It’s super exciting and scary at the same time; in a week we (Duckbridge) will be starting our own game company, it was kind of a scary and hard decision to make, but we decided to just go for it!
Donald and I have been making videogames together for a little while now (almost a year) but mostly part-time and we didn’t ever really finish a game untill our last game (15min Max). We found that fully finishing a videogame takes a lot of time, even more than we were spending on them previously.
Starting our own game ‘company’ was more or less a joke at first. It was more a joke that Donald brought up but it became more serious when we found that we couldn’t really ‘get around it’. And with ‘company’ we just mean indie developer.
I was/am working 9 hours from Monday to Thursday as a Software engineer and next to work I spend about 4-5 hours working on our game(s). Every Friday I would go to Donald’s house to work on videogames and the same goes for Saturday and Sunday. This kind of lifestyle is possible to do of course, but it’s not very healthy and it’s not easy to keep this kind of lifestyle.
When you work on something that you really ‘love’, you kind of ‘live’ it, you think about it all day, as much as possible; you cannot stop thinking/talking about it. Even during my day-job I was thinking about the game(s) a lot and it distraught me a lot. I wanted to talk about it, but every time it came up I couldn’t stop talking about it…
So after some discussion with Donald and my mom (yes I still live at home) I decided to resign from my Software engineering job and fully focus on Duckbridge and the moment is getting pretty close now. Often during work I had this itch, But during work I wasn’t allowed to scratch it, until I went home and I scratched as much as possible.. this is why I figured that I had to resign. It’s super scary of course because there are no ‘safety-net’ and no ‘security’; there is no one to tell you ‘it will be alright’ or to hold your hand, because you’re all on your own.
I’ve worked for a game company before and I know that it is hard work either way. The days are long and sometimes the weekends are short, but in the end it is usually totally worth it! And doing something you enjoy is more important than doing something that earns well imo.
When I try to explain to people why I want to do what I’m going to do and how I feel about it some people think it’s really cool and all that and some don’t really take me seriously (maybe because I’m still a bit young). Some ask me why I don’t just go work for a game company and I don’t really have an answer for that actually. But I’ve always believed in that you can do what you want if you just put enough time in it and enough effort (of course this doesn’t apply to everything and always). And if Donald and I don’t try it now, when will we?
So what I can say is that, in two weeks we will be going fulltime, we’re super excited, scared and we don’t know what will happen during this time, all I can say is that we will try our hardest and make the best games we can possibly make!
My name is Marciano Viereck and I’m ½ of Duckbridge, a tiny developer based in Amersfoort, Netherlands
Thank you for reading!
