I have great, exciting, and terrifying news to share with you: I quit my day job so that I can fully focus on Smiling Cat and finally turn it into a viable business. In all honesty this is probably something that I should have done long ago, however, inertia is a great force to overcome, and to overcome it I had to become a different person than I was just three years ago. I also had to get a bit of a nudge from an employer increasingly uninterested in paying rising market wages to keep a top-performing developer.
As nerve-wracking as this all should be, I am surprisingly more at peace within myself than I have been in a long time. This feels so right.
What This Means for Smiling Cat
Up until now, the amount of time I could devote to Smiling Cat while staying sane has been limited. In addition to being beholden to a 40-hour workweek elsewhere, due to my wife’s condition, the lion’s share of household work also falls onto my shoulders. So I was only finding anywhere between 8 and 12 hours per week to work on Smiling Cat if I was lucky, and often those were tired hours of less than optimal value. Trying to do more than that was a large contributing factor to the burnout I experienced 2-3 years ago when work slowed down on Dehoarder 2. In contrast, being able to put at least 40 bright-eyed hours into Smiling Cat every week should be a game-changer for what I am able to accomplish.
In addition to being able to devote more time to Smiling Cat game projects including finishing Prepare For Warp and a much-awaited return to development on Dehoarder 2, I will also be taking on game development and general application development contract work as my primary means of making this path viable financially. Given my extensive past as a software developer, I have the flexibility and pragmatism to take on pretty much any development work if/as necessary. I am also becoming active on the Unity Asset Store, packaging some of the more reusable components that I have created over the years.
I will also have more time to devote to this dev blog. My silence over the last couple of months, however, was due to my planning for this event. Lots of work went into preparing for this that I could not openly talk about at the time except to family, friends, and a few select confidants in the community. As these preparations consumed most available ‘free’ time, I’ve had very little else to talk about these past few weeks. (Though I have made considerable progress on the Prepare For Warp mission/store UI that I will highlight in a later post.) But now moving forward I should have plenty to talk about on a regular basis. Right now, I probably have enough material to pack three more blog posts.
Call To Action
Ever since making this decision about a month ago, I’ve had a huge outpouring of support from family, friends, and peers in the local gamedev community, cheering me on to go through with this, lending me confidence and courage to add to my own to take this huge leap. For those of you who are Dragonball fans, remember the times when Goku reached out to everyone to help build his huge Spirit Bombs? Well it has kind of been like that for me. My wife especially has been giving a lot of support and encouraging me to make this dream a reality, even understanding the risks involved.
No matter what happens from here, I want to be able to say that I gave it my best. So here I am. Showing up at my new full-time job. This is a big leap into the life of my dreams, and I’m hoping I am able to make this work. In addition to my hard work, your support will be crucial to helping to make this happen, and will pretty directly put food on my family’s table.
How can you as a fan help support me? There are many ways:
- Buy my games from Steam and Google Play Store
- Download my free games from Google Play Store
- Review my games on Steam and Google Play Store
- Become a Patreon patron (once available)
- Wishlist my games on Steam
- Stream my games
- Talk about my games to others, especially to streamers
- Follow me on Twitter
- (Developers) Buy my Asset Store packages (once available)
- (Developers) Review my Asset Store packages (once available)
So that fans who would choose to financially support me above and beyond the price of my games may do so, I am currently working on building a Patreon profile through which you will be able to score giveaway games and get exclusive beta access (pre-Early Access) to future games including Dehoarder 2. I will provide more details on this as they become available, but for now, enjoy a preview of my tier badges.
Current Project Plans
My first order of business, from a project perspective, is going to be to finish development on Prepare For Warp, transition it from Early Access to full release, and update Android support of the game to the latest version. In the immediate term, expect a much shorter release cadence for Prepare For Warp on Steam, especially on the “Bleeding Edge” test release track.
After that, I will be making a long-awaited return to Dehoarder 2 development. During my hiatus from development on this magnum opus, I’ve recorded many ideas on how to move past the roadblocks I was encountering in terms of both gameplay and story, and I’m looking forward to implementing those solutions now that I am completely and thoroughly through the burnout that plagued me on this project.
Vintage Pachinko has proven itself to be quite a resilient game. Since the 64-bit update last fall, sales of Vintage Pachinko have tripled, and I’ve taken notice. I am currently in talks to bring more new artwork updates to the game, and also have ideas for some new features to further add to the zen of the Vintage Pachinko experience.
I am really excited and charged up about this opportunity. I am bringing with me fully flush the first two hands of success, Ability and Determination. All I need now is a bit of the third hand of success, Providence.