If you are an indie software developer, either full or part time, struggling to get your software recognized, I recommend you checkout Jeff Atwood’s latest post on his blog, “Coding Horror”. The post is titled “How to Get Rich Programming”, and while I realize I will never become rich and famous for my code, it is always nice to read about someone else’s success story. Someone who deserves it. Not some company that raped some developers and made some money off the developer’s backs. This is just a guy, by himself, who made something that other people liked. Instead of charging for it he gave it away for free, and pays bills via ads on his site. Kudos to him!
I’ve been up in the air in terms of my vision lately. I have no idea what direction I want to take my coding in, and I have no idea why. I love creating little applications to help myself in my day-to-day work, so I’ll probably never stop doing that. And occasionally, when I think an application might have a broad enough appeal I release it on this site. But my real love lies with game development, as you could probably not guess by my 2 stalled projects on this site (ConceptRS and SS:Zero). If only you had access to my hard drive to see how many half done, near done and tech demo game projects I have tinkered with. There must be at least 50 of them, all of them doomed to collect virtual dust from a lack of time to pursue their development. I’ve often thought about pursuing a career in game development, and have even applied for a couple jobs (although, to be fair the jobs were in England and Australia and I don’t have work visas for either country, so I didn’t stand a chance). But then I think about why I want to develop games and my answer is always: Because it’s fun. I love it. I love building the framework, tweaking, playing, tuning and eventually sharing my love with other people. But somehow doing this for someone else makes me think it might lose its lustre.
I think the time has come to finally just suck it up, buckle down, and try to actually develop something. Something simple. I always seem to get bogged down with the technical complexities and the project eventually stalls, like, for example, the physics in ConceptRS. It’s time to go through my old game projects and see which one deserves to be resuscitated, because I know I could use a revival.
May 30th, 2007 at 2:49 am
Very poignant Jon, I wish I could say I didn’t understand this feeling ALL too well, I’ve encountered it in many fields of endeavor unfortunately.