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[Bonker]

I'm in decision to quit game development, because I just can't make a living from it as a lone wolf developer. Saturated market, being in top 10%, competing against specialized small teams, practically being forced to make games I don't want to make, luck factor,...all the factors are just turning me off this area. Don't wanna struggle here anymore, and reading articles when indie teams who worked on tittle for two years, are economically dependent from donations and similar stuff, just boils everything up.

What I'm asking you is what other areas in IT (web development, apps,... ) or electrical engineering (programming micro-controllers,...) should I try as (and are reality for) lone wolf developer?

[MadSage]

I've been a freelance game developer for 7 years, and the last couple of years have been hard. It's been harder to find game programming contracts, and companies have been dropping like flies. At times I've had no game development work at all, but as I have done work on iOS, the obvious choice for me was iOS app development, so I looked for app contracts.  At the moment I am back to games almost full time, but I will do more apps if I need to, just to pay the bills.  Don't give up on your passion.

[Hangedman]

Getting a more standard job or doing something else doesn't mean you have to give up game development completely

[larsiusprime]

If you have any connections to academia, there are a STUPID amount of grants right now for "serious games" projects, etc.

Most of these grant committees are in DESPERATE need of someone who knows

1) Anything about game design
2) Anything about software development

It's probably a totally different world from what you're used to, but there's opportunities there.

[mikejkelley]

@larsiusprime, I'm making inroads to academia, please direct to me to these grants you speak of!

[vdek]

Have you released anything?

[PompiPompi]

Yea, you can keep developing games and have a "real" job.
You just need to make much smaller games, because you won't be working on them full time.
Another thing is(which was already mentioned), you can try to get work at CS labs in the academia, or some sort of project\contract.
This is good because it might be a part time job\project(more time for deving games) and also it would be more of a lone wolf developer project. You probably won't need to integrate with some large base code of a company and so on.
Also, working on image processing(especially with the GPU) can be as fun as working on games, and the experience will beuseful for gamedeving, once you decide to go back to game deving.

[larsiusprime]

@mikejkelley:

Sent you a PM, didn't realize you'd posted here first. I'd post it for everyone's benefit, but I forgot to save a copy in my outbox, and.... I'm lazy

If anyone else is interested in academia, lemme know and I'll try to retype it.

[Fallsburg]

@mikejkelley:

Sent you a PM, didn't realize you'd posted here first. I'd post it for everyone's benefit, but I forgot to save a copy in my outbox, and.... I'm lazy

If anyone else is interested in academia, lemme know and I'll try to retype it.

I'd be interested if it wouldn't be too much trouble.

[RudyTheDev]

You say you have been a "lone wolf" developer. Have you worked or have you thought about hiring or working with a team? I take it you are a programmer?

[increpare]

Why don't you want to work with other people?  In other areas of programming, you're going to find yourself doing a lot of contracting, quite likely, which will involve dealing with people quite a lot.  If you want to develop your own software solo, then you pretty much have to have some good ideas.  Do you have any ideas for software that you'd like to develop that would be valuable to people?  If the main reason you want to do solo development is because you don't like working with people, you're going to have your work cut out for you.

[moi]

now, do the games that you want to make

[larsiusprime]

Okay, here's a shot, Fallsburg:

Basically, there's a lot of grants flying around in Academia right now (at least in the U.S.). There's no central clearing house, exactly, so you'll have to start networking and getting known in Academic circles, but I can point you in the general direction.

First and foremost there's the MacArthur foundation / HASTAC - their Digitial Media and Learning competition is something you can apply for most directly and with the least BS. It also has a lot of competition. This is how CellCraft, a game I worked on, was funded. (What happened was the team leader, who I didn't know at the time, won the grant, then hired me for the project).

In terms of goverment grants, I've been involved with committees seeking funding from the NSF and the USDA. In terms of serious games the NSF is all about STEM, STEM, STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math), so you'd better be making a game teaching about those concepts. I think the STEM-thing is a bit obsessive, but that's what the current climate is.

