraged before I even started. Little did I know that this was just the tip of the iceberg.

Then, there was the issue of which game to create. I had several ideas, but who doesn’t? Even those before me thought theirs was the best. I had to make sure that this idea was a viable one. After much deliberation I settled for a boxing game. My alter ego (“James”) told me that this could be done within 3 months. “Isn’t it just two people hitting themselves?” He said.

I remember looking at the ceiling with a big smile on my face, I had ticked the first thing off my checklist. Next, was finding a game engine that I would use to create this world class game. “Indecision is a virus that can run through an army and destroy its will to win or even to survive.” This quote is a better way to describe what plagued me for the next couple of weeks. There was Unreal Engine, but I didn’t know C++ and hated programming in blueprints. Unity was another obvious choice, but I hated the licensing issue and other internal problems (such as the workflow and engine flaws that came with it). Other game engines didn’t cut it for me. That was when I encountered ‘Godot engine’. It was open-source and ticked some of the things I required from the engine that would be used for creating my game. The only problem was that it is still in development and didn’t have some of the features I needed, but nonetheless could be hacked into it one way or the other.

[preview of Godot 3]

All this time I didn’t know the workload of building a game alone would drive me crazy. It was time to get a team. I met a lot of good programmers and 3d artist willing to help me create my dream game. After days of interviews and promises I finally got a team. I had an army and now it was time to conquer the world. The problem with this team was that, they were all C# programmers (from Unity) and some had never worked on a game engine. That’s what you get when you don’t have money to pay everyone in your team. I thought the promise of revenue-share from the millions we were going to make was going to keep everyone in line. Little did I know what lay ahead.

[we managed to pull this and other things off though]

My army didn’t even survive long enough to fight a battle, it disintegrated along the way. No team, no money, and a broken dream. If you’ve ever felt devastated from failure, then you will know how I felt. There was a silver lining though, a bunch of lessons – which I will share in a later post. Like any great general before me, I healed from my wounds and went back to the drawing board to plan my next battle in the game industry. This time around I will let my lessons guard me and try to squash any enemy(problems) that dared challenge me.