PSY_WOMBATS'S PROFILE

I was interested in mazes, mapping games, and game design pretty early, around 10 I guess. I gave that up really fast when I was 12 and realized that there are very very few who can make a living designing games, writing for games, composing music for games, or any of that fun stuff. So I chose the next best thing: programming. I made text RPGs in C and worked from there: built the website, got the basics of a team... That got me into a good university, where I currently study computer science. I just completed my first year.

This summer I'm an intern at Zynga, the company behind Farmville, Cityville, 9 out of the top 10 facebook games, etc. Complain about them all you like, but it's a fun place to work and working on others' games has if anything increased my enthusiasm for making my own. The pay is excellent and even at this point I'm sure I could find a good job in the games industry that I'd be moderately happy with.

The problem is that I'm not really sure that's what I want to do for a living. It's a good way to start and it looks like I'm lucky to have that direction, but recently I've been doing a lot of thinking about how to leverage the other skills I have that I'd never touch as a game programmer. It would be amazing to do some combination of programming, writing, and designing full time instead of as a hobby. There are plenty of notable indie game developers that have day jobs, but the games industry is notorious for long hours and burning out programmers. Pretty much the only way to do this would be to quit whatever neat and stable job and found some sort of studio. I've been trying hard to plan for this with networking and the rest, but it's still really unclear. At this point I'll keep doing what I'm doing and see where I'm at in five or ten years.