What if, like, I decided to give it all up and make games?

Since I was a child, my dearest and most beloved hobby has been playing computer games. Aged five, when I should have been reciting the times table in my head or at least pretending to pay attention in class, I was actually running through strategies for maneuvering Dizzy (a kind of sentient egg) through the strange and surreal world that the Oliver twins had built. At high school I spent endless hours glued to Civilization 2 (and when the school library got Internet access, God knows how many minutes over lunch and breaktimes downloading scenarios from the defence of Stalingrad to the Peleponnesian war).

I briefly put games to one side (never away) when I was correcting for this intensely nerdy childhood at university, postgrad school and in the first few years of professional life. Which is a fancy way of saying I started working out, started dating, got a job, eventually got married and generally learned to masquerade as a responsible adult. By the time my wife and I had kids, we were both working as lawyers somewhere in East Asia, and most of my free time was given over to family and to the kind of not-work-but-really-kinda-work socialising that you do in your late 20s. In what was left, I ploughed through Bioware’s output, explored Skyrim and disappeared down a black hole marked “Every Paradox Game, Ever” only to emerge with a highly specific form of OCD that compels the sufferer to make map borders as aesthetically pleasing as possible.

The years passed by, our children grew older and our careers changed – I moved from law into tech and from advising to a business exec role – but I never grew out of playing games. The time available for hobbies shrank, expanded, shrank again. When COVID hit it expanded a lot, enough to make me dust off hobby projects that I’d set aside for years and look seriously at them. One of them was “figure out if you can actually code and have a crack at making a game.”

As of now I only see three problems with this. First, everyone knows that giving up your job to spend time set up as an indie developer is a fast track to bankruptcy and ruin, so I need to fit this into downtime from family and paid employment. Second, I’m pretty sure my professional career would suffer if word got out that I was spending a significant of my free time thinking about games, which would lead inexorably back to 1) and the downward spiral toward divorce, alcoholism and living in a box under a bridge somewhere.

And third, hobby projects typically go nowhere. So I'm writing this blog to be accountable to myself, as a record and because the discipline of writing here should make it easier to know if I'm really serious about this.