I’ve got it! Here is my rough outline plan for the next eight years.
I am going to make games. Currently, I am employed full-time, working 40 hours a week at my day job. However, I can dedicate an additional 45 hours each week to work on my games.
Step One: I will scope a game that I can make in three months and publish it on Steam. In parallel, I will look for investors. While I don’t necessarily need them, securing investment could allow me to quit my day job earlier and execute my plan faster. By the way, all my games are going to be free.
The first game will help build a foundation of supporters, and donations from these supporters will start coming in. I will then scope the next game for six months. I’ll rinse and repeat this process for the next two years.
At this point, I expect to have enough income from donations to quit my daytime job and focus fully on making my own games. I am aiming for around $3 million. With this income, I’ll set up a program to aid my friends and family, no strings attached, so they can enjoy their lives. I’ll probably start with $500 per month, increasing the support as my income grows.
Throughout this process, maintaining creative freedom is essential. While finding investors can accelerate my plans, I will ensure that any partnerships allow me to retain control and creativity in my projects.
Years 3-5: Over the next three years, I will continue making a new game every six months. As I gain experience and work full-time on my games. This means my games will become more and more attractive and awesome. I can relax a bit and work 60 hours a week instead of 85. By the end of the fifth year, I expect to have earned $250 million.
Years 6-8: I will keep up the momentum, aiming for a total of $1 billion by the end of the eighth year.
I will regularly re-evaluating my plan at every step.
About half a year ago on a whim, I wrote a post about the development process. I thought a lot about how I can optimize it and came to the conclusion that just working solo, the outline of the process takes about 10 steps, each step introduces overhead, even and the polished well-working team, adds the human factor, and everything just barely crawling. If I can work solo, I think I can have a productivity of 5x developers, minimum, and honestly, I am estimating it to be about x100. So instead of having a team of 100 developers with exactly the same productivity as myself, it is cheaper and more fun to work solo.
What is going on? I woke up and World War III and nukes are trending on Twitter. And also, I pulled my back and have diarrhea. Just keep swimming.
I am doing a one-month game jam, and I was stupid enough to commit to publishing the game on Steam at the end of the jam. The store page is live. Wishlist or not is up to you.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3058180/The_Final_Act
I am still learning about game development and development in general. I am reflecting on why I do not like the existing art pipeline in engines. You need to get locked into some decisions. One small example: if you want to do blend meshes, you are locked into the mesh, and you cannot modify the mesh. If you want to make changes, you will need to redo all your blend meshes. These kinds of issues are littered across the pipeline. A tiny change in the early stages of the pipeline causes a ripple effect.
Back in the day, we had two ways to serve JPEG images on the internet. The internet was slow, so you could see how the image was loading. One way was loading from top to bottom, and another way was blurry with little detail and then became sharper over time.
I think in game development (maybe in general software development) it is important to get the rough game from beginning to end, so you will have some blurry vision of the game and a general idea of how the game feels, what kind of weak or strong spots the game has, and in general, if it’s worth continuing to work on the game.
So, the first step is to implement the main game loop and all service functionality around the game as fast as possible with placeholder assets and without any important functionality. This way, you can get the feel of the gameplay. I think the second stage is to add assets to bring the look of the game as close as possible to the final look. This is more to keep excitement about the game fueled by nice aesthetics. I found having a lot of placeholder and temporary art demotivating. Also, once you are done with this step, the game is technically shippable. It is just about adding more content and polishing it up.
As I mentioned at the beginning of the post, I am still learning, and these are just my thoughts, not tested. What are your thoughts?
Last week I started working standing almost 100% of the time. I feel it has helped a lot to deal with my long COVID symptoms.
YouTube playlist is buggy; it is falling apart with my 400 music videos playlist. Slow, stops playing at random times and refuses to restart.
I have an idea for tutorial processing. I feel my tutorials are too slow-paced. Personally, I watch my own tutorials on 2x speed. I’m wondering if I should record them normally, then speed them up to 2x and re-narrate them to match my own 2x talking speed.
Does anyone use the Insert button to toggle between insert and override mode? I never use it, but occasionally press it by accident, then I try to hit backspace? We probably have to repurpose the button for something more useful.
Some game developers ask: “I spent 3, 4, 5 years working on a game, and then I released it. Some minor issues, like problems with the controller, generated negative reviews that set the tone for the whole project, and the game sank. How can I avoid these types of mistakes?”
