Late in life indie game developers, Talk to me.

I'm 31 old now, and simple accomplished all my tasks in career, so, decided learn Construct 2 (since the first public release) and now I'm doing games as my hobby, also, learning manga, Comics and other types of 9th Arts.

I can say with property, if you make games as you eat when you're alone in a isolated island for two weeks and find a banquet, you're safe, otherwise, don't try to live from games, specially these days, where games with good content are selling less than crap games.. But it's a talk for another time.

I know. I decided to make the game I wanted rather than a game I know can sell. I'm putting my heart and soul into it. It's my first actual game.

Hi! 32 year old Swede, work as a systems developer which I enjoy, but developing games is my passion. I've been developing games in my spare time the last 7 years, but the last 2 years I've been investing more time in game development.

I'm focused on mobile game development and I've released a couple of games for android and iOS. I have a ton to learn but I figured I'd gather enough knowledge about C2 to build a bigger project som right now I'm working on a really fun project that I'm hoping to release X-mas 2014.

I'm looking for people to work with a specially on the art side. So far I've made the art for my game myself (or used free resources), but I'm just not good enough to create art at the level I want.

If anyone is interested send me a PM as a start and we'll see where it leads. Here are a few screen shots of the game I'm working on right now.

I'm 36 myself and been programming on and off for most of my life - I think my first programme was written in BASIC and copied from a MAD magazine onto a Commodore 64 when I was like 6 or 7.

I stumbled into an indie game job about 5 years ago after doing some hobbyist game stuff in my spare time, but it has only really paid off in the past year or so.

I'm getting paid much less than now I was before I got into game development, but it's enough to get by on and a much more enjoyable job even if it is mostly making someone else's game idea become reality.

I'm 36 myself and been programming on and off for most of my life - I think my first programme was written in BASIC and copied from a MAD magazine onto a Commodore 64 when I was like 6 or 7.

I stumbled into an indie game job about 5 years ago after doing some hobbyist game stuff in my spare time, but it has only really paid off in the past year or so.

I'm getting paid much less than now I was before I got into game development, but it's enough to get by on and a much more enjoyable job even if it is mostly making someone else's game idea become reality.

I am actually 37 myself. You must have grown up in a nicer place than I did. Our elementary school had like 1 computer for everybody to share. I didn't get to mess with BASIC until 1993. High school computer class. I wrote a few cheesy games with it. A text game, a wrestling game where you entered your wrestler and opponent stats, move names, and finisher. It would mathematically mad lib a match for you and determine the winner with the stats and some random variables. I then wanted to do something graphical, so I created an adventure game where you played as a blob, because circles and squares were easy to draw on screen. The character was a circle with two square eyes.

It wasn't long after that, I quit programming altogether. I always wanted to design video games. I had since I was a little kid. I went to college, and the computer course lineup seemed like it had been designed to keep certain people out. Most of the computer classes were taught by a truly, freakishly brilliant professor. But computers weren't as ubiquitous as they are today. I had to take FORTRAN and COBOL before I could take C. I got As in both classes but by the time I had finished 16 weeks of that, I was pretty much done with programming. I had given up going to art school, and I had given up going to DigiPen Game Design College. I was far too poor. I was not going to give up on at least getting a college degree that I could afford. But college killed my desire to program.

However, nothing killed my desire to be a game designer. I have been a graphic designer for almost 20 years now. That's like playing your whole life in the minors. But I'm not worn out, I'm just warmed up, ready for the big leagues. I am going to make this game and people are going to have the opportunity to play it. It will be fun, clever, humorous and artful. And those thing will make it engaging.

I'm with you. If I had to do this for a job and make someone else's game, I probably wouldn't enjoy it. Making my own game means I can have fun doing it, I can do it the way I want to, and I can experiment and use mechanics that don't follow a formula. I don't care if I get rich doing this. I just want to do this.

