Hi everyone, Arvind here.
Ten years ago, I opened up Google and started looking for tutorials on programming video games. While some folks on the Steam forums might argue otherwise, I think it’s fair to say that I have learned a lot in these ten years. I have worked with some incredibly talented people, traveled across the world, met some of my heroes and most importantly – had thousands of people tell me they liked my games.
Left: My hostel room, picture taken on a Nokia brick.
Right: My home office, picture taken on a slightly better brick.
Both: Bad fashion sense.
In the roughly seven-and-half years since I started Pyrodactyl, I released five games. Many people in creative professions talk about post-project depression, or a feeling of emptiness when you finish a big project. For each of my games, I had that feeling, but I would usually recover after a month or two.
However, the feeling after Good Robot was different. To explain why, let’s break down what I like and don’t like about running my own game studio:
| Things I like | Things I don’t like |
|---|---|
|
|
I was burned out. While I had a good idea about what my next game would be, I lacked any motivation to make it. I can think of a few reasons why it was worse this time:
- I live in a city which doesn’t have any local game developer community or support structure.
- It’s very hard to feel the love on the internet. We generally remember the negative comments more than the positives, especially online.
- Because I worked remotely, I had very little human interaction with my teammates, which further compounded the problem.
This is why I have decided to take a sabbatical from making games. Consider it hibernation as I recharge and get my mojo back.
If you’ve ever played any of my games and liked them, please consider tweeting (or emailing, facebooking etc) a small message of support. It’s the love that keeps us going.
Posted In: Misc
Tagged: game development, postmortem
Akshay Goel
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Hey Arvind, I feel really sad about the negatives you mentioned regardless of it being the truth. I have started a local community to address the problems you mentioned in Pune and I believe you should start one in your area to keep things interesting.