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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • Thank you for that writeup, I suspect you’re right, that’s probably why a few people are downvoting :)

    You’re not wrong though. It is a little crazy, I admit.

    I have a decent bit of funds saved up to live off of, so I think I could do that for a while, and my company has offered to hire me back if I need (but likely without the aforementioned perks…). Worst case, I could take it and take the step down in comfort/lifestyle and go back to kind of what I’m doing today.

    Earlier this year I had a medical disability thing that hit and put me out of work for almost 3 months due to stress related to my career.

    I had to make a hard choice of trying to continue down this path I was on in B2B, where to get to where I’m at and maintain it is an easy 60+ hours a week plus a boatload of stress consuming my life.

    In the end, I decided to try and follow my childhood dreams. The near death-ish experience has given me a new perspective on what is important and matters to me most in life, before I don’t have any more time left to do it.

    Truthfully, I might be able to ride out the remainder of my days no longer working, if I pull in just a little bit of supplemental income. I own my own home, and have a modest lifestyle with no children and live well below my means. I’ve been saving pretty hardcore for over a decade, and while it’s not enough to live off of forever, it should cover me for a good while.

    Even if this fails, I get a sabbatical from the job that’s killing me, and some new experiences to throw on my resume.

    I sincerely appreciate your concern and advice, and it is well taken. I just don’t know how much longer I can even do my job today, every day is burnout day, I’m hanging in there until next year to get my bonuses and to ensure that my role’s successor-ship plan goes through so my engineering team continues to thrive when I’m gone. I’m also not burning any bridges at work, and for the most part, I’m pretty well respected/liked there so I have no doubts I could come back if I needed in an emergency.

    But for now, onward :) Going to give this game dev thing a try for realsies :)


  • I sincerely appreciate that concern :)

    I am good on funds for a couple years of living frugally. I also grew up poor and you are correct, it does indeed suck. One of the few benefits of having been in the industry for so long and trading my sanity and health for $$ is: I’ve got a decent bit of that saved up. Which I’ll be trading away for survival during this :) If it makes money, great, if not, I gave it a shot and I can always get a job again doing the B2B thing, even though it likely won’t be as comfy as the position I’m in. I’m just totally burnt out with it today. To the point where the stress of going to work caused a major health issue to manifest that’s given me a new perspective on life.

    Thank you for the well wishes! I’ll be checking out your game when it’s released!


  • Heya man, I just wishlisted this because of reading your comments in this post. You’re a good dude.

    I’m a programmer too, been doing it for roughly 27 years. Next year, I’m going to quit my well paying job, where I have a fully remote working position working with some of the most talented engineers in the field for one of the largest privately held companies in the world, a position I’ll probably never be able to get/achieve again in my lifetime; and throw it all away and start an indie studio with my brother and another indie dev. I’ve wanted to make video games for as long as I can remember. This is a childhood dream of mine.

    Life’s too short, chase your dreams while you still can. It doesn’t get easier when you get older.

    Hearing about your passion helps keep me focused on hopefully realizing my own dream one day soon :)

    Edit: I genuinely don’t understand the downvotes? Could someone help me understand why please? :)














  • Unfortunately, those of us that make games in Unreal Engine are stuck writing a lot of C++, unless we want to do everything in BPs (no thanks, they’re fine, but it’s not coding, and it’s difficult to maintain and refactor for complicated projects, they’re good for taking C++ components and building bigger components out of the base C++ functionality though).

    With that said, UE’s support for C++ is decent. Which is, that as long as you tag all your fields, properties, methods, classes, etc. with some UnrealEngine attribute filter (like UCLASS or UPROPERTY), Unreal will handle the memory management of those constructs for you. Which is nice.

    Unfortunately it has some other limitations to the C++ language that you can’t work around, like disallowing pure abstracts because every C++ derivative class based on any UE construct (Actor, Character, Pawn, etc.) has to be instantiatable in the editor. So no pure abstracts and such.

    In general, I’d give it a 6/10.

    It’s still mostly C++, but some of the things suck less.