What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project
1–10 of 128 posts
Re: What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project
#2How did you get married and afford rent?
Re: What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project
#3How did you get married and afford rent?
It was a side project. OP mentions he has a full-time job ... also, is marriage contingent on an income level?
Re: What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project
#4A project is doomed to fail unless you setup a specific target success goal before you start.
Perhaps one can get lucky, and stumble into success - monetary or fame or something. But more often than not, a project that didn't initially define what success looks like would be doomed to fail (and meandering is also a type of failure under this model).
Re: What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project
#5> the downside of adding more features is that it becomes increasingly time intensive to fix bugs, update demos, deal with pull requests and respond to questions.
Thibaut Duplessis, creator of Lichess, talks about this in a talk he gave (YouTube somewhere). He says that he's very reluctant to add new features due to the huge cost. The feature must be something very special to overcome the cost.
Re: What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project
#6How did you get married and afford rent?
It was a side project. OP mentions he has a full-time job ... also, is marriage contingent on an income level?
Both marriage and divorce rates have a very strong correlation with income in the US.
It also makes being unprofitable and living in your parents basement harder.
(Obviously GP missed that this was a side gig)
Re: What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project
#7How did you get married and afford rent?
It was a side project. OP mentions he has a full-time job ... also, is marriage contingent on an income level?
I think more along the lines of having a partner in a healthy relationship requires some time put forth, which unless the partner is pair programming, time is not being spent on development efforts.
Re: What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project
#8My experience is that anything that spending significant amounts of your time on anything that assists others with building their thing is a total waste of time. Tech or otherwise. Those people are mainly doing it with the goal of making money for no one but themselves. The fact that they don't have money already proves that they likely are not good at making money. One of those primary early ways to make money is that early on you may have to strike some potentially less favorable deals when you have no money to get your first projects off the ground. Which of course they are NEVER EVER are willing to do. ie profit sharing or something.
Re: What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project
#9It's only a failure if you judge success by monthly income. I'm not saying that's not a good way to measure success, just pointing out that it doesn't have to be the only measure. A therapist told me this recently when I was struggling to find meaning in life.
Success can be tons of stars on GitHub - I would feel very good if I had positively benefited that many people. I think a major downside of capitalism is how it attempts to attach a price tag to both the concrete and the ephemeral - how can you put a price tag on the good feelings one gets for creating something useful from the world? But nah every side project has to be a hustle and if it isn't making you money, drop it in a second.
As for support requests, you don't really have to reply to them. You have control over your level of involvement in a project.
How much less enjoyable does your backyard garden become if every weed you pull you think "excellent, I've just increased the value of my house by .12$. Ah shit there goes inflation, hold on, my weed pulling nets me less than a dollar an hour, maybe I should do some contracting with this time instead?"
Re: What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project
#10Failing is hard. I'd definitely try to get my kid into sports so he can learn to lose early and often.