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[iDev]

Beginning of last year I was a web developer for a small start up, new in the industry to head developer in a few months. After saving an employee's job I got the axe a week later. The Boss was out to save money, I said the wrong things at the wrong time. I now currently work part time in a supermarket. Hopefully 2015 will be a better year

That being said, I have a lot of respect for those who take the plunge of leaving their job to start becoming an indie dev. Personally that's too much risk for me, I have nothing to fall back on and trust me you will never know how well you will do until you have your projects finished and on the market. So developing is my second job at the moment.

[Lost Shrine]

Definitely a lot of respect for those who have taken the plunge to go full time.  It always occurs to me that deciding whether to make the leap is all about taking a step back and taking stock.  For example, I work a job most of the time, outside of indie gaming, that's not particularly fulfilling but at least grants me the time to fund and focus upon my other interests.  The downside is that when you're working something like that and you want to take your creative outlet/hobby to the next level, it's super easy to do so simply in comparison to your current work - "I don't enjoy this, I do enjoy this".  It's easy to take an emotional decision, shout carpe diem and then be stranded without funds a few months down the line - ironically too stressed out on the whole food/rent issue to focus on making your game great. 

Personally, I try and use my day job (and the crap that can flow from it) as a springboard - it's the safety net that mitigates risk for the things I actually care about creating and working on.

Not a long term goal of course - I'd love to take things to the 'next level' (bit cringe, but you know what I mean) and if you can do it than I say go for it.  But try not to take such a big decision heavily as a reaction to your current job being frustrating, would be my 2 cents.

[VampireSquid]

I am curious if any of the posters on this board are early retirers.  You know the MMM and ERE thing where you save up enough money that by living frugally you can retire at a young age.  

Given how unpredictable revenue from video games is this seems a good approach.  Is anyone actually doing this or planning to?

[oodavid]

@_matt_: I married a Doctor so... 

[RareSloth]

My co-founder and I quit our jobs and moved across the states this month!

[WaywardEmcee]

I still work my day job, and work as an indie by night. I happen to be a software engineer in silicon valley so I get paid quite a bit. I use my large income to outsource art/audio work at above average rates (so I attract the more talented artists from those areas) in places where labor is cheaper (E.G. Eastern Asia) which normally lets me keep one or two contractors working for me at a time, while covering my cost of living, and paying off my student loans.

I see no reason to jump the gun and quit my job before I have a tangible product to sell.

[ProgrammerDude]

If anyone are on the fence to take the plunge going full indie, I would recommend to code your game (or app) with a highly marketable language like Objective-C, Swift, Java, C# (Xamarin), HTML5/JS (PhoneGap / Titanium). Because if your game failed miserably like mine, at least you'll have a decent skill that could strike employment rather quickly.

I chose Corona SDK / Lua and used it for a full year. Built a game with it and failed to earn any money. Great experience, good SDK, and I accepted the failure because it was a badly executed concept.

Afterwards I have no more resources to go on, so I went back to the job market.

First, employers are keen to see that I published a mobile game. But once the conversation gets technical, they frowned immediately after knowing I built it out of Corona/Lua. It was a tough few months looking for work, and I finally scored a junior position coding 9-5 with with one of those "popular" languages.

Only if I knew to choose a more marketable platform, my life could have been slightly better.

Corona/Lua are good tools, don't get me wrong. But I just cannot find any employers recognizing it as a desirable skill.

Bottom line: Pick a coding platform you know you could be hired for later on, should your indie life failed miserably. The last place you want to end up is having some failed products crafted out of unmarketable skills.

[motorsep]

I happened to start full time indie career when my contract was up. If I had a day job at that time, I would probably stay on it until I saw that indie game dev can replace my job income with steady long term cash flow.

Now I am back to working a day job and until I have my new game (that isn't out yet) and old game (re-released on new platforms) producing either full long term replacement, or significant partial long term replacement (so I could have a part-time job) of my current income, I am bound to stay working a day job.

[xier]

Here's my story:

I went to university and finished my undergrad. Music Composition was my field of study, so as you can imagine - getting steady income was quite difficult. Luckily, I managed to land a job after school at a private music conservatory where I taught and held lectures, and played bars regularly for some spending money. I stayed with this routine for almost a year and a half, but something just wasn't right. Money was coming in regularly, but I knew I was not satisfied with what I was doing. Why teach when you can do?

So I left my job and took some time to "find myself". I left my country, and wandered around Europe for about 6 months - networking with really interesting people, and absorbing all of the music, artwork, culture, and beautiful architecture I could.

After coming back, I met up with one of my close friends (who happened to be a developer) and we started catching up and reminiscing about the past. We were talking about all the great games we used to play together while we were growing up, and all those fun memories we made together doing so. Then we started talking about the game we wish we could play now, and realized our vision was quite similar in what we wanted.   

It was at that moment we decided to start our project, Dragon of Legends. (progress can be found here if you're at all interested: www.dragonoflegends.com )

The two of us have been working in the music and game development industries for at least 5 years, so we decided to take a leap and try to do something great.

Next month is going to be our first anniversary. It's so amazing to see the progress we have made as a studio over such a short amount of time. We originally started with two people, now our team is up to 9. The amount of knowledge accumulated over this year is incredible, self education FTW!! The whole project is bootstrapped by the founders, and the majority of the people working are doing so on a volunteer basis. We have yet to bring any revenue in (as our project is still in development), but this was an amazing experience I would do again in a heart beat.

So are you thinking about quitting your job and going indie? It's what I did and I don't regret it for a second.