Game Development life has been interesting, especially in the last 4 years. (“Interesting” doing a lot of work in that sentence!) >_<
Six years ago I was fortunate enough to join a very small Indie Game Development team, Pizza Club Games. They had been founded around 18 months prior to my joining them and were working on mobile titles for a very supportive publisher.
Life was good! I learned an incredible amount about unity, programming, remote work, communication. It was the best environment to learn how to become a Unity Developer and I regret nothing.
Fast forward a few years, the supportive publisher basically goes out of business. The leaders scramble to find alternative options in the midst of one of the largest layoff periods in the games industry ever. They managed to get oh so very close, but sadly corporate garbage being what it is, a new director came in and shut everything down. Not a new story in corporate land.
There was a little bit of funding left over, so a few of us stuck around and worked on a PC game that would hopefully land us a publisher and give us a tiny bit of runway. But we always knew it was a long shot. A Hail Mary!
Sadly, it didn’t pan out. Our demo didn’t light the world on fire. The be fair, it was very rough. I honestly thought of it more as a vertical slice, and as such I feel like we did very well considering the time and budget constraints.
Pizza Club Games is now finally riding off into the sunset.
I shall miss you very much, but I must now find my next adventure.
<3