Over the last four-and-a-half years, I’ve had the privilege and pleasure to be a stay-at-home dad. The pandemic was a big part of that decision, but obviously not the only thing. As the kids have grown, though, they “need” me less and less. Which is great.

But it also means that I find myself wondering what I should be doing more and more. I’ve periodically enjoyed consulting and mentoring folks, but I find most startups that come my way arrive far too late – out of money and time having believed they didn’t need any help with game design or product development, because this stuff was easy, right? That’s not everyone – but it is most folks. And I’ve started turning them all down, because it’s simply not worth my time to spend a huge amount of time and effort to find a path forward only to hear that literally no change is possible.

With mentorship, it’s fun, but it’s slow. Mentoring one-on-one shatters my time in a way that’s difficult to justify. Having great folks to help is satisfying moment-to-moment, but it comes at a cost which makes no sense to me. And doing it for free means that help often ends up being taken for granted or ignored. While I’d love to say the positives outweigh the negatives, unfortunately in reality they don’t – a few bad apples crushes my will to invest my time this way.

Looking at getting back into making games – the simple conclusion I’ve come to is that I’m not a solo developer. My favorite bits of working in games have always been collaborative ones – whether I’m acting in a leadership capacity and facilitating those magic moments, or whether I’m neck deep in the work, and helping folks build crazy new things. But remote work … I’ve never enjoyed it – even a little. And yet, I want to retain flexibility and commutes are bullshit. No, I don’t know how to reconcile those things.

And more, the game industry is a bloodbath right now. The level of home-run-certainty I’d need to invest my time into making something that I think could even stand a hope of finding an audience… it’s just not there. Not on PC, not on console, not on mobile, not in VR. Every market is saturated.

I also don’t want to work on something at this point that doesn’t serve some sort of greater purpose. Building a VR system for post-stroke rehab was immensely satisfying, and wielding the power of games to create things that supercharge health, or learning, or *something* – I don’t think I have any desire to do things “just for fun” anymore. But all those avenues come with their own huge challenges – and they’re ones I’m not just unequipped for, they’re challenges I don’t want to engage with. I don’t want to figure out how to sell a game to learning institutions or school districts. I don’t want to deal with health regulatory processes and legal stuff.

Yeah, that’s the voice of absurd levels of privilege talking. I know.

But it leaves me in a weird state. The last two things I built that became successful? I made a lot of other people very, very rich. Some of those people I retain respect for – I don’t mind having contributed to their success. Others, I really, really don’t. I will not put myself in that situation again. Which means anything I build in the future, I will own and control. And there’s no compromising on that. It doesn’t mean I’d be the only person to own it – it just means that I will never be in a situation where my success can be wrested from me and handed over to someone else again.

But where does that leave me? I don’t know. I don’t think it’s games. I have one weird idea for a puzzle game that isn’t even a set of mechanics – it’s a feeling – and another itch to revive the best game I’ve ever worked on. I can’t do either of them on my own, and also can’t imagine either ever being successful enough to justify their own existence other than, “they’re fun!” But financially both are almost certainly dead ends – there’s no “business” there. And to be honest, I’d want to make something self-sustaining as a first priority. Doing something fun and constantly scrambling against insolvency was no fun the time I tried it. 🙁

I don’t know what this all means. Just that it’s a mess. There’s an itch there. The time exists. What to do with it is the question, and I don’t have any answers.