JJEvil

Yeah, I guess I was a bit more fortunate. My primary school had 3 Apple IIe computers that students could use, not that the teachers would let us use them very often since most of them struggled to even turn them on. Most of my early programming was done at home, copying things out of magazines and books onto the C64, and trying to tweak them. And I always had some sort of games system - Intellivision, Atari 2600, Sega Master System (my brother had NES), various Game & Watch games (favourite was the TableTop Snoopy game which I think I still have somewhere), and more as the years went on.

At high school, we actually had a whole classroom full of computers! I don't know whether it was fortunate or unfortunate, but the teacher who taught programming admitted he was only one lesson ahead of the students so he let me do my own thing since I was ahead of everyone else. I ended up making a Tic-Tac-Toe/Naughts&Crosses game and a few other simple games. We did a mix of BASIC, Pascal and dBaseIII+ throughout high school.

University was a bit more instructional. We did C/C++, Assembler, COBOL, Scheme and a few other languages and covered topics such as Graphics, AI and databases. Of course, most of the lecturers made it so boring, it mostly killed my desire to program.

After university, I moved more into IT support and only did the occasional programming for work or some hobbyist stuff.

Now I get to make games for a living and code in Lua, the easiest programming language I have ever come across. I mean seriously you don't even have to give variables a type!

I still make simple games as a hobby, hence Construct 2, but hopefully one day I can turn those simple hobby games into something people might buy and I can stop making other peoples games.

Anyway, good luck making your games, I hope you keep having fun with it and wish you all the best.

Out of curiosity, would anyone be interested in starting some kind of group, or place to chat, for older game developers to come to? I don't mean it a replacement to such things as Scirra's forums nor other places like Gamedev.com. Just a place where older folks could come to connect with others and where they might feel a bit more of a connection on a personal level to others that 'just get' current circumstances of life?

I have been thinking it over the past couple of days and I can see a sort of support and encouragement type of forum to be a nice place. I was wondering if anyone else would be interested and use such a thing as well.

If so, what would be your ideal type of place? I ask because I pay for hosting that I don't readily use nor do I want to give up. It would be nothing at all to setup a subdomain out of the way of my current domain and put up a quick platform. Let it see how it see how it evolves and takes off from there.

Not sure what you would call it. Synonyms for older, and indie don't go together well.

Mepis - I'm down. I could use the networking practice, and it would be nice to know a few of my indie design peers and see their projects.

Http://www.reddit.com/r/PixelPioneers

If you build it, they will come.

reddit.com/r/PixelPioneers

If you build it, they will come.

I get that reference!! Because I'm old....

I just posted a huge update on what I'm working on over in this thread:

I have been doing art for friends games since I was about 15 and let myself believe that I was not code logic minded. After taking a stab at it around age 25 I have been chipping away at my ideal game ever since. I am now 28 and have realized that (for me) it is not about finishing my game it is about being able to create a virtual world of my own that can be interacted with. To get my instant gratification fix I make side games which involve mechanics I will later adopt into my primary project. I now enjoy just the act of working on my game and have stopped relishing in the thought of releasing it. I am developing this game for me to play, but if I do ever get it done I will make a public release. Meanwhile, wife, kids, job, house... you know how it goes. When I get overwhelmed by real life I just keep telling myself that later I will get to go to my "happy place" which is working on my game Ayternal.

33. I'm a programmer by trade, but I work on the web. After college I never lost the lust for game programming, but the time and the focus. Now that games can be written in javascript and there are tools like impact and construct, I can go back to developing games without the mental limbo of a different tech stack.

Hope it's not too late to revive this thread. Another oldie here, 30 and back in a game dev role after a long break. The biggest hurdle for me is trying to break into communities for some support and feeling ancient around all the kids.

This thread is great, thanks!

I don't use reddit but I might have to check JJEvil's link, see if I can get my old brain wrapped around it.

Ok can we ban 30 year olds who call themselves 'old' please