missn

Nope, I didn't see the rest of his site until after I commented. Make sense under that lens, getting published in those places do help a lot reputation-wise.

Agree. The article had good points with the part about pitching especially helpful. I do get too that the focus of this piece is more on how to get into these publications. I do wish though that the author spoke a bit more on how he survived as a freelance writer.

If you're a good enough writer with good ideas and you keep pitching persistently, you'll get traction soon enough. It's whether or not you're able to survive the unstable early goings that's the issue.

From my experience, if you're jumping into freelance writing without any savings (and starting from scratch with no connections with editors, no previous published pieces, etc.), it's hard to survive. Pitches take time (some editors might take months to reply). Writing/research takes time (you're essentially unpaid until your piece gets published). Even harder is the invoicing. You have to hound some publications to pay you (some take 45+ days to pay after your piece gets published). You really have to plan your pipeline well. When I tried doing it full-time for a bit, I planned ahead in terms of income (i.e. income from this month came from all the work I did in November). The moment you slow down or you stop pitching though, you know it's going to affect you in two months time.

Getting through the gates is tough but the hardest part is trying to find sustainable work that can pay your bills month to month. If you can develop relationships with editors (who consistently greenlight your pieces or give you regular assignments), that helps a lot. But, if you're starting out without any of that, the constant grind to find something regularly is stressful.

I still do it because I love it but I don't do it full-time anymore because I need to pay my bills.

I second that. A dev I spoke to basically said that the indie dev scene before (distribution-wise) was really tough because the only way to distribute games on a mass scale was through big box stores (with actual physical copies). A lot of these stores rarely, if ever, dealt with smaller studios (let alone one-man shops) so you would have to make deals with publishers (like EA) just to get your games on those shelves. Those publishers then took a large cut of all the revenue.

If your game was somehow a success, you had to keep making bigger games with a bigger team just so you can make that game 'relevant' to the big box stores. It's a never-ending cycle of needing to keep growing, expanding, and eventually that financial pressure swallows up indie studios. Nowadays, you have digital distribution channels like Steam or itch.io which make it significantly 'easier' to reach customers. Plus, there's less pressure to grow unless you want to. Like erik said though, there's definitely more competition nowadays.

I will say this though as someone who writes about games, a unique hook (ie in mechanics, story, tech, or maybe all of them) goes a long way in getting press to write about you. I suppose that's the way it is with other fields though.

As a writer, I love discovering and covering new indie games. I want to write about you but if you scroll through a lot of these games, it feels like stuff we've seen again and again. The one game that changes the formula even for a little or presents it in a novel way (ie Undertale or Her Story), you get people really interested and talking about it.

This is amazing, thank you for sharing this.

I'm going through something similar and you never want to go on a full on fight because, like you said, it's hard "knowing that you or the other person may not come out as friends anymore".

It's a hard lesson but I'm slowly realizing that it's better to know the limits of how real and true your friendships are rather than realizing it was all based off unstable foundations.

Interesting develoment, seems similar to what APEX (Airline Passenger Experience Association, an industry org consisting of airline companies) is establishing: http://apex.aero/2016/04/06/Official-airline-ratings-APEX-an...

Wonder who'll come out on top. From my understanding, the APEX one has an Amazon-like 'verified traveler' system where only those who traveled on those flights will get to rate them (though it might be limited to partner airlines, not sure about the specific details).

(Full disclosure: Used to worked for an agency that did work w/ APEX)

Have you seen Pearl from Google's Spotlight Series? It's a VR film that shows how you can get around the "limitations" of VR: http://www.fastcodesign.com/3060252/dont-be-surprised-if-goo....

I definitely agree though. You can't just take what works in film and expect it to work in a VR film. It'll be interesting to see how filmmakers experiment with the medium as more and more start pushing what it can do.

BeAnotherLab is one that tries to do that: http://www.themachinetobeanother.org

They let you experience what it's like to be another person via a custom-built video rig (i.e. you get to 'see' the world as another person).

Does anyone have a good simple and free alternative to Invoiceable? I loved the simplicity of that tool (where you can track who your clients are, make reports, the income chart, etc.). I've yet to find a similar kind of alternative (everything else seems bloated and missing features like client tracking/adding notes or customized reports by client, year, etc.).

Second that.

