Since the beginning of 2022 I’ve been working full time as an indie game developer. First of all, some background on myself.

The past 30th of December was my last day as a developer at Ironhide Game Studio. Almost ten years working on great games like the Kingdom Rush series, learning a lot not only as a programmer but in all areas of game development. Alongside Manuel we founded Tragico Media and are currently working on our first game Tourist Trap, a dark comedy point and click adventure.

I have a partner and two small kids. Why am I telling you this? So you can have an idea what my costs of living are. Yeah, I know, costs of living vary from country to country… but you get the whole picture this way. While I’m not 100% supporting the whole family my salary was the main income of our family, and until now, the only paycheck we got month to month as a household since my partner has a small architecture studio and kind of lives as an indie I guess… no paycheck each month, then some money comes in from time to time.

Why go indie? Link to heading

I think this is something a lot of developers dream about.
While you can definitely work on great games and with great people at a lot of places there’s nothing like working on your own stuff. But it’s not for everyone. I know people who aren’t interested and are happy working at a company making games and that’s fine. I’m not making a “this is better” judgement, people like different things and that’s cool. Another huge benefit from going indie is you have a lot of freedom with your time and how to manage your days. This is especially valuable when you have kids.

In my particular case, when we signed with Microsoft and joined ID@Xbox I knew there was no way I could undertake our game’s development while working 8 hours a day and this meant I had to resign my job at Ironhide. After a lot of thinking, discussing it at home and running numbers I made the decision. The opportunity of publishing a game on Xbox was too good to pass up.

How do I survive? Link to heading

Or at least how I’ve survived so far…

This is something I’ve always wondered when I see solo or small indie teams like Tinytouchtales or Jake Birkett.
Note: when we signed with Microsoft we got some funding to work on the Xbox port of the game.

I’m living off (part) of this funding as well as my personal savings. The hardest thing for me was changing my mindset from “receiving paycheck at the end of month” to “seeing bank account go down until some money finally comes in. Repeat”. I’m still waiting for the money to come in, but that’s the plan for 2023.
Being a programmer I’m lucky if everything fails I can probably find a job programming something.

How’s it been? Link to heading

The good:

Great, I couldn’t be happier!
Working on your own games is really fulfilling and I’m incredibly grateful for this opportunity. I’ve really enjoyed (co)writing the script for Tourist Trap, this is something I couldn’t have anticipated. Seeing your game come to life bit by bit is really nice and motivating. As a programmer-first dev getting console experience is great and no matter what happens when the game is released the knowledge has already been gained.
Weekly meetings (virtual, actually) were great to focus and push through development of the script and puzzles when things felt a little slow. We got a lot stuff done in a month with one ~2 hour call each week.

The bad:

We are a two person team but I’m the only one working full time. This is just the way it is, not everyone can resign a paycheck. I knew not working side by side was going to suck but at certain points in development it was really a bummer. You get all this small and not so small ideas while working on the game and you want to instantly share it with your teammate but they are stuck at their job. At first I would send a bunch of small emails or messages the moment I thought of something but I came to realize this could be really distracting for him. What I do now is I fill up a txt with all the ideas and send them at the end of the day or week depending on how important I think it is.
Doing all the non-dev stuff is really boring, but has to be done. But what really sucks about this is my brain believes this isn’t work. If my day fully consisted of doing this boring stuff I would feel like I hadn’t worked at all. I had to convince myself this is work (it is!) and it shouldn’t matter if I didn’t have time to write a line of code or implement a new puzzle.

As with all jobs there are stressful times but it just feels… different.

What’s next? Link to heading

Finish and release Tourist Trap in 2023! We have a couple of ideas for new games we’ll start exploring some time next year.

Happy new year!