If You Aren’t Doing the Happy Dance, Do Something Else

Life is not easy, being a creator makes it harder.  Make sure that you are happy with what you are doing.  Game development is creation, you take nothing but an idea of an experience and start typing code that to a normal human being would be unrelated and, BOOM, experience comes out.  If that doesn’t make you do the happy dance, do something else.

I mean it, if you are not jumping out of your chair and dancing, or at least holding your hands in the air wanting to shout…

I’m the greatest programmer alive!!!

If it doesn’t, then maybe you have the wrong hobby.  It gets rough, it gets terrible even.  You will think you cannot do it.  You are wrong, but only if success makes you do this…

See the only reason game development is so rewarding is because there are times where things all fall apart.  It crushes you, and makes you feel very small.

The thing is, directly after that, if you make it through, you hit the highest of highs.  You defeat that crushing moment and feel like king of the world.  You take down what seems like a dream killer, and you elevate yourself to seemingly one of the best in the world at problem solving.  You stand up on the mountain and you simply dance, mostly alone, but you dance none the less. For a moment you are in game developer heaven.

So if you are in it for anything other than this, get a different goal.  You won’t make money here, unless you love it.  You need to understand the highs and lows, the crushing defeats, and the elevation of the successes.  Really think about game development, do you love the lows?  Can you get through to the highs?  When you get there will you dance?

If the answer is no, get out.  🙂