A friend made a platformer for an incubator called "Runnin' Around With No Shirt On" where it's basically about a (shirtless) guy running around in hell (and dodging all the basic platform obstacles like spikes, moving platforms, etc.). The goal of the game was to defeat Satan in order to get his shirt back.

It was the most ridiculous thing I've ever played but I couldn't go one second without laughing at how ridiculous and how much fun it was to play.

I love "serious" kinds of play and games with these awesome narratives but sometimes you just want something funny and fun to play!

Definitely. I think that's one of the reasons they have such flexible online course offerings (gives their co-op students a lot of flexibility).

At the end of my second year, I transferred to McGill and I was a bit disappointed at the state of their online course offerings (barely had any, apart from some electives, that could count for my degree). Also felt the school had a misguided bias against online courses (if you take one externally, there's a limit of 2 courses that you can apply to your degree - http://www.mcgill.ca/oasis/away/online-courses). When I was trying to get transfer credits, any mention of the course being taken online got my advisor telling me that my course would probably be denied. It was a good thing Waterloo didn't differentiate in my transcript between the two or else a lot of my credits might have not transferred over.

This was such a stark contrast to Waterloo where I really felt they considered their online courses to be just as comparable to their on-campus ones. I suppose though it's the whole culture of the instition. It helps too that Waterloo has a whole department dedicated to just the creation, design, development and testing of online-based courses - where they have designers/devs/subject/qa spcialists working closely with professors to design the courses (both for credit courses and professional development/continuing education courses). I don't believe my school has such a department to rely on.

The University of Waterloo is a good example of getting an official degree all while doing courses online. Their transcripts do not differentiate between online courses and regular courses so if you get a BA in English or Philosophy for example (degrees fully offered online - http://cel.uwaterloo.ca/undergraduate.html), nobody will know you took it entirely online.

Love that flexibility when I was there. The cost per credit was the same whether I took the course online or on campus.

Did three semesters online before switching to the regular campus (my program wasn't fully online). The education was top-notch too with responsive profs and (for the most part) a good pace even though you're doing a lot of self-studying. My final exams were either held at colleges near my area or proctored at public libraries (the latter though I had to arrange on my own and the school just mailed the exams directly to the library).

Can you elaborate what you meant by the "bs that came along with it"? Was it mostly setting up the system (getting the right folks, script, etc.) that was hard?

Really interested to hear your experience (and the "pain points") as I know someone who is trying to write a book about this and he's always on the lookout for folks with different perspectives.

Definitely agree with you about issues with monetizing teachers. You would be surprise though to know the kind of things that departments/districts pay for.

I once worked for a company that provided montly conferences to teachers (marketed as professional development courses). Apparently, the districts in our area provided teachers with a budget towards professional development courses and so for the majority of them, they just invoiced the cost of the seminar to their districts.

Not the typical education startup you would think of starting but they're completely self-funded and they seem like they're doing well (with a steady stream of attendees for the last ten years).

Maybe it's just a matter of looking for ways to use the money that is already allocated (but not used) rather than convincing districts to add more to the budget? I know for my former company, the issue wasn't about how teachers could pay for the conferences but rather teachers didn't know they had the money to use for these conferences to begin with.

You might find the work coming out of MIT's Fluid Interfaces group fascinating.

The "Smarter Objects" (http://fluid.media.mit.edu/projects/smarter-objects) project seem to tackle some of the things you're talking about. This article (http://singularityhub.com/2013/05/20/virtual-and-real-object...) explains it a bit more.

This reminds me of Blizzard's motto of a depth first, accessibility later approach (http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=10773).

Sure, you can focus on a few features that allows you to cater to your core market. But, what if they outgrow your program? What if they want to go to the next "level"?

A "deep" program like Photoshop allows for that flexibility. A beginner can start off with perhaps the most basic of features but as they become more comfortable with it, at least they still have the flexibility to move on to the next set of (more complex) features.

One might argue that knowing all these "catch-up" details beforehand (through Facebook) could allow for more deep conservations when people meet up - they can immediately dive into the deep stuff and skip the catching up part.

Yet, as you've mentioned, small talk leads to many more tangents than what you'd usually get online. And, if you actually eavesdrop on conservations (or even look at your own), they usually start slow with small talk but eventually build up momentum towards deeper issues.Sometimes we just need time to settle in a conservation and those "what's up" starters usually help in that regard.