My name is Tommy Bergeron and I am a freelance developer.
Basically what I do is, look for contracts wherever I go or on the net. There’s always people looking for a good programmer who’s willing to give a hand on a project.
Usually my clients are happy and I stay with them a few months, sometimes it even ends up with great opportunities like working on successful projects.
The thing with what I do is that I do my passion, for a living. I hack whatever needs to be hacked and I jump onto the next problem. It simply never ends. I could work 24 hours a day if I would like to, that’s the thing. Freelancers, most of the time, are alone at home. That’s where work and life must collude with eachothers, that’s where most of the time things fuck up.
I, sometimes, miss being part of a team, a physical one. I tweet, facebook, google and everything at any given time but never I would have thought to say this, I miss people and I feel myself introverting. Thought I was a little anti-social but nobody really is in the end I guess.
That might only be because Rdio is playing some sad tunes, or maybe I’m just getting bored with that I do for a living. What I really know is that I deeply want to spend more time on my personal projects. Which brings me to the next subject:
What’s happening with the game?
It’s pretty self-explanatory at this point I believe. Time is flowing through my fingers, after many attempts at getting back at it I took my notebook and started brainstorming about what was Indie Game Story, what it needed, what was the current problems, what solution I had in front of me and I came to the simple conclusion that I went full retard with the features.
So after many pages of insanity, I thought of an exercise that would help me decipher what was going to happen with the game. I described a few other games with one small sentence/paragraph.
That’s where I had to separate which features were primary and secondary. In IGS, building comes secondary, it’s more personal, about your character and his/her lifetime achievements. You’ll still be able to build an awesome office, but that’s not the first thing you’ll learn in the game.
Based on this train of thought I came with that final sentence: Indie Game Story’s goal is to become a succesful CEO by gettings jobs, hiring good employees, achieving lifetime goals and publishing kick-ass games.
That greatly helped to get back the focus on the right features. There’s still a lot of confusion about the whole game completion process, but that’s next on the “un-fuckup list”.
It’s easy to get fucked by the amount of details I want to pour into it and it’s hard to rationalize in that instance.
That’s all for this first sign of life after my long absence, to get more updates about what I’m doing please follow me on Twitter at @tommybergeron and check out my personal blog at www.tbergeron.com
Thanks for the on-going support!
Checkout the original article and much more on my personal blog.
