This is going to get a little autobiographical, so bear with me.
I’ve spent 2022 looking for work as a narrative designer and writer of video games. I’ve been doing game jams to get more group work for my resume, but most of my direct industry experience is as a solo developer for the past few years. This puts me in a difficult job hunting position, as I have a decade’s experience as a novelist, tabletop game designer, audiodrama producer, and scriptwriter.
I’m not a beginner, but clearly I don’t qualify for senior roles.
I’ve always wanted to make video games. When I was a kid, I collected microcomputers when I could find them at garage sales. My first was a TRS-80, little more than a keyboard that hooked up to my television, and I had a stack of old Rainbow magazines (also garage sale finds) containing BASIC code I could type in to make my own games.
The TRS-80 didn’t have a hard drive and I didn’t have a cassette or disk drive, so as soon as I turned the machine off it’d be out of RAM and gone forever. This didn’t stop me from tweaking the programs to try and change the games, or even filling notebooks with BASIC code at school, to try running when I got home.
My next computer was an Atari 400, which had all the same issues. My most impressive feat here was designing my own simple VERB NOUN text parser. At this point I had my own room and an old black and white television, so I could work on longer text adventure projects – as long as I left the computer running, I wouldn’t lose it.
The Commodore 64 was a great find. Not only was the rummage sale selling the computer, but both a cassette tape drive and a disk drive too. I could save the games I was working on, complete them over multiple sessions. I loved that thing.
In High School I bought my mom’s old 486 PC and had internet access, stumbled across Usenet and rec.arts.int-fiction – the interactive fiction newsgroup. This was my first real exposure to other hobbyist game devs, and from there I branched out into exploring other game development options. I learned some C++, some Java, took a bunch of programming courses in college – including COBOL so I could hopefully find work helping companies update their antiquated systems in anticipation of Y2K.
I did not.
Instead, my twenties were spent drifting the country like a feckless vagabond, living out of a suitcase, traveling from state to state and working a series of brain-numbing jobs that kept me skimming the poverty line. Hard to find time to write or program when you’re trying to decide if you can do without paying the water or electricity bill this month.
Fast-forward to 2010. I’m back in Illinois. Couch-surfing and burning through what’s left of my friends’ goodwill in Chicago. My body is broken, my mind is in a deeper depression than I’d ever thought possible, I’m wracked with personal tragedy, and for the first time in my life, I can’t find a job. It used to be so easy – move to a new place, and in a week to a month I’d find something.
Not here. Not now. I’ve got my laptop and a suitcase full of clothes.
I decide to write. It’s been a long time – almost a decade, maybe, but you don’t really forget. I write a story about the stages of grief, about a party at the end of the world, and make a list of paying markets. A spreadsheet, prioritized by quick response times. I send it off into the void.
I get a rejection. Not a form, a personal one, that calls it “chilling in a Lord of the Flies kind of way. An Almost.”
I am elated.
See, as long as I’ve wanted to make games, I’ve also wanted to be a storyteller. I was filling notebooks with stickman comics before I even knew how to write. Putting on stuffed-animal plays for my grandparents.
I have spent a lot of time reading books about the publishing process, but I’d never submitted anything for publication. This was my first submission, and it got a personalized rejection.
That’s a milestone, that is.
So I went to my list to look up the next market – but then stopped. See, I’d been hearing about this whole self-publishing thing. You could now, it seemed, publish fiction directly on Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s nook.
The royalty rates were amazing – 70% – and you’d get them right away, not months later like with a short story, or years down the line with a novel.
And I was broke and homeless. I needed money.
So I did it. Put what would eventually be republished as “Grief” up on Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords. By the end of the month I’d made $10. I kept writing, kept publishing, and by the end of 2012 I was writing novels and bringing in four figures in royalty payments each month.
I was a writer. I was a novelist.
Over the next decade I wrote a dozen books, formed a production company, made a web series pilot and a few seasons of full-cast audiodrama, even published a few role playing game supplements. I never really had any huge breakthrough successes, but I didn’t care. I was living off my creativity without needing to take on another minimum wage job.
Since the pandemic hit I’ve been working on games instead, mostly in the Godot engine though I’ve dabbled in Unity as well. A few small arcade-like projects to get a handle for the game design process – I’ve always said that learning to finish a project is the most important skill a creative can cultivate – and some longer branching narrative games.
My goal isn’t to make it as a solo developer, though. I’ve been a solitary creative professional for over a decade. No. What I want to do is build a strong portfolio to help me get work with a studio, working on someone else’s projects, letting them worry about the financial and marketing details. I was never very good at them anyway.
I just want to write.
