Category: Uncategorized

I know someone who works in local government but wants to be a historian. I know someone who works in science but wants to be an author. I know another scientist who would like to be a photographer.

Like most people, they don’t change. They don’t change what they do for a number of reasons. Some are practical, some are emotional. I’d wager that the majority of people out there are not in the career they want to be in. I’m sure all of them can justify to other people, and themselves why they shouldn’t change their career, even though deep down they know they have the wrong one.

Few of us have grand plans for what we want to do with our lives aged 16 (when many people make educational choices that will determine teir future careers). I wanted to be a special effects cameraman, Then a heavy metal guitar hero. Then a computer games designer.

I ended up working as a boat builder, for no more illustrious reason that I happened to be sat next to a kid at college who worked there at weekends and we became friends. I’m sure some of you reading this have ‘fallen into’ a career that way, and it’s never one you would have chosen as your life’s goal, back then, let alone right now.

Of all the reasons to change, the most depressing one is the fact that it would mean a drop in your standard of living in the short term. “I get good money as a senior cubicle sweeper, why would I quit it to be a lowly paid actor doing bit parts in daytime TV?” sounds very reasonable in the short term (and assuming you won’t actually be a successful actor), but when it comes to career, thinking short term is madness. So it might take you five years or ten years to get back to where you are now in your new career, don’t you owe it to yourself to make the best of your life? Do you really want to be sat there aged 50 wishing you’d given it a go?

I quit my boat-building job and was unemployed for eight months, doing the odd manual job when it showed up. Eventually I got a job as an IT hardware engineer for £11k a year. it was hell. Within a year I had a better job for a company in the city for £16. they promoted me to about £22 as I recall. After 2 years I left there to work for an IT training company for £30k, then eventually (after doing an MCSE in my spare time) I got a job as an IT consultant for £48 then £55k. Things were suddenly much better than they would ever have been building boats.

After getting fed up with all that I changed careers again, having taught myself C++ from mail order courses and evening classes. I got a job at Elixir for about half my IT consultant salary.

Ouch.

Then after 2 years I went to lionhead and earned a bit more, then got a bit more. Then I effectively changed career again to run positech and effectively halved my salary again.

Ouch.

Now I work for myself, and I’ve climbed back to where I was before, only this time I have my dream job and no boss. From boat-builder to computer game designer took me twenty years and 3 career changes. It’s not exactly easy.

But it can be done. And if you are sat there thinking your dream job is far too removed from what you do, remember that you read the blog of a guy who used to nail boats together all day and now programs computer games. If I can make that career change, you can make yours.

Since when did game developers all become indoctrinate dby marketing and PR bullshit? It seems now that a lot of the interviews you read with actual coders and designers (not the publishers) have stuff like this in:

“It was an incredible thrill and privilege to be able to leverage the awesome IP from that title to provide a compelling and dynamic experience for this platform, and it will be available across multiple SKUs”

Nobody wants tor ead that crap except shareholders.  What I want to know is the honest thoughts and opinions and experiences of people. But you don’t get that, just a lot of marketing speak. People are interviewed, then everything interesting gets censored by the marketing dept until its just character-less, souless mediaspeak.

Here’s some brutally honest comments by me on some of my own games and indieness. if I had a PR manager, he or she would never let me say this stuff:

“Starship tycoon is basically transport tycoon in space. I was originally doing a space combat game, but for some reason I don’t even recall it got converted to a space trading one. I was a pretty crap coder when I made that game, and although generally it runs well 90% of the time for 95% of the people, you should check out the demo first, because it *does* have some bugs in it, and tbh they are not about to get fixed.”

“Kudos 2’s days at work are the low point of the game. I just didn’t have the budget, manpower and time to write enough events for all the differnt jobs, and I was delusional thinking I could do it. When I play the game, I do find myself skipping the text descriptions of my day at work. It’s the one design bit I don’t like.”

“Right now there is a price war going on between the casual games portals, and it’s going to seriously squeeze a lot of the smaller casual game developers out of business. Personally, I don’t care that much, because a lot of them are just churning out diner dash rip-offs for someone else anyway. Would we really give a damn if they went out of business?”

Wouldn’t it be more fun if every develoepr interview was mroe like that? I think so :D

Might as well keep you guessing. But here is a very general clue as to what sort of game I’m doing next.

More clues to follow

I still occasionally pay for ad clicks for democracy 2. It’s an older game now (just over a year old) but it still sells, and has had a bit of a welcome boost thanks to the US elections and the resulting increase in interest in all things political. I figure that if people are more interested in politics than usual, that the same ad spend as usual should have better results. It’s true that the credit crunch means people have less money, but that also means people spend less on ads so ad space should have less competition and be cheaper :D

Right now I’m only using google adwords to place some democracy 2 leaderboards. I’ve also been reading a book about brain structure and advertising, which covers the whole topic of how advertising works (in real low-level neuroscience style), which also has me thinking about ads a lot. According to the book, almost all of our sensory input gets channelled first through an area of the brain called the ‘amygdala’ which is in charge of our fear response, before being passed on to other areas for detailed contextual analysis. This is so that the brain can recognize danger (a snake, a hand grenade etc) as quickly as possible. It’s also why we jump back instinctively if someone throws a fake spider or snake at you, even when it’s an obvious fake. The higher level pattern-recognition parts of your brain that say “its clearly a toy” haven’t even received the data yet, let alone come to conclusions.

I find this interesting because it explains US political TV ads. Most of the successful ones are based on fear. Fear of terrorists. Fear of immigrants. Fear of crime. Fear of poverty. The fear response takes over before the higher level rational bit even gets a look-in.

Which is interesting, but doesn’t help me sell games :(. I’ve tried a few different banner ad styles and wordings and will let the wonder of A/B testing evolve the one that sells the most copies.

It seems every tenth person with a computer is a composer of music for Video games, who currently has a gap in their schedule and wants to make music for my next game.

At least, that is what you might think if you saw my inbox. I’m sure I’m not special, I bet anyone who makes indie games, and who has the budget to actually pay people to make music gets the same number of CV’s and emails sent to them as I do. generally speaking I try to reply to everyone who emails me, regardless what it is about (unless it’s yet more justifications of piracy – I’ve read enough now thanks). However, I confess I don’t reply to unsolicited CV’s from music composers.

Partly this is because there is such a glut of them right now that I know I’ll never have a problem finding one when I need one, and partly because the guy I used for my last two games does exactly the sort of music I’ll need for my next one, so the chances of me needing a new composer in the near future are pretty much zero.

So if you are reading this at music college and hoping to make your fortune in the games industry doing music for games, trust me, get a different plan, because there are WAY too many people out there trying to do that right now. Learn C++ instead :D.