Plotting a New Course

Under the Weather is taking a change in direction for the foreseeable future. I started working at a great company that is completely unrelated to games, which means I’ll be scaling back the time I spend on Under the Weather games, websites, and social media. Essentially, the projects I work on for Under the Weather are now relegated back to “hobby” status.

The Reasons

Anyone’s first thought into why I would make this decision can be that I am running out of money to continue funding a startup. While I am not immediately seeing the return on investment within the first 12 months of effort, money was not one of the more important reasons for the change. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not rich, but I wasn’t going to start panhandling either.

If anything, it was a personal decision. Life happens, and some events in life take higher priority than others. I don’t really want to go into more detail than that.

The Strategies

Making a conscious decision to look for a job required a significant mindset change. I was already in the midst of developing my next game (and I still am, but at a lesser capacity now), and then I had to update the resume, brush up on those academic interview questions, and generally get ready to get back to working for a company that’s not my own. I found a few prospective places that I could work for, but luckily I found a software engineer position at a robotics company whose products are for the scientific community. So yeah. For science!

The place I’m working for allows me the amount of creative freedom on my off time that working at a game studio does not. One of the drawbacks I had while working at a game company is that I felt creatively starved.  For one thing, working on your own game on your personal time is considered a conflict of interest. For another, working at a game studio tends to use so much of your creative energy, that you don’t really have any left after going home for the day. I have to say though, that working in the game industry is a great experience, but during crunch time, when you absolutely need to ship the game, it can get incredibly stressful and draining.

The Future

So, with my free time a lot more limited now, I have several avenues I wanted to explore for developing and growing Under the Weather. I’m not ready to reveal anything yet, but at some point, I’d love to divulge more details about the first year of development of the company and products. There are plenty of game development stories out there, and for some reason, I personally can’t get enough of them, so this time, it’s my turn to contribute. This probably also means that, perhaps now, this blog will be a little bit more free form, in the sense that, before I started this whole Under the Weather thing, I had no idea how to blog, and how I should blog for a company. Well, this is me. I’ll write about stuff. Games, software, and things related. So for my next post, I’ll probably get to talking about Pokémon GO…

Make it fun.