Paying the Bills

Why can’t I just make games?!

This past year and half have not been good for the old bank account. Because of the animation industry contraction, there were just no jobs available. Like all of you I GOT BILLS TO PAY. Luckily, over the past 10+ years, my wife and I have been saving for retirement. So, I did have a safety net of savings. But I did I have to tap into that to pay the bills. This is something I worked so hard over the last 20+ years to avoid. It sucked.

So, with no animation jobs, the obvious thing to me was to shift focus on my hobby/side hustle, game development. So, I spent months making a demo for a platformer game that I thought I could sell. But guess what? I quickly found out that just like the animation industry, there is a big contraction in the video game industry as well.

Bills don’t care about industry contractions!

So, instead of just:

I added this to my business model: work for hire game development.

Luckily for me, the timing was PERFECT! My friend just happened to land some investments for his project and part of the project was… A GAME DEMO! So for the last couple months, I’ve been working on this:

No, it’s not just blocks, it has graphics now.

I’m really happy with the project and most importantly, so is the client. I’m sharpening my skills, learning more and NOW I CAN PAY THE BILLS!

<phew>

But it didn’t even dawn on me until a couple weeks ago, that this is a big deal. See, besides the little profit I see from my game sales, this is my very first PAID GAME DEVELOPMENT WORK!

“I did it Mom!”

The project should wrap up soon, and then onto the next one…

So, for all of you looking for work or struggling, the lesson to take away from all of this is try to think of what marketable skills you have and sell YOU! Because you are the best thing people can buy (unless you are some kind of big jerk that no one wants to work with).

If that’s the case, you might wanna work on that part first…

Next newsletter: “A Lesson In Marketing”