The One With Aldacron

There are two primary motivations that put me on the path to starting an independent game business. The first is my love of game development. I’ve been researching, practicing and studying game development obsessively for the past 8 years. In that time I’ve made several small games that were nothing but a pleasure to create. Some of them I intend to revisit in the future and polish up for a commercial release. The second motivation is a strong desire to be self employed. I’ve held more jobs than I can count over the years. As an ESL teacher, I have a loose relationship with an agency that allows me to pick the schedule I want. That sort of independence is liberating. Being able to make games while working to my own schedule is my idea of paradise.Ultimately, I want to drop the ESL classes. Teaching is currently my primary source of income. My schedule is light and the money is good, but my heart is no longer in it. I really get a lot of enjoyment in a classroom environment, particularly in beginner or intermediate classes. It’s gratifying to watch someone’s ability improve over the course of several months, knowing that I have a hand in it. It’s also a lot of fun for me to keep the class entertained while they learn. I’m a Leo, after all. The price of my independence was leaving the classroom environment.

In Korea, ESL teachers employed by educational institutions and private language schools either get paid peanuts, or, in the case of a university job, wind up spending quite a bit of time outside of the classroom doing required work. Working for an agency I am able to make more money for fewer hours, but the classes are less enjoyable for me as they are usually one-on-one lessons with business executives who already have a good command of the language. They bring me in to talk for an hour to keep their skills sharp. It sounds great on paper, getting paid large sums of money to sit and chat, but after years in classroom environments it is largely unsatisfying. I’m not teaching. I’m talking about Hwanggate and correcting little errors that my ’students’ make repeatedly. They’re nice guys and I enjoy chatting with them, but they aren’t really learning much from me.

It would be nice if my game business could generate enough income in a short time to allow me to drop teaching altogether. That’s not going to happen, though. It will take several more months before my first game is finished. Then I need to market it and build up a user base while I work on the second game. I also have a considerable amount of overhead to worry about before the first game is released, such as fees for subcontracting art and music creation. I don’t expect to break even for several months after the game’s release. And I don’t expect to be generating enough income from the business to give up teaching until I have at least three games released. It could be five years before that happens. It might not even happen at all if I fail to produce quality games or to market them effectively.

Inspired by Steve Pavlina’s success with different ventures, I’ve been considering a variety of ways to generate passive income. Ideally, it would be something that I could allot a minimal amount of time to each day, but that could show results within several months rather than several years. Anything that would allow me to still devote the majority of my time to game development while putting me closer to the day when I can drop the teaching role forever is something I am certainly interested in. I think I have a solution. Steve’s recent post about his traffic and Adsense revenue growth in 2005 helped cement the idea in my head. Sometime within the next couple of weeks I will launch a new website to put my little idea to the test. Wish me luck!