This is a longer story than I was trying to tell; but it is the strand that runs from my childhood, into this new decision I’m making in this season, as an almost-40-year-old.
Childhood was filled with playing Nintendo games, paired with activities like cutting characters out of paper and pretending they were characters in a world, also drawn with colored pencils and markers, on lined paper in spiral notebooks. My brothers and I also spent hours in our large yard pretending: exploring, fighting, talking to strange creatures, and going off on big adventures. Having a good imagination kept us having a blast for hours at a time, back in those days in the 90s. Metaphoric stories like Narnia didn’t hurt either; empowering me to feel significance in my fantastical creativity.
Not long later, I started playing more-compelling computer games saturated in interesting story and deeper worlds, with my best childhood bud, Larry. Then we would also go explore the seemingly endless wilderness behind his yard; with imaginative conversations about adventures and other worlds, choosing to not be constrained to our own.
By the late 90s, I decided that I wanted to make video games. I was the kid with the stack of drawings that I was working on throughout classes in Middle School and Highschool. In my mind, I was already making games, however the software at the time was limiting. I made Doom levels using a really rough Doom level editor program. I made something resembling games on the Gameboy camera, by snapping pictures of drawings and, within the game, chaining links to other pictures together in the form of buttons you could put on each picture; which played out something like an illustrated “Choose Your Own Adventure”. I filled countless spiral notebooks with drawings of characters, monsters, weapons, maps and story and world ideas, and eventually moved on to what I considered professional concept art of the same. These were the only means I had to create other worlds; which I was exploring as I created.
Finally my youngest brother turned me on to “Game Maker” when I was recently out of high school and had decided not to go to a game development school. Instead, we put on our developer hats for the first time. We made several small games. However, we didn’t seem to be able to focus on one big game for long, as there was just too much freedom, and too many ideas. I constantly cranked out concept art, and dabbled in pixel art for years. We restarted the same kind of game several times over the next decade; growing, living life a little bit, and coming back to try to tackle the giant kind of game we wanted to make, several times over.
Into the 2010s, we saw huge success from some Indie games, released into the new norms of digital storefronts. We realized the door had been opened for us to make video games, outside the scope of some menial job within a huge company. We put forth all of the determination a couple of 20-something-year-olds could. My brother moved to the same state/town (and even the same house for a time), in hopes that we could hunker down and make a game… but we had to work… and we needed social lives and/or hobbies, as well as other things to fill up our lives. Sitting in a basement / makeshift studio for hours a week was pushing our limits by expending our budgets of time, finances and self-fulfillment. We moved on from that season. Life kept happening for a while, as it should. While we intended to keep making games together, there were adventures and families to be had (thankfully)!
When I turned 30, I decided to learn how to program games, so that I could create a lane of fulfilment in creating video games, while it was improbable for my brother to help me at all for about a year. My wife and I were also having the first of our 3 boys at the same time, and would soon become business owners, importing and selling furniture in the store that took off in 2016. It was not an ideal season for “creative side projects”.
Since then, the past few years have been balanced on this tension between the lives we have, and the worlds we want to create. I still consider myself a highly creative person, and what I want to create is still my passion, but I feel ashamed of needing to prove it still, if only to myself. After wondering if anything was ever going to be able to take off; if I’d get to do what I wanted to do, I had a realization / revelation this last year at some point.
In spite of a business that takes all of my time, all of my energy, and has historically been growing, but without significant financial success; I may have been offered a chance to follow my dreams through it all. After about 5 1/2 years, we’ve grown a substantial pile of stock. I’d say it took a few years to max out a warehouse to stock our smaller store. Then we moved into a 10k square foot store, and started filling it and all of the back rooms with furniture. It happened over time, and I never really saw the investment that had grown to fill the space; until one day when I realized that this may have been happening for a reason this whole time. Perhaps it wasn’t just to have a successful business, if I could continue working hard enough to keep selling furniture for years to come.
I hoped that God was giving me a chance to make video games by storing up several years worth of salary in the inventory of a large furniture store. In the midst of the modern day economic frustrations, juxtaposed on the frailty of life, and just how quickly it goes by, I started to see it as more of “no brainer” than a risk. The risk might have been to keep trudging forward as a small business owner.
If this business was a means to get to focus on game development, it was quite a process to get here; but perhaps an outcome I couldn’t have appreciated without the years of seemingly-unrelated labor and strain. Certainly the years of squeezing several hours of game art in every week hasn’t hurt my current ability to do so.
It’s kind of an amazing thing that both my brother and I held on to this dream into our mid-late 30s (I’m 38, my brother is 34). Now is it time to push that way, and really give this dream a full opportunity to work? Do I get to sell off all our business stock to fund a couple/few years of trying my hardest to give this a real shot?
I’m writing this today to say that it’s my goal, and I don’t see it as a sacrifice, so much as an investment. I’ve been “training” for this all of my life. I’ve got a solid bro-partner whom I’ve been creating together with since we were kids. My wife and family are supportive, and I feel like this “green light” has just changed over in my favor.
It’ll be a several-month progress, but I’m excited to give closing our store the attention it needs to hopefully walk away with such an investment. It’s almost time to see where this creative journey, so long in the making, is finally going!