I am currently in a sort of limbo, which will explain why my blog posts have been less frequent. When I was working around the clock all day every day on Production Line and spending the weekend doing blog videos, there was a ton to talk about. The same was true of Democracy 4. But the last few years have been a bit of a strange period for me because my life has changed quite a bit, and I haven’t really blogged about it, so here we are.
Firstly, I have been making games and selling them online since 1997. Its sounds ridiculous to me that I might be about to retire, and yet the truth is that I sort of already have. Kind of. Not really. I had a number of other jobs prior to games, including mad ones such as window-cleaning, boat-building, guitar-teaching and IT support. When I finally made it into game full time I worked at two triple A studios, and THEN I finally went full time indie and made the games most people know me for.
So I’ve been around a while. For the record, I’m 55. Young to retire, but not young for gamedev. Not many people in videos about game development have grey hair (and not much of that any more…).
Somewhere along the line, as I was building up my portfolio of games, two things happened. Firstly, I had enough hit games that I had kind of made retirement money, and secondly I invested that money, and spent a fair bit of time managing the investments. To give some context, I used to work in IT for city trading floors, and did a degree in economics, so markets come quite easily to me, and I am fascinated by the stock market.
To cut a long story short, I did quite nicely from that, and managed to save up the money to build a solar farm. There are many posts by me about it, and I now own two companies: A games one and an energy one. On top of this, the investments fluctuate so much that it means that the ‘average’ year now, I am about as dependent on the stock market for income as I am games. Weirdly, games has gone from a teenage hobby to a full-time job back to a hobby again. This is strange.
Plus I have finally come to the conclusion that what I really need is a stress-free and happy life. There are studies that show that any income over £70k a year no longer increases your happiness. I can state that this is absolute bollocks, and the number is higher, but its not THAT much higher. My current goal is definitely happiness above all else. So given that early retirement is an option, what would you do?
Well it turns out that this question is MUCH harder for me than most people. I just read a book on hypomania, and although I’m not hypomanic… I am a bit. probably more than I care to admit. The idea of me sitting in the garden with a cup of coffee and a book each afternoon seems ludicrous to me. I just can’t do it, or at least I can’t do it every day.
So I ended up making a little game to keep myself busy. I even released it on steam for a laugh. Its a vertical shooter, the exact kind of game that never sells on steam, so nobody makes any more. It took a few months. Here is the trailer:
I think its kind of fun, and I enjoyed making it. Obviously I had a lot to do to build a solar farm, but it wasn’t even 10 hours a week, let alone 40. Now the farm is up and running its likely under 2 hours a week. So what to do? At one point I actually completely re-designed my entire website from scratch, which took a few weeks, but no more (and I am SO glad I did it). Also during this time I started making a new game…
…and I seem to have taken it a bit too seriously. I’ve written code that takes up 1,607,029 bytes of text. I guess the average line is maybe 40 bytes? So 40,000 lines of new code? I now have a complete strategy game that is playable, although not balanced, and likely a bit buggy, and has some missing content. I reused some assets from an old game for some bits, and I will change all those, and also I’ll need new music, although I might even buy stock music licenses for that. You may have noticed that I have not announced this game, let alone shown a screenshot or trailer, although I have a ton of screenshots and it sometimes looks pretty awesome in trailers. I’ve been working on it for about a year now, and do work on it most days. Its not a hobby any more.
I would LOVE to just announce it and paste some screenshots here, but I am teaching myself to be careful, and patient, and only do that when it is ludicrous not to. There is a lot of attention, and stress, and instant feedback you get when you announce a game, and TBH I am not really up to handling any of that right now. I guess most people would say they are exhausted or overwhelmed, and I probably am, but simply do not recognize that.
So anyway, this is the very start of 2025, and in theory this should be an easy year for me. The solar farm is almost 100% done and should just tick along and make me content and happy. I do not have any pressure to release a game this year, and I can chill out. Obviously I won’t chill out, so the nearest thing for me is to just work on the thing I am secretly very proud of, but not expose it to the world for judgement until I am 100% calm and content.
A lot of words to type to say ‘I’m working on a thing’ but I have spare time to type them :D.