Four months ago I quit my stable, well-paying job as a sysAdmin. I planned on using the savings I had been building up for the previous 7 years to support myself, all so I could pursue a dream.
So now at 30, instead of buying a house with my wife like a responsible adult, we've moved in with my parents and I've been working full time on a video game about pixelated humans beating the shit out of each other.
What would drive someone to this sort of madness?
My first PC game was DOOM. I was too young to have the coordination to use all of the controls, so my brother would 'drive' and I got to press the 'kill button'.
I think I came to the realization that I.T was just a job, and games were exactly what I wanted to do with my life when I was travelling through Canada & the USA in 2013. Visiting Montreal, I was excited by the fact that I was in the same city as Eidos, Ubisoft and Bioware.
Pictured: Canada.
By Jonathunder - Own work, GFDL 1.2, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5185607
It made me realize that I didn't want to just play games, I wanted build them. Unfortunately I didn't know the first thing about coding.
So, I decided to figure it out.
I started with GameMaker: Studio. In hindsight the language was pretty easy, but at the time it was probably the most frustrating 3 months of my life. I built some simple prototypes, then I decided on making ultra-violent 2D shooter that focused on blasting through walls and ruining buildings. It took a bit less than a year to build it in my spare time.
One day I will totally finish that. Maybe.
At the end of 2015 I switched to Unity, learned C# and started building a new (far better) game. That game is Pit Fighter Tycoon.
If I make money from it - awesome. If not, well... At least my young nephews think I'm cool.
I've always wanted to answer the question of 'Why are you making this game?' with a long explanation about how I'm following through on the dream design-document of my childhood. But, it never really works out like that.