How I Quit My Job To Start An Indie Game Studio

some of you are working jobs that you despise some of you are students and maybe you are going to school because you feel like you should be doing what your parents told you to do or you should be doing what culture is telling you to do I've done that I've been there in fact I started making games when I was a teenager I loved it I was awesome and then I kind of went into a bit of a regression in terms of passion and dreams when I went to college and when I got a desk job I was still making games and I was working hard to add it but I don't know if I ever truly believed that I would quit my job and start my own company it was always this huge fear of never being able to achieve what I always had wanted to achieve ever since I was a kid there was always this fear in the back of my mind and a voice in the back of my mind that told me that I wouldn't get there that it was impossible I would hear stories of people you know they'd get a publisher they'd make a lot of money they'd have their own studio they'd be able to work in their pajamas they would release games and get a 9 out of 10 score on Steam or a 10 out of 10 score on Steam all these wonderful stories I remember I would listen to podcasts with interviews with developers kind of a situation like right now and you're thinking wow I'll never be able to do what Thomas does and don't get me wrong I'm not thinking that I'm special or that I'm super popular or anything I just know that I'm in a position where I make games for a living and that can feel so far away well I want to tell you guys the story of how I quit my job to become a videogame [Music] [Music] before I tell you my wonderful beautiful quitting story I want to talk to you about something that would have helped me quit a lot faster quit my job that is not my career my job and that is Skillshare Skillshare is an incredible sponsor I love Skillshare I love what they do and so I'm happy to shout them out and just tell you that there are a ton of courses available on Skillshare comm whether it's 2d animation or or audio or game development or 2d design or code whatever you need to be able to start your indie game career and quit your job it's on Skillshare so please guys click the link below if you want to get two free months of skill share thank you so much skill share for supporting me in my channel so it all started hold on one second it all started with a melody it started with a melody [Music] ha I can't play it that's the melody that's how my games started it was really just a song that I wrote when I was 18 years old and I wrote it in my bedroom I didn't I I was in a band but I didn't have a ton of friends and I remember I would just go upstairs in my bedroom when I was in high school and I would write music and that song really made me feel something and I wanted to add it to my games so I decided I was gonna make a game called coma released it on Newgrounds calm got eight million views I loved it it was the best feeling in the world but what was weird is even though I had a lot of validation about my game and about myself and about my art form I kind of felt still felt insecure a lot of you feel insecure and you say I just need a little bit of validation I just need someone to tell me that I can do this and then I'll be brave even if you get 8 million plays on your game if you're like me you can still feel insecure about who you are so I went from 18 to about 20 23 years old going through college getting a desk job doing the normal American thing because that honestly was afraid I wouldn't be able to pay the bills so I got married started working a desk job and basically was in a cubicle it was conveniently shaped more like a trapezoid or something so that it didn't feel like a cubicle but it kind of was and I was a graphic designer and I gotta give my boss credit he he tried so hard to make sure that I was happy and he would he would pitch creative projects to clients as creative was we could make them but the problem was as our clients were b2b clients business-to-business marketing which is you know you're good for tire companies and I don't know construction companies and things that you know aren't very exciting you're not you're not making ads for for like Nike or something or adidas or I don't know why keeping up shoe brands I know just shoe brands have cool ads we were really doing that we were making ads that were kind of boring and I remember one day this might sound a little overdramatic but I remember one day it was pouring rain outside it was really gloomy I was in my little trapezoid and I was staring at a wall I was looking at my wall to my left I had gotten my work done well maybe I wasn't there's no need to lie here maybe I was just sitting there not working I was looking at a wall and I thought to myself I'm never gonna get out of here and it was like this rush of like heat coming up from my chest and into my cheeks of like I'm stuck and a lot of you feel that hell right now I'm not saying that people shouldn't work desk jobs if you love your job go for it and honestly I'm at a desk right now so I'm not really using the right word am i but if you feel that he'll keep listening to this story and hopefully you'll be encouraged so during that moment and those feelings of feeling stuck and imprisoned that was the moment where I realized that I was gonna push as hard as I could the hardest I ever could to make games for a living to start my own company see a lot of us need that rush of heat from the chest to the face I don't know if you guys get it but it's like this heat of fear a feeling trapped almost like a claustrophobic feeling a lot of us need that feeling to be able to give us the drive and the energy to actually work to make things different to change things and so that's what I did I told myself I was gonna wake up early in the morning every morning at five o'clock in the morning before going to the morning commute to go to work I was gonna make games at that time I was gonna work through lunch I was gonna cram a sandwich down my throat while I made games at