Kickstarting my dream! – building my own Real-Time-Strategy Game

My dream is to build my own games and make a living out of it. It is fairly obvious to me now, but at the same time I never dared to make it this explicit.

Once you decide to make work of your dreams, you get into some kind of planning stage. How am I going to build any game? What kind of game? And how do you find time? Practical stuff, dreamy stuff. There is so much needed to build a game, where to begin?

For me it is obvious I want to build an RTS game. I have fond memories of Dune 2, Command & Conquer and Warcraft. Those games got me into programming. No wonder I built Dunedit, Arrakis, Dune 2 – The Maker, and am still working on my own engine today. You could say: I have a strong desire to build my own RTS.

So what is needed to build a game on your own? Obviously you need practical skills, coding, graphics, sounds, music, etc. I’m convinced you can learn about anything – although that does not make you an expert at it. I can code, and I have some skill in music. And, if I can’t ‘create’ it myself, there are various resources out there…

Then the next question is, when am I going to build this? It requires some serious time. How am I going to make time for this? Especially if you have a family, work, etc.

The answer to that is, you ‘make’ time. My experience with working on Magic Gatherers is that I can at least free up 1 day a week and every 8/9 weeks 5 days. Freeing up means basically taking unpaid leave.

This means, over a period of 10 weeks, I can allocate 14 days. A full two weeks of time I can spend on my own stuff: 10 ‘day a week’ + 4 extra days (the 5 day week).

As a freelancer I can more easily free up time, but it also means I need to watch my cash-flow and be sure that my family can rely on a sort of steady income. This is my starting point, from here I want to free up more time (but I need preparation for that).

In the meantime, given that I know my time I can spend on the game for this year, it becomes obvious that I have to prioritize the things to do. This is related to goals, which I will talk about in a later post.

If you want to follow my progress, and get a more indepth view of what I encounter while working towards my dream, follow (or support) me on patreon.

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