I'm still to find a viable way to run game projects, but even if sometime I feel my efficiency goes down I can make treasure of any accident an looking at the entire picture see an overal positive trend.
From a business point of view I'm running out my budget and my passive income is not enough to refill what i spend every month.
I stopped run any other work since February and i had to go live in Spain for a while and it has not been so economic at all.
The worst thing is that it looks like my full time efforth has produced less than free time one, but in reality I had explored a lot in those times challenging many previous assumptions just to come to my own way to do things.
Yesterday I watched an episode of the serie "Big Bang Theory" where one of the characters ask herself if to become an actress would be better to work as maid or act in very bad movie production.
Luckly my working experience was different and the range of jobs I run in non gaming fields always teached me some good skills I can now apply to games, Not that having a maid job cannot help your acting(who knows).
Bad games could surely open your way in the industry as junior employee ,but how they turn out to be in the "run your own studio" context?
I always tought that funding my games with money coming from other works was a fail, as a sign that a my game business was not going to be sustainable, but in the end is the only thing that has made me come to this point or I had to stop this way before If I just had to rely on some of my previous bad game earnings.Games that only few played and remember(luckly?!?).
I have now clear that my goal is not to ship whatever game I can just to keep this going with the money coming from it and keep this way.
There are very few cases where this has worked out and even for who this worked out not every games toruned to be very profitable just very few ones, but we just remember them for those games not looking at the huge amount of bad and unprofitable work.
There are very few cases in whatever business of people reaching the break given point in record times especially if you add to the equation random products that no one asked for or products came last in a just saturated branch of the market offering poorly made clones of well known products.
Mobile platforms and Steam on Pc in past years has been a bit misleading giving evidence to some epic win cases even breaking whatever accepted rule, but there was also many and many almost untold misadventures and epic fails.
I point to get to the point where I can realiaby ship real user experiences that fullfill real end user needs, with my own unique touch leveraging what I can do best and not totally fall through other things where I'm not so good manteining an overally hi level of polishness.
To do what I can do best is sometime hard as learning what I can't actually do within my standards demands generally a lot more focus and not be able to delegate is frustrating, but hope it will make me better at delegating tasks in future.
Rising my own bar a little bit more every time is easy but doing it in a way that people can see and enjoy is a must and is all but easy.
No one matters if I wrote qualitative piece of code or if I gained more and more artistic skills, become faster or better at something.
what the game overally tells about you could be a totally different story and the only that counts in the end.
Do errors as early as possible is what will make my games more sustainable in the mid to long term even if it means to risk a lot now.The amounts of risk and errors and speriemtations I can do now is an opportunity that I will hardly got again even if all will turn for the good.
Getting fast to the market with no value and major unresolved issues is a non sense.
I had to consolidate what worked good in those months as a framework and workflows for future works and cut everything else.
I have set lots of hard and flexible constraints on my next efforts,most relevant is to try to not use c++ in prototipation and use very few of it also in the final gameplay code leaving it to major modules and macro optimizations.
We will see how this and other things will work out in next posts if you still find them of any interest :)
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