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[recycicle]

approximately 30 seconds ago, my brother walked into my classroom before class started looking at the stuff i was drawing on my ipad for a game.

 the exchange went like this:
BROTHER: is that for a game?
ME: yeah.
BROTHER: so are you going to have someone else make it?
ME: uh, no? i’m making it myself.
BROTHER: you need to go to college for that.
ME: a lot of people make games without college degrees.
BROTHER: not good ones.

my brother left  the room  as i went on to ramble about how that’s not at all true. so anyway, i would like the people here to seek out as many very high grossing games as they can find that were made by people without college degrees, especially people who were in their teens at the time. i can list them off to him once we get back to school on monday. i only have… 10 minutes before school’s out and i spend the weekend without internet access, which is why i’m not doing it myself.

[DarkGran]

"Good" is relative, and so is "high grossing", especially in the indie world.

Some games are harder to make than others.
More complexity and/or content in a game means that it will most probably require more knowledge to make.
(Let's not talk about whether college degrees actually translate to knowledge.)

(btw Minecraft, as one example, was made by a proffesional.)

[michaelplzno]

There's a game that was done by a high schooler with a very similar style to what you have here on newgrounds back when i was in high school that got at least a million plays. The kid actually went on to go to the same college as me. Good advice, to you and to me, is to try not to let other people get in the way of making art. I know its difficult because you want your brother to support you. I still spend time searching for others who think what I do is legitimate.

Just as a matter of empirical fact, there are high schoolers who have made more money selling games than me. Maybe I just suck, its possible, but I think that its more about having a process that turns out good art instead of getting your brother to support you.

My sister spent a lot of her life telling me to get a real job. We have a strained relationship at times. I don't know how to get people to treat me like I'm a valid person who is worthy of respect, other than a small circle of people who really do believe in me. Sometimes I tell myself that people are jealous, but I don't think that's the truth. Most people turn to more practical careers and feel good that they have a boss who likes them and says "good job on that TPS report" every once in a while.

That, to me, is the hardest part of making games. I do not feel like I belong, and usually people will give you more of a sense of belonging if you are really subservient and cater to their whims and wants. But that's the nature of power: people rarely want others to outshine them. It seems to be a universal axiom of the universe. People don't want to support, they want to be supported.