Of love and paying the rent
You often hear, “If you love your project, it will happen. Love will find a way.” This is great, positive thinking, but you can’t pay your landlord with ‘love’ (or can you? … no… no, no, no, we’re not stooping to that yet…) So the realities of a self-funded project mean having to spend sweet, sweet game-making time doing stuff that’s more to do with rent and bills and food rather than making the game.
Stu’s other programming job (until we start rolling in PILES AND PILES OF MONEY (and other various fantasies)) is taking a chunk of time, so Grandpa progress is moving at the pace of a grandpa, but a spritely grandpa. My own progress has slowed to the crawl of a baby this week as I look into ways to get money that don’t involve creepy people asking me to ‘just take this suitcase across the border, quick, QUICK!’
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| The task board grows, even as time shrinks |
Matt has finished up his saxophonist season for the stage production of Annie (even SAYING the word ‘tomorrow’ to him makes his eye twitch) and can now focus more time on adding audio to each of Damian’s animations. Damian himself is doing well, but he’s definitely in that stage where the fun ‘drawing cool art’ gives way to ‘wrestling with tech to make it function in the game’. And Tracey? Well… having finished the background paintings and handballed the dev diary over to me, Tracey is now full time with her writing job at Polygon, until she’s reactivated like a Terminator when it comes time to spread the word to the far reaches of media.
So the lesson to be learned here, I guess, is that making games is as much about work as it is about fun, and as much about the realities of day-to-day living as it is about the dream. Stephen King started out doing laundry for a seafood restaurant for an income, while he lived in a caravan with his family, typing up his stories each night. Sometimes, you gotta gather warm, day-old prawn heads if you want your dream. We want the dream.
