I am filled with absolute terror whenever I get a message like this in my inbox:
"You inspired me to quit my job to make indie games!"
(emphasis mine)
For those of you new to this blog, my name is Lars Doucet, I'm an independent game developer, and my company
Great post!
One of the biggest problems with following your dreams is that… they come from you! I mean, that sounds like a good thing at first, but if I’m honest with myself, many of my dreams and ideas are selfish, prideful, or just plain bad. I have horrible dreams sometimes. I’d be nuts to have followed all of them.
Now, I’ve made a decent living in the business of video game development myself, and that’s gone beyond what my dreams would have expected. But it’s not for everyone. Some days, it doesn’t even feel like it’s for me.
Wow, that Mike Rowe talk, such a good speaker and with a point.
I would say passion is important, right after survival (or perhaps we only survive cause we want to do something), passion and goals makes people move forward and make progress, either financially, self improvement, relationships, world domination, etc…
I would put in cause the passion to make games, the passion to make drawings, the passion to make animations, programming, acting etc… sure its enjoyable and keeps the mind occupied but its not an end in itself, its an error to go for something because “its something i like to do and maybe i can make a living or get rich out of that” thats boring!
Also agree there is a lot of doubtful life-path ideas, usually taught by parents, and spread into common thinking, takes a lot of effort to realize what moves us, what are our individual goals, what paths lead to those goals, and take action! Its easier to sit down watching tv, drawing, programming etc… because something good will probably happen if we keep doing so (again thats boring!).
In sum i think its important:
1 - Have some stability (just enough)
2 - Find what drives you
3 - Have a plan (avoid this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PC3lov2xGY)
4 - Take action!
Yea it takes a while but having a long term purpose is always charming, and no I’m not a successful person.
My job is to make “Follow your dreams” posters. Please don’t ruin that for me. 
Thanks for the post. It helped me to read that a successful developer has similar doubts and hesitations to my own.
Right now I do not feel like quitting my day job (making AAA games) to make indie games but… I am starting to have doubts whether, with all the marketing required to get noticed, it is still possible to make a successful indie game in your spare time. It is like this: I can put 20 hours a week max towards finishing my game. 10 hours is usually more realistic. However even just preparing a weekend update for the screenshot Saturday may take away 2 hours of my time. If I want to write some content for the blog - bam, 4 hours gone with the wind. Twitter - hard to measure as it is a cost largely hidden in other tasks.
This is some very, very basic level of awareness building, not yet really marketing at all. And already it can cut down my average working week to 4 hours. This means implementing a single feature might take weeks, possibly months,
As I said, I am not ready to quit my job - you might call it golden handcuffs, although mine are more like gold plated. But I am afraid if I do not give it “everything I’ve got” I may never be able to make it. What do you guys think? Am I exaggerating? Or maybe I should just drop even this minimal marketing effort and focus on creating the game first?
Hey Mazurek64,
Everyone likes/would like to have golden handcuffs / a rentable job, but assuming that after a certain threshold money is not proportional to happiness, its important to be able to trade more free time for less income or even switching jobs without fear of losing home/wife/dogs/car. Of course that depends on the job, company work ethics, life situation, debts to pay, cost of life etc… In that case its good to figure how to keep stability and get more free time to explore other areas you like.
Once you figure making indie games or skipping rope or dancing is way to go, nothing will stop you from putting more and more time into that and eventually quiting your job, its the natural thing to happen, it takes a while and its usually not a smooth ride, but its worthwhile.
Thats how i view the job / income scene, I’m not someone who has traveled the world switching jobs or anything like that, but it sounds reasonable, Cheers!
I’ve been down this path. I put my decades of life into the regular job, never forgetting what got me headed towards software development in the first place - a beaten up Space Invaders game.
After that, went to university, got my M.Sc in computer science, and still worked on games on the side.
Worked on a couple that did well in the real world (and helping out with yet another at the moment).
Have my own company that is working on stuff - even though I tend to contract out art work due to me totally sucking at it.
What do I do now? I’ve retired from my regular job, I teach game development part time at a local college (Algonquin College in Ottawa), and work on my own game projects.
Best inspiration was Richard Feynman. “I decided that from now on, I was only going to do things that were fun.”
And I am. Teaching kids to build games is a heck of a lot of work, but is great amounts of fun as well.