Is This Right For Me?

What Am I Doing?

I knew coming into this course that I would be approaching it with different goals and aims than probably 90% of the other students, and I suspected this might not work well.

Where Do I Fit In?

First off I am probably a fair bit older than most of the students at 48 years of age when I started, and it looks like a lot of the other students are younger. Some considerably so. As you get older your world view and experiences change how you look at things, and I have found myself disagreeing with points made, and comments raised, that I personally know to be untrue and not indicative of the real world.

Secondly, I probably have a fairly unique viewpoint coming into the course in that in terms of game development experience, I have quite a lot already, and still regularly talk to friends who are still working within the games industry, so I’m fairly well up to speed in a lot of respects. Add on top of that my experiences outside the games industry in professional software development, and I have packed a lot into my now 30 full-time years as a programmer, quite often at 60+ hours per week, so you could argue 45 year experience.

My Aims & Goals

So, what was I hoping to get out of this? It was quite simple really:

• Sharpen up some rusty game dev skills
• Get up to speed with any modern game dev methodologies
• Work on my teamworking and team management skills
• Gain extra business skills which might be relevant to my current career

What I am not going to be doing is quitting my job to become an indie developer. That’s very clear. I currently sit just under the board of Directors in my current role as CTO, and although the work is challenging, it can be exciting, and I am rewarded well for it.

And there we probably get to the heart of it. I think potentially every other student in my cohort is thinking/dreaming of becoming an indie game developer, running their own successful studio, and I genuinely wish them all the best in hopefully achieving their dream. I really do. But that’s not for me.

Should I Stay Or Should I Go Now?

All this has been brewing since week 5, and here we are about to start week 9. I have not been keeping up to speed with the course at all, and have pretty much done nothing for the past couple of weeks.

This came to a head, personally, and I made the decision that it would probably be better if I quit the course. So with this in mind I asked to speak to one of the module tutors to go through my concerns and thoughts.

I managed to do this on the afternoon of Thursday 18th March 2021, and spent nearly 45 minutes going through my concerns. I have to admit it did answer a lot of questions, but has since left me with a few more I need to ask, but it did assuage a lot of what was concerning me, and has actually pushed me in a slightly different direction.

The Outcome?

As it stands right now I have decided to stay on this course, at least until the end of the current module. I will then take time to review where I am and how I feel and hopefully speak to a module tutor again, and make that decision together.

For now I had best crack on and catch up with commenting on Flex, reading the course material, writing blog entries and starting on my RI2 project.