My New Year's Resolution: Continuing on my Indie Game Dev Career Path with A Few Updates and Adjustments

For a lot of people, the Holidays tend to be no different than any other days, except with gift exchanges, family dinners, and popping wine bottles in anticipation of the new year. In other words, the old year came and went, the new one unlikely to be any different depending on who you ask. It was no exception for me, either, mainly due to the lack of progress in my game development and design career despite my accumulation of resources, knowledge, inspiration, and ideas. It is unfortunate that I still have issues with time management, self-discipline, focus, and the various distractions in my life and at my computer. The one thing I've been least worried about is my current source of income, which is mainly acquired through my part-time job at the local supermarket.

Still living the dream, or at least continue trying to, anyway.

In addition to my 4-hour bagging shift every Friday, I've been doing cleaning duties focusing on the bathrooms and employee break room every day except Sunday and the management offices every Thursday for the past year. I initially accepted the work offer because my current progress in my game development and design pursuits has been, and regretfully still is, stagnant and I needed more money for my immediate needs. I would've used job networking sites like LinkedIn and Indeed.com to at least get an additional job. But when it comes to having a network of people to increase my chances of getting a job that's at least relevant to video games, LinkedIn has thus far proved useless to me, delivering me nothing but automated messages that are either labeled 'sponsored' or 'LinkedIn offer.'  Indeed.com has proven to be no better either, as it emailed me various jobs that don't really meet my needs and are hardly interesting despite what the resume I've uploaded a few years back. In other words, Indeed.com is nothing but a spam-generating joke. So I've come to rely on my part-time job and a bit of luck for money until I can get my game development process moving and make a few minimal viable products to jump-start my career (fun fact: I won $500 with a lottery ticket once).

You might be asking "what about the Bachelor's Degree that you got in college?" Quite frankly, it hardly did me any good in my career path. Despite earning a Bachelor's Degree in game design after roughly 4 years of college studies, I was never able to land a job since, as I later learned, that a college degree is only useful in keeping the number of hires down for human resources. As far as the conventional video game industry is concerned, their focus is less on providing the best quality video games sell to players and more on pursing various trends that, while highly profitable for rich corporate executives and sleazy con artists, are more trouble that they are worth and offer no value to gaming in general, like unpolished releases, sequels that add little to nothing, microtransactions, loot boxes, blockchain, cryptocurrency, and NFTs. At this point, I'm no longer interested in entering the video game industry through conventional means. And I'm not looking to work in a small indie company or team, either, as I've decided long ago that going the route of a solo developer is the best and only option for me due large part to these circumstances as well as my autism.

I have pretty much everything I need to work on game development, except time.

To anyone who at least plays video games but are outside of game development, they would think that developing, designing, producing, marketing, and selling video games alone is, to put it mildly, insane. But with today's technology and what you can find and do on the Internet these days, that is far from the truth. In my time on the Internet, I've heard and read many success stories of various solo indie devs, sometimes with a bit of commissioned help and others entirely on their own. If you look up the terms "games made by one person," "solo developed games," "single indie dev" and "#solodev" on Google, YouTube, and Twitter, you might be surprised by what some solo indie game developers can achieve without needing to work at a major gaming company, pursue an expensive college degree or even joining a team. It's these stories that continue to inspire me to never give up my career path and have made me loss interest in pursuing it via the conventional means that I think a lot of people tend to put too much stock in.

As I've stated plenty of times, I stand firm in my pursuit to become a successful solo indie game developer and designer.But I have no games to show off, no material to put in a portfolio, and no additional skills to put in any additional resumes. And my college degree or whatever connections I have never increased my chances, either. Yet, I continue to seek additional resources to keep my computer updated, additional study materials to improve my skills, and more video games, among other things, to inspire my own game ideas. So how to I make more money while keeping my part-time job in a way that doesn't detract my from my interests? It is by chance that did a bit of research with that question in mind. And I found something that just might improve my finances in my spare time without changing my time and routine too much: mobile play-to-earn apps.

I've recently looked into mobile apps that reward you for playing mobile games like Mistplay, PLAYTIME, Just Play, and Rewarded Play. Depending on how much time you spend playing and sometimes on how much money you spend making in-app purchases, these apps reward you with points which you can convert into gift cards for various shops, restaurants, and online storefronts. These online storefronts include Amazon, eBay, Apple, Google Play, the PlayStation Store, the Xbox Store, the Nintendo Eshop, and sometimes even Steam. These points can even be converted into money for credit cards and PayPal. For the past couple of weeks, I've been downloading and playing mobile games via various play-to-earn apps including the ones I mentioned here. Having experienced how these systems work first-hand, I started thinking about setting up my own PayPal account someday once I earn enough. Unless there are more profitable ideas, I see no better way to make more money than this.

So that's pretty much my New Year's Resolution: no different than the last one aside from a few updates and adjustments to my career path. Unless I make a few profitable games that would start my career, there isn't going to be much change. But if I make an approach that works best with my time and money, I could end up with better results than I have been in over the 10 years I've been pursuing my dream. No guarantees on anything major or minor coming of this year. But we'll see.