Howdy everyone, so as the title suggests I don't intend to post anymore chapters of Iceborn. It has been fun writing the story, and seeing y'all in the comments, getting proof that my writing is actually pretty good, but it comes down to the fact that I need to get my shit together. I don't want to trap my self into the patreon writer niche that I've seen a lot, where I need to put out two, or three, or four sloppy chapters a week to appease my subscribers. I don't want to compromise what I want to write about to cater to an audience, which is another pitfall of career writers. With that in mind, I've come to the conclusion that writing for a living would drive me up the wall. Writing as a part of what makes a living though, is doable.
I've been on and off learning how to code for the better part of six years. Making mods, playing with game files, writing minor bits of code to bugfix stuff. In the past few months I've gotten a lot more serious about that, and scraped together some money to start courses on game development. They're going great, I'm about four weeks ahead of what the online syllabus says I should have done and it hasn't been hard. I've mostly been aware of what the courses are teaching, I just didn't know how to really string it all together. My goal going forwards is to finish my course, and start work on a game I've thought about making my whole life. I've looked around on Steam, on GoG, Epic, all the big storefronts, and nobody has made the game that I want to make. There's games that come close, but nothing quite like what I want to do. I know the game would be popular if I can turn vision to implementation, because those similar games are pretty successful. I don't want to spoil the idea, but it's a bit of a mix between a sandbox RPG, a top down shooter, and a tactical RTS.
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One of my good friends has already volunteered to help with the art side of things, we're both 20-something trying to get out of similar issues. I've been putting together what we would need to actually make a game. I've got the loose background lore written, I've got prototypes for some game systems already working, I have the engine and coding language chosen. It's going to be a long road to actually getting something cohesive and playable, but for now I'm pretty confident that it's something I can manage.
My main goal here is to just get something, anything going that will break me out of the cycle of 'Hey I got my money straight!' -> 'Shit Happens Immediately!' -> 'Fuck I'm broke again.' that I've dealt with since I was 14. I thought that might have been writing, and I have enjoyed it, but I don't think I could make it as a writer by writing what I want to. A game on the other hand, there's a thousand eyes looking at even the niche, spaghetti-code indie games out there. Everything I've put effort into in my life, I've been good at, so I figure I may as well try it. In any case, thanks for reading my story, and I hope y'all have a good one.
