Utah Indie Night, January 2015

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 23, 2015

Indie Night this month was at my alma mater, Brigham Young University. It was cool to hit the ol’ stomping grounds again – I spent many, many hours at the James E. Talmage building getting my Computer Science degree. It seems smaller, now.

But mainly it was cool.

Anyway, the night was kicked off by Lyle Cox giving a talk on finding motivation as an indie… although it covered a variety of subjects concerning health and well-being. He talked about finding life balance, avoiding burnout, maintaining focus, controlling your environment, scheduling, maintaining perspective, self-improvement, and yes, motivation.

It was an idea-packed half-hour. I’m not too much into the touchy-feely side of things, but a lot of the talk made sense. Even the basics – getting enough exercise, and filling your brain with better “brain food”, and discovering a bit more about what motivates you and makes you tick – was valuable information to be reminded of.

After that there were the games, and networking. I got a chance to play the latest version of Eidolon Games’ Flame Warrior, which totally kicked my butt several different ways.  It has changed a lot since last summer’s demo, with a very different interface. And it’s clearly more challenging.

Some other old favorites were there – Script Kiddies, Dub Wars, etc.  But as usual, I took advantage of the opportunity to talk to other game devs and get a feel for how things were going among my fellow indies. Sadly, it’s pretty rough and crowded out there. But it was once again great to draw on their experiences and learn from them, swap ideas, and talk about things that fellow game developers all understand. It was, as always, equal parts educational and motivational.

Big thinks to Greg Squire of Monkey Time Games for organizing things, as always. And thanks to my fellow indies. I had a great time, and I think I really needed the chance to hang out with other game devs for a while and remind myself why I keep doing what I’m doing. We’re all passionate about games, for different reasons sometimes, but we’re passionate enough that it drives us to keep at it in spite of all the other things we could be doing with our time. (I noted that very few indies were caught up on current television shows…)

I’ll end with a couple of quotes from Lyle – one might have been him quoting someone else, but they go like this:

#1 – “You will never influence the world if you try to be like it.” Be unique. Find your own purpose and measure of success. Do something awesome. And:

#2 – “You probably suck at what you are doing right now. So work on self-improvement and keep working on becoming the expert in your craft.” (Probably misquoted, but that’t the gist).

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