Original subtitles

I was 21 years old

Couple years into a printing degree at Clemson University

I was watching the indie game documentary

I got moment

I knew I wanted to be just like Edmund McMillen

And Jonathan Blow

I wanted to make

Independent games for living

Everything about college the real world

And a desk job

Suddenly felt like a nightmare

And I was going to do everything I possibly could to avoid that work

Inmate games

Full-time

My name is Thomas brush and video games have fascinated me ever since I was a kid

I want to tell you about how Indie Games changed

Everything for me

I'm sure my story

It's actually very similar to yours I know we all probably experienced that

Brush when opening up our first console

On Christmas Day

That sense of wonder as suddenly

Banjo flips onto his back carry by Kazooie

Or that sense of camaraderie

Brotherhood

When playing GoldenEye

On a tiny TV left over from the early 90s in for little squares

Growing up the video game world for me and my brothers

Was a place to bond together

Who really got old

The four of us sprinting up our rickety wooden staircase burst into the playroom

Flip over onto the couch

Blow into the cartridge

And start shooting each other

No matter what was happening in the real world

We can always rely on the fact

Hang out with each other after school

In another dimension

I'll be honest though I never really played video games with my brothers

I spent most of the time just watching

Mesmerized

All of it

I wanted to figure it out

How did rareware

Nintendo and neversoft do it

Thankfully my brother was given a piece of software coreldraw for his birthday

This is basically the 90s version of Photoshop

Camera that clunky animation add-on called Corral move

So why my brother sat watching movies playing in 64 and eventually Xbox

What actually sit across the room and windows Millennium Edition in Corel move trying to recreate Dragon Ball Z

Honestly all I can remember from those days with

The Twin Towers harry-potter-and-the-sorcerer's-stone

Making

Really crappy animations showing them to my family and thinking it was the next Walt Disney

Life was good

I felt like I could see my future

I'm going to be a filmmaker

Maybe even make video game

My confidence in my career path solidified in high school

As I moved on from Corral move

I heard about the shiny new tool called flash MX

About a copy from a website called

Cheap software.com with my dad's credit card

To his dismay it was more like a copy of a copy a flash MX from China

Got it running and began to create some bizarre and sometimes cringe-worthy animations

Looking back it's no wonder it wasn't until graduation

I was able to find a girlfriend

Actually ended up being my wife

I guess you found something special in this scrawny Newgrounds obsessed teenager

I got lucky because

I was eventually able to prove my skill to her when I released a small game called coma online

You received over 7 million plays with help of websites like newgrounds.com

It made me about $20,000

Publishing contract

As you can imagine my head got a little big

I felt like I had made it

Set it at go to college and see what they knew and then jump right back into game development

College was where the real world

Started to set in

The money from coma and a few other flash games I made

Begin to dry up

Navigate to realize making indie games for a living

It was hard

I stuck with it though and spent most my time either studying in my dorm

Watching prison break with my fiance

Or working on my next game on my little MacBook

In the basement the library

Depressing looking back

I wish I'd made more friends mini gone too few parties

Had that college experience

But I couldn't let go of that dream

There's always ticking clock in my head

Time was running out to really solidify my career

As a game developer

Black clock eventually hit midnight

The time was up

I love my fiance more than my career

And we got married right after graduation

She was still in school and I knew I needed to provide for the family so I took a job as a graphic designer to business-to-business

Is this marketing firm

Making around $38,000 a year

Was pretty good money Wellington to what I was used to

My wife and I had a tiny little house a couple acres of land we started Living in this real world

But it didn't take much time for me to start feeling anxious

Pressed

About a week I came home from work crying trying to explain to my wife that feeling of being

Trapped in a cubicle sorts

Making email blast for refrigeration company

Had a weird looking back because

I was really lucky to have a job at a really great company that treated me well

I was lucky to be making money and luck if he married

But something in me was screaming

Tell stories

True video games in my own way

In my own time

That dream from childhood that self-assurance

Roaring back

That's when I decided I was going to wake up at 6 a.m.

Every morning before work

And make games

I'm going to work on them through my lunch break

And even work on them an hour or two in the evenings

Wasn't easy easier than feeling trapped

After three years of mustering of Creative Energy in the midst of being a full-time student and then a full-time employee

I also traveled across the country to small indie game competitions

And I was even lucky enough to have Unity

Thomas small documentary about my story after that I was ready to release my next game

Pinstripe

A game about a minister in Hell well I thought I was ready

Of course it wasn't that easy

The game was riddled with bugs

Received terrible reviews when I would submit it

Festivals

Like igf reindeer

I really was devastated but

Kept at it

Wasn't without a ton of quotes about failure printed all over my office wall

That I mustered enough bravery

Pelagic Kickstarter campaign

I knew I needed

Quit my job

To be able to fully focus on making pinstripe

With the help of my sister-in-law and her camera

Some footage from unity's documentary

And I wife holding my laptop

The teleprompter

I recorded the kickstarter video in my parents back

Wasn't perfect

And I knew that

Who's even a bit embarrassing

Asking for people's money

Is showing them an incomplete project

Compromising

Try and make it better

Then the day came

Launch day for the

It was lunchtime

I snuck down to the basement

The marketing agency I was working at

Nervously waiting

Click the launch button

Really needed

Mainly because I knew my family and friends watching

Click the launch button

And my job Rock

Within the first

Our kid raised over $7,000

The day I could not believe what I was seeing

Campaign exceeded its funding goal

$28,000 in less than 24 hours

This was it

This was the moment I had worked through High School

College

In three years at a desk job for

That moment

When you quit your job

Become a full-time Game Dev

It's been a wild ride

Ever since that day

I thought that single moment

What kind of like a glitch

Did the money with dry up and I've had to go back

My day job

But it's really only gotten better since then

Here's the thing

Every full-time Game Dev Pat is

4 summits

One game launches changes everything

For others like myself

The lengthy process of

Launching Kickstarter campaigns partnering with publishers

Relying on patreon support and even building a loyal audience with

Help of some Mega YouTubers

That's perhaps another story for another time

So I'm about to turn 30 I'm sitting in my

Little 80-game Studio

I couldn't be happier with my current career

Looking back it really is all a blur

I always thought I would feel like I was Landing a plane like once you've landed you've landed you've made it you're good to go

It doesn't work that way

That's what I want you to know

Making Indie Games exactly that you're making

Me I don't ever just make a game and then I'm done

It's a journey and it's hard

It's exhausting

You might cry and

If you're married or dating you're probably fight your family might be confused

Some people might think you're crazy

But none of this is about being understood or having talent or being a genius

Chili about being diligent

Humble

And hardworking and with those traits

I believe that anyone including you can make games

Full-time