He is pretty much fucked. He only has a laptop to work on. Also, he isn't giving up his job.
I really don't want him in any lower of a state than he is now. He is doing pretty much everything besides music for his game, and he is making it in GameMaker. I just can't support him when it's obvious that the gained yield after all of this will be negative. Where we live, there are absolutely no jobs involving IT, and everything is pretty much just labor. He can't go to the city and live there, because he couldn't pay for it unless he gets a job that he knows will pay for it. It's pretty bad for him, and he wants to follow his dreams even if they hurt him in the long run. I just think he should get off his feet first before he does something this detrimental. 

Oh good lord :( 

My friend knows how to use it very well. He doesn't use the whole drag and drop thing, he scripts everything himself.

But still, GameMaker... 

Googling for "list of gamemaker games" turns up a surprising amount of familiar good games. So it's possible to beat it into shape. 

Are you working with games in Fortaleza?? That's awesome.

Kinn

Thanks a lot for the feedback. Resembles a lot my IT career and probably most careers in an "industry" production model. 

Great question. I feel like there should be some kind of path for people who have game industry specific skills (like level / game design) because holy shit did I feel completely useless trying to figure out what that would be.

I had an almost 2 year hiatus from making games professionally, and during that time I thought about doing something else to pay the bills but I was turned down for *every* job I applied for outside of games. And I'm talking about near minimum-wage jobs in some cases because they all said I was overqualified and why would I want a job selling espresso machines or whatever when I'd been working on all these games.

The longer you do any job, the harder it is to start over and do anything else. At least that's been my experience so far. 

The longer you do any job, the harder it is to start over and do anything else. At least that's been my experience so far.

After 15 years in a specific professional domain, this make things significantly harder even though the desire to change is high... Potentially everything has to be learn from scratch, or almost... and that's really hard for middle age guy to change... *sigths* 

@czg

When we developed Payday 1, me and my buddy Ilija worked very much alone with great responsibility, more or less how you work at home with your own stuff. We designed and built the levels from whitebox up to shippable, that included the gameplay, scripting, art-pass and lighting.

From the start it was only us, then a third level designer joined, but all in all, we worked a lot, slept at the office and in the end, turned out a really fun game.

I've worked 10+ years now as a "Professional Level Designer" with various projects.
These days I'm running my own biz, which me and a friend started, that was 3+ years ago.

@SpecialBomb
Really, try and convince your friend to start with a smaller thing first, it takes ages for a single person to make a long full feature ARPG, even if it's top down.

We started with Hammerwatch as a smaller hack and slash, instead of a larger RPG, just because we kinda "knew" that you can't make a real ARPG in short time and keep the quality up. We worked full time for 9 months with that, developed our own engine, made more or less all art, all levels, tweaked etc etc

Had we we gone for the initial idea and done a real diablo clone, we would still be sitting with it I guess... (maybe not, but you get the idea). 

Played it coop with my buddy and loved every minute of it 

I use to say that I did everything you see and hear and my friend did everything you don't see and hear =)

Not 100% true, since we didn't create the music ourselves and we had some help with boss graphics... so almost true =) 

But please, dear Hipshot, make the characters in your next games at least x2 faster. ;) 

It's very different, but I do like speed, I do...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3AVjgIgtUE 

Movement needs to be 2x faster in that! :) 

That's tiptoeing speed! 

Omg... I should have leveled up moved speed a lot more... 

Kinda odd to see a developer like you up on this forum. Unless I am completely unaware. 

Your work seems to have inspired a new Dreamcast game:
http://dcemulation.org/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=72&t=103950 

@ SpecialBomb, there's probably at least a few around here. Often you don't know, since when people are employed at a larger developer - they try to avoid talking about that outside work, AAA titles are surrounded by a lot of hush hush and paperwork to enforce that =)

@ mankrip, cute =) didn't know people still made things for the DC. 

 

A pretty large proportion of people here have worked on "AAA" games (whatever the hell "AAA" is supposed to mean nowadays).

But yeah, NDAs and whatnot tend to stop people mouthing off about what they are up to. 

I ain't worked on shit 

AAA is not an acronym, but a way to classify games, in some cases, referring to it as an equivalent to a movie blockbuster.

:=) 

That reminds me, my AAA membership expires next month. I need to remember to renew it (wouldn't want to get stranded on the side of the road).