USDA is all about health, nutrition, and obesity education. So, health and nutrition games. (The fact that the USDA has basically created the obesity epidemic through heavily subsidizing high-calorie commodity crops, then spending gobs of money on researching high-technology fixes for the problem is extremely ironic, but hey.)

If you're going for NSF or USDA grants you have to be part of a larger academic team with experience writing and seeking grants. The best way for a games developer to get involved in this is to brand yourself as a game development consultant and market your skills towards the committees that are winning these grants. I wouldn't recommend seeking government grants directly unless you have an experienced academic partner or ARE an experienced academic yourself.

What's happening right now is that academics highly interested in game design, but with close to zero experience, are getting this money and then hiring second year computer science students to flail around miserably for a few semesters programming a game the committee has meticulously designed for them in power-point. Then they test the semi-working game on a few dozen undergrads or elementary school kids, write a research paper, and declare victory, leaving the game itself to rot and die on a forgotten hard-drive in the basement. There's a real need for actual competent game designers. Ideally, you should be able to do a little bit of everything, particularly programming.

There's a few RARE shining lights in serious games right now, but I've been on a lot of these projects, and that's how it turned out. If you're VERY lucky you'll get on a team with a lot of game design experience, but largely, it will be YOUR job to bring that perspective to academia.

See if you have a local "Serious games" chapter in your area, like the Houston Serious Games consortium (I live in Texas). Get involved with these guys, meet some academics doing research in this industry, get plugged in and find out who has the grants and who needs the help. Groups like these generally are a mix of academics, game developers, and those that bridge the gap, so the culture is a tick up from the bowels of academia itself.

The need is there. If you've got the skills you can help these people out and hopefully get paid, too!

Also - Academia is a totally different world. Instead of resume's (work you've done), it's all about CV's (papers you've written). You will be marketing yourself on your game development credentials, but you'll also have to start working academic ones as well. It's a VERY different culture from for-profit company work, and has just as many gotchas and downsides, but of a different sort.

Good luck!

[kukouri]

Known alot of guys over the years who have given up game development for the same reasons you cite. They always come back  You got into this because it is what you want to do. I hope things work out for you, get things stable with a normal job for awhile, network, meet some people with a like mind, and get together hammer it out. Don't give up the dream.

[starsrift]

This is actually pretty much the reason why I consider myself a hobbyist and not a full-time developer. I just... Yeah. I have no desire to compete with a bunch of people, I just like making games. I would like to publish games and sell them and make my living making games, but it's a rat race I'm not really interested in playing along with.

If you want to make your living writing freelance code, a lot of people contract web programmers and developers. PHP, Perl, and SQL.

[tametick]

If the main reason you want to do solo development is because you don't like working with people, you're going to have your work cut out for you.

 

[CowBoyDan]

What I'm asking you is what other areas in IT (web development, apps,... ) or electrical engineering (programming micro-controllers,...) should I try as (and are reality for) lone wolf developer?

Short answer:  no

Do you have experience doing any of these?  If not then no (as far as making a real living at it.) 

Yea a lot of people contract web programmers and developers, but expect to spend most of your time cold calling completely non-technical small businesses ("Hi I'm calling from such and such, does your business need a web site?") and working long hours for far less than you could working for someone else.  A few guys I went to college with did this together, several years later one left, they took some interns, hired a couple of them, and have more interns now, half the company is interns (everyone working there is from the college).  And they do a lot more than just coding.  They setup entire ecommerce sites for small (very small) businesses, and they rely heavily on open source solutions.

Saturated market?  Yea, if you can get into any market by yourself (lone wolf) without a million+ dollar entry fee, its going to be a saturated market.  There are 7 billion people in the world, markets are saturated.

Do you have a degree?  Get a day job and do game dev on the side.  If no degree, and no experience, who is going to hire you to do any IT work?  How will you convince them?