Hi, my name is Henry. This is me quitting my job (by email) from a seaside café in Greece!
I used to work as a programmer at BioWare making video games. I loved my time there, but I’ve decided to take a year off to try making games on my own.
This has been my dream for a while now. I love programming, but I also like messing around with art & graphic design, music, stories, systems, interactions and interfaces—and putting it all together to build new worlds to play in.
The Plan So Far
My long-term plan/dream is to be able to make games sustainably for as long as I can. Notably, I don’t want to start a business or try to get rich. In fact, I’m not particularly keen on selling games at all, I just want to keep making them. I guess I’ll need to resolve that somehow :)
Me at work, in the future.
I’d also like to set my own hours/days, work from cafés or remote islands, and make crazy decisions that I don’t have to justify to anyone. You know, the usual stuff.
My short-term plan is to live off my savings until they run out (a year or so), make a couple of small games, and then get a job again. If my games make a bit of money in the meantime, then I’ll keep going; if not, I’ll save up some more and do it again! Whatever happens, I will have spent a year doing what I love. I figure it’s hard to go wrong with a plan like that.
I’m also going to make more time for the other aspects of my life I’ve been neglecting: reading, re-learning the piano, exercise, meditation, and working through the long list of games I’ve been meaning to play.
This blog is a diary to document my adventures and to have discussions about all of this with whoever’s listening. I have a lot to learn and I’d love to get feedback as I go.
Stay tuned for details of my first project: Spaceteam!
Thanks for reading,
– Henry