my desk at my job and then when I got home my wife and I agreed that I was just gonna eat dinner and then go work for an hour or two making games so I was working about two to three hours a day on games outside of my desk job and I won't beat a dead horse I've talked about this a thousand times it was obviously very challenging I was obsessed with getting out of that job now the cool thing about getting married and I encourage all of you to honestly get married and start a family one of the main reasons why I'm so passionate about marriage is that it forces you to be simple and it forces you to push hard especially when you feel trapped a lot of people feel trapped when they get married they feel trapped at a desk job and so what they'll do is they'll blame marriage or they'll blame their family that's not what you should do it's a good thing to feel trapped because what it does is it pushes you to be stronger and and work harder towards your dreams so I'm glad I was married because I don't know if I would have pushed as hard as I did to experience this sense of freedom to be able to start my own career if you're in your 20s right now some of you feel like you can just sort of take your time and relax and maybe watch Netflix or play video games and drink beer and hang out with your friends through your 20s because you're supposed to have fun in your 20s but if you get married in your 20s like I did suddenly all of those desires go away and you realize that you want to work towards independence financial independence so that you can do your own thing and so that's why I'm really glad that I got married because it pushed me it pushed me to want to work hard so that I could support my family while also doing what I love and experiencing that sense of freedom the day that I quit so I worked on my game and it was called pinstripe and I can't tell you how insecure I was about this game every day I would avoid reading articles about new indie games online I would avoid them like the plague because I would get so jealous I would get so jealous of reading about these great indie games that people like Edmund McMillen were making and Jonathan Blow I would avoid reading the articles and playing the games because I was jealous I was so passionate about doing what they were doing and it felt so far away even the slightest encouragement whether it was maybe getting into some booth at IG F or whether it was getting a good review from somebody who played the game or someone in the press and I hadn't released the game yet but I would still send it to people in the press just to see what they thought about it to get small little reviews would would send my ego soaring and then the next day I would feel down again I would wake up feeling like I was wasting my time when you don't have the validation of release your first game when you don't have the validation of actually making something and seeing it be successful I totally get that feeling of like not knowing whether you're actually spending your time wisely making a game so those of you who are watching right now thinking I'm wasting my time I know how you feel I know how you feel I know you feel like you're wasting your time I felt that I had this movie crew not a crew a film crew come to my house from Los Angeles suddenly one day unity wanted to film a documentary about my little studio in my little game that I was making it changed everything not not like you would think okay you'd think getting filmed by a film crew from unity and having that video play at the game Awards would suddenly make your career explode and you'd sell millions of copies and you'd get invited to fancy dinners and people would know your name right I remember thinking oh man mark Hamill's gonna be at game Awards and they're gonna play my little documentary at the game Awards Mark Hamill knows who I am and that's gonna open up all these doors it really doesn't it sounds stupid saying now it really doesn't work that way okay so the doors didn't suddenly fly open because this documentary happened okay and I can't tell you how the documentary happened I think somebody just read an article on Game a Sutra that I wrote and suddenly unity wanted to film a documentary about money my life well the doors didn't open like I thought they would the pre-orders did not flood and I remember I was expecting like millions of dollars of pre-orders it doesn't work that way but what did happen is I had a conversation with the director of this documentary and his name was Ben Proudfoot Ben Proudfoot and I sat I remember sitting in his he had a rental car and we were driving up to the mountains to film the mountains were like 20 minutes away from my house and we figured to be a good setting and he started telling me all of these things about entrepreneurs and how entrepreneurs tick and how they're always they're always scrambling to look for funding and they they don't complain entrepreneurs don't complain they have a positive attitude and they always look for advancing they're always looking for advancement they want to see progression in their career and I learned and I decided that day when I was talking to him getting plenty of advice from him that I didn't want to be someone who complained any more about my career I didn't want to complain I didn't want to think lowly of myself I had a conversation with somebody yesterday and Amy game developer who sent me messages about how terrible their game is and how horrible they feel and how they're not they're not a real game developer that won't get you anywhere thinking that way it won't get you anywhere and I was that way and I still I lean in that direction sometimes but Ben told me that that's and maybe he didn't say it in so many words but he definitely had the attitude and he was he was a young guy we were both young but he had an attitude of positivity of strength of power of his chin always being up and I knew that I wanted to be that way and then he said you need to be brave and he encouraged me to do a Kickstarter campaign and that is when almost I quit my job so all of that video footage that it was