If you watch the youtube series doublefine has on the making of Psychonauts 2 (I’ve actually never played it, but I’m a hobby game developer and found the whole series a fascinating behind the scenes for how established studios do game development), they had a project lead early on to the Psychonauts dev cycle that pushed for things like “blood gates” where you had to kill enemies to progress, and more challenging combat and more traditional sort of “God of War” style gameplay mechanics.

The core devs, UX, animators, level designers, etc. all sort of rebelled against him and went to Tim (the President of DF and the writer of it) and complained until he sorted things out.

So not having these challenging combat pieces was 100% intentional by the dev team that built both Psychonauts 1 and 2.

I assume he means that there’s no way to perms die or challenge to the game from a combat standpoint, that is more story driven. If so, he’s right. Double fine specifically built that into their game design. It was an intentional choice

Yeah, if the fascist overthrow of democracy only had tariffs to worry about, we’d be doing well.

What if we put a bunch of Legos on the floor around your bed while you slept?

Oh man, blast from the past.

That was my jam, way, way, way, way back when ;)

Was a RR10 Enchanter and RR10 Blademaster, plus a TL for both classes. I think my account is still lifetime comped.

Put wayyyy too much time into that :P

Best we can hope for is an overdose

Haha, I feel that! I’ve got dozens of almost games in my wake. 🙂

Thank you!

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? :)

Epic also does this

Looking at the trailer and reading the article, it’s clear they’re going back to the doom 1 roots with the way the projectiles feel like it’s a 2D top down shooter.

That’s the way it’s supposed to feel imo, and I dig the direction they’re heading and the combat definitely felt like oldschool 2D top down shooters were supposed to feel: Dodge everything, never stop firing.

It’s not pve. It’s a glorified training simulator. Extremely boring and basic

They’re just a corporation.

Which is to say they’re all rotten to the core when it comes to profits.