On January 1st, I woke up knowing I no longer had a steady source of income. Unlike most who have hit hard times in this economy, I quit my job of 3+ years instead of being laid off. My goal: to start a game development company. How did I start? By playing lots of WoW

Around March, I started working on my first game collection. Stepping back into C++ and SDL was a bit rough. I’m still not sure about the structure of my classes.

In May, I had a mostly complete first game. It was going to require some serious rework on graphics (as it had none, really), some sound, and all that polish that would be required to make it a game and not a tech demo. However, I was learning that this style of game was being pounced on by some lawyers for a certain company. Although they had the flimsiest of cases, they would go after those indies (like me) that couldn’t afford a robust defense. So after talking to my partner, I scrapped the idea.

This was also the time where our budget was getting really tight and we were having a hard time paying the bills. To relieve the burden, we managed to sell the Toyota Prius we had for the outstanding loan amount, and I slashed our expenses. No more WoW subscription, no more TV, only 1 cell phone plan, etc. I was really doubting that Silver Moonfire was a good idea.

Without a game, I needed a plan. I always wanted to target the iPhone/iPad market, so I took advantage of my birthday to get some books. Developing for iOS required learning both a new programming language (Objective C) as well as the iOS library, so this proved to be a challenge. I bought the first major business expense of Silver Moonfire: a Mac Mini to develop on.

I was feeling increasing isolated, having pretty much given up all social contact at the beginning of the year. Contrail’s income was starting to get erratic. They changed paydays from every two weeks to twice a month and then started missing the twice a month mark. I would have bouts of depression where I didn’t get anything done and felt useless.

Around July, I felt I had learned enough about iOS development to start a project: a guide to Pokemon locations for Pokemon Black/White. I rediscovered that there’s a world of difference between following examples in a book and designing your own project. Core Data in particular turned out to be nearly impossible for me to work with, due to a flawed understanding that wouldn’t be corrected for months. Was I really cut out for this?

September and the Pokemon app was starting to take shape. I was leaning heavily on Contrail for her iOS knowledge. Between that and my own laziness/depression, progress was slow. We had reached the point where we could no longer pay the bills every month; something had to be left behind and made up for later. Contrail’s paychecks have reached the point of “twice a month, sometime”.

October. The month everything hit the fan. Contrail lost her job. I didn’t have a working app, and just spent 10 months without anything to show for it, so good luck finding decent work. She was expecting two weeks of severance, though, so maybe we could scramble and get through the month. Had no idea what was going to happen in November, but crunching the numbers on her unemployment said we should be able to survive. Would have to apply for food stamps, but that should be easy enough to get approved for. Unemployment office says they won’t cover her severance period; expected. I get a loan from her mother to make sure we can pay the things we need until the end of the month. Hopefully she could bounce back into another job; being a talented iOS programmer has to be worth something in the current market, right? We had no idea…