beautiful video footage that been shot and he and his team shot I asked unity I said can I use some of that foot it's just a couple rolls of b-roll in my Kickstarter video and then I had my sister-in-law Thank You Jackie I had her film the Kickstarter campaign video where I talked to the camera we went to my parents backyard in the woods and we waited it for just the right time like 5:30 p.m. or whatever time my sister-in-law recommended we started filming and I remember we didn't even have like a teleprompter or anything so my wife had to hold up my macbook my old MacBook and like scroll from behind the camera so that I could read the script it was definitely it definitely felt indie and and homemade and that's because we didn't really have a budget for anything so I put together my Kickstarter video and some of you will watch Kickstarter videos and you're thinking and these people are so confident they're so great they're so amazing they're so good at what they do I wish I was that way do you know how nervous I was when I released my first Kickstarter campaign or my second Kickstarter campaign I was incredibly nervous you can't tell the future you don't know what's gonna happen and so I remember I spent two or maybe even three months I remember I thought I was gonna do my Kickstarter campaign in December of 2015 but then I ended up doing it in April it took a long time to put that campaign together lots of research and a lot of reaching out to people like myself who had done Kickstarter campaigns before so I was very nervous I didn't know what I was doing but I remember what Ben had told me and I remember what several other friends had told me any time I meet someone who inspires me you know whether you love the state or not they do come from California so anytime I'm meeting somebody from California they inspire me and put me in a higher emotional state a positive state well hold on hold on no I'm not done yet this is the cool part I reached out to every single Facebook friend and asked them to give me their opinion of the Kickstarter campaign the first reason why I did this was I really wanted their opinion I wanted to know what they thought and this was before I hit launch obviously what I also wanted is I wanted them to be involved in the campaign so that they would share it on launch so remember I was eating lunch in the basement of my my job's office building and with all the lights were off downstairs in the basement there was nobody there and I was nervous I was so nervous and so I clicked launch for the Kickstarter campaign there was a lot of preparation and work that went into this so I was very nervous and I just started texting my friends at noon during my lunch break at my desk job a job that I frankly did not like and I just started texting everyone I could can you share can you support can you cross your fingers can you give me your thoughts and prayers everything and I just text text text text text and I was so focused on my phone that I wasn't realizing what was happening on the campaign and so I looked over at my computer and the campaign had raised about $7,000 in 30 minutes I think it was you know you can imagine at that moment you are gonna have trouble finishing out your day the campaign had funded itself in a day and I had some whiskey I looked at my wife and I said this is it I have arrived some time around then I put in my two-week notice I felt so amazing it was so cool just putting in my two-week notice because I had funding and I also had this feeling of maybe a little bit i-told-you-so to people around me because I think I I did experience a lot of doubt now a lot of encouragement as well but I think there was a lot of doubt around me about what I was doing with my time in making this game while I was at work people didn't perceive me this way but walking around the office those last two weeks of work it was I felt like a rock star this is gonna sound crude but I always imagined just flicking off my workplace when leaving for no reason right it's not like my job was bad like everyone there was amazing it was a great job but you see it in movies where people like flick off the work place and when I left that building all I felt was nostalgia immediately nostalgia about my job and that's kind of a little bit what the moral of this story is is that your indie career starts now wherever you are my indie career started there it didn't start the day I quit it started there and I learned so much from the people that I worked with and even if some people I wasn't happy working with some projects I did not enjoy I didn't enjoy most of my days because I'm an entrepreneur and I like to do my own thing that's where my indie career started and so I have a ton of respect for where I was and so the moment the day that I quit it was not what I thought it would be it was not a moment of euphoria and I told you so and thank God I'm out of that place it was a feeling of thank God I had that place to nurture me in to launch me forward into next career so that was the day I quit been doing this full-time as an entrepreneur for I can't even remember the four years three years and I have a family I have a daughter I have a wife and we're about to release our next game that's the quitting story and hopefully you learned a lot again my name is Thomas brush if you like this video please hit the like button and the subscribe button and consider supporting me on patreon it helps me continue to make games bye guys thanks talk to you later see ya love you bye degrade bye [Music]

Channel: Thomas Brush

Views: 62,640

Keywords: thomas, brush, game design, game designer, game developer, game development, game industry, games, games industry, gaming industry, video game, video games, how to be an indie dev, how to make indie games, indie vs aaa, indie development tips, game design tips, how to start a game studio, how to start a game company, how to start an indie game studio, indie game dev, unity, unreal engine, nintendo switch, pinstripe game

Id: 1XlcpXURJEI

Length: 19min 24sec (1164 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 16 2019