I think it is expected to make mistakes. You need to learn by failing. You just have to be okay with failing, stand up, and continue moving forward. I believe it is better to start by making smaller scoped games. Start with a game jam, make a game in 2 days, and see the reaction. I learned that issues with the controller can indeed affect the reception of an otherwise decent game from my game jam experiences.
In my opinion, you just have to be ready to fail and make sure that after failure, you are able to stand up and continue with better knowledge.
Just keep swimming.
If someone says to you, “I am Taiwanese” or “I am Singaporean,” and you reply, “Nah, you are Chinese,” remember that they feel the same way as if a Ukrainian says, “I am Ukrainian,” and you reply, “Nah, you are Russian.” Please, be mindful.
Today I went to the SoCal Startup Day and saw a lot of desperate entrepreneurs. I could see it in their faces. They go for the pitch, it’s high energy and upbeat. But then they come downstairs, and their expressions change from smiles to desperation. It’s a horrible sight. I question why you have to sacrifice your family, health, and happiness if you want to have a business. Why is that mindset so prevalent?
I don’t know exactly why I went to the conference. It’s kind of the opposite of what I want—I want to find some life in the work-life balance situation. I’m already working 40 hours a week at my job and then using the rest of the time to work on my own games. Don’t get me wrong, I love making games, but sometimes I want to go for a hike, eat good pho at a restaurant, or sit in a beach chair and watch the waves of the Pacific Ocean. I thought maybe I could find someone who could fund me, so I could quit my studio job and fully focus on working on my games. Take three years, finish the game, put it on sale. Another three years, finish the game, rinse and repeat. And instead of working 85 hours a week, maybe work 60. That would be nice.
But no, if you’re an entrepreneur, you have to sacrifice everything. Shrug.
I don’t know what to do with my life.
Breaking news: Apple finally added a calculator to the iPad!
“Reticle” and “reticule” are two different things.
I had a strange dream. I invited Elon Musk to a Bible study group in my dream, and he agreed and came to the meeting. He was super chill and seemed to be having fun, while I was very self-conscious, thinking I was wasting Musk’s time with the Bible study. Then I started thinking that the setup didn’t make sense; I must be dreaming. Yeah, nothing makes sense, I am dreaming, and in my dream, I remembered going to bed. But I also remembered that before going to bed, things didn’t make sense either. It cannot be that I am dreaming in this dream and in the other “reality.” And then I actually woke up.
Should we start calling Proton PINE (Proton is not an emulator)? Some people call it an emulator, and it triggers me a bit.
🌸 Fri, Jun 7, 2024 🌸
The 2FA into my studio takes so much time; sometimes I get distracted while waiting for the webpage to come up, and ending up on the timed-out page, because I forgot that I was about to log in to the studio system.
🌸 Thu, Jun 6, 2024 🌸
Sometimes my Unreal Engine gets confused about which GPU to use, giving the error “Cannot find a compatible Vulkan device that supports surface presentation”. I am fixing it by adding -graphicsadapter=X. For example, /mnt/Texas/prj/ue5.4/Engine/Binaries/Linux/UnrealEditor ~/prj/TheFinalAct/TheFinalAct.uproject -graphicsadapter=2
🌸 Thu, Jun 6, 2024 🌸
The Actor Lifecycle is a very useful documentation page. Do you put all starting functionality into BeginPlay? And you’re trying to figure out dependencies between an actor’s initialization? What if this actor runs BeginPlay first and another one hasn’t run it yet? Check this page; you can put your starting functionality not only in BeginPlay, PostInitializeComponent is one of the useful ones, or OnConstruct, which is very useful for seeing the result immediately in the editor. #UnrealEngine
🌸 Wed, Jun 5, 2024 🌸
If you cannot select translucent objects in Unreal Engine, just press T; it toggles the ability to select translucent objects.
🌸 Tue, Jun 4, 2024 🌸
I have an interesting thought: ChatGPT, in its current state, may actually help people improve their communication skills. Since ChatGPT can be somewhat limited in understanding, it requires clear and well-written input to comprehend. This mirrors the skills necessary for effective human-to-human communication. TL;DR: If ChatGPT 3.5 can understand you, most likely other people would understand you as well.
🌸 Tue, Jun 4, 2024 🌸
Is the ‘Do-Re-Mi’ song from The Sound of Music 2 semitones flat? 🤮
🌸 Tue, Jun 4, 2024 🌸
Modern Game Engines are forcing the development in the waterfall style, the asset pipeline is so rigid it is forcing developers to build the ‘PROCESS’ around it. My dream is to be able to easily make small tweaks at any stage of the game development.
I don’t like when services ask for my birthday; can they stop doing it?
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