I am a Canadian solo indie game developer living in Europe.
Game dev? What other games have you made?
Well I’ve been working in AAA games for nearly twenty years. I’ve spent most of that time working for EA/DICE and Ubisoft. So I’ve worked on a lot of… you know, THOSE sorts of games. But I’ve never released a game under my own name. Not really.
I mean, I’ve been making games on my own since I was 11 years old and selling my home made knock offs of classic arcade games to my classmates at recess. Ok those games don’t count, they were all terrible. Perhaps I’m being overly harsh, I mean I’m talking about an 11 year old even if it is me. But let’s just say they were primitive and had a lot of room for improvements.
So you know everything about games then?
Oh not even close! AAA teams are large and heavily specialized. I only work on a small part of the game professionally. At home I’ve been still making my own little games, but most of those were never finished.
You see most of the AAA studios I’ve worked at put it right in the contract that I can’t make my own games. Or more specifically that they would own them if I made them, unless I get specific permission from the legal team. Also they get to say that they both don’t want to own them and don’t want anyone else to own them either. Lucky thing corporate legal teams are notorious for being easy going and willing to let stuff slide. Oh wait, no the other thing, they’re NOT willing to let things slide, and are very unwilling to allow exceptions. That was fun.
But now I work for a new, small, and very cool studio that is willing to let me do whatever with my own time. They’re pretty encouraging honestly. I suppose they figure that if you hire people who are passionate about making games that they might want to… you know, make games. This means that I finally can work on a cool AAA project during the day, then go home and work on my own decidedly non-AAA totally indie game at night, which is great!
The Games?
Well I’ve got a lot of games I want to make now. But they share a lot of things in common:
- They’re small
- They are things I find interesting
- Artistically
- Thematically
- Technically
- I think they might be fun
- I don’t care about their market saturation or how many SKUs I project that they’ll sell