Why being an indie game developer interests me?

...exploring the infinite of the universe, colonizing distant planets or enganging in cosmic battles with spaceships or races

...rushing through the enemies lines, fighting them and rescue the world like your favorite character of a movie

...flying around like a bird over the greatest building, higher than the sky and just relax

...racing precisely through the streets of a city, avoiding the traffic and other cars and win the race against your friends just with a fraction of a second

Most likely you can go on for a while with this list.

Dreaming, natural curiosity, exploration and understanding new things is a part of our human nature. We are born with this ability, and we are required to use it in our daily life. Games are a way to do all of that and even more, they provide a way to explore the world, enjoy the time and have fun.

Being a game developer let you pick up the lenses and see the world in the ways you want to see it, making it possible that other people can see the world as someone else might see it. You can immerse them into a world, that you created and let them experience it.

It is your story, your setting, your world, the creativity is endless.

Ever get worn out from going through the same pattern in daily life? Ever felt like life is passing you by as you wait for a meeting, phone call, domestic task, or commute?

lacked color and just seemed to you in grayscale?

At the end of some of my days, i felt like i was just a passenger in my own life. The repetitive tasks and the same routine as a robot without any interest. With this feeling clashing together with my natural curiosity and the desire to learn new things, makes it even harder to see that I don´t follow the path that my life should take.

With the start of my self-employment in 2016, my expectations were not clear at that time. Thought to be able to more freely decide what my work shall look like, quickly found out still being bound to the dull life, usual project business and the urge to make money.

I still did not commit to the idea of being a game developer.

Even if i see myself as a capable developer with broad knowledge in a lot of different skills, let it be huge eCommerce landscapes, connecting enterprise processes, setting up websites or handling infrastructure setups with docker and kubernetes, creativity was not the part i showed off.

Give me a process to automate, data to process, a customer to register and i´ll do it for, but give me a blank sheet of paper and it stays blank. Drawing is not the thing, don´t get me wrong, but i can imagine, with everything related to it, i can create something.

But with honesty, this creative part is seeking the freedom to express it deserves

Being self-employed is not a walk in the park, sometimes it´s a lot of work and responsibility that comes along with it. Luckily as a developer, at least finding a customer to work with is doable even if the work by itself is not that easy every time.

With being a software developer since 2011 and self-employed 5 years later, I owned a lot of topics in various projects for my customers and still this is a different kind than building something on your own.

There are a lot of roles and topics involved in a project that you have to take care of, even if you are not the only one working on it and in the end you are responsible for the outcome.

This short buzzword list of topics apply for most software development projects, but game development is a different beast. The coding is harder, the UX even more important and the whole processes can be magnitudes more complex.

I made myself self-employed and trust myself in order to archive true independence in my decisions and face every risk that comes along

Over the course of this year, i read a lot of books and the ones that fascinated me the most out of them were the non fiction ones from Steven Pressfield. He is a writer and a screenwriter and wrote a couple of books about the creative process and the mindset of a creative person.

At one point in his book Do the work, he described small tests to find out if the book is appropriate and if the readers attitude is aligned. Without going into details, one of the right answers on the question Why do you want it was because I have no choice.

There is no other reason for me to that apart from the fact that I have no other choice.

...No other choice than to slowly get away from the way of self-employment i currently have.

...No other choice to find out why game development is the type of work i want to do.

...No other choice and climb down this rabbit hole and see where it leads me.

Everybody should know that making anything is hard, with no guarantee of success. In the past years i played around with unity and unreal engine, but never really got into it.

Now it's time to take commitment and do what is required in order to make it happen.

Building something that truly reflects my passion is the hardest challenge i´ve ever faced