With all the talk of layoffs and studio closures, I wanted to know what the opinions and general experience is like as an indie game dev. How viable is it, how successful can you really be with that career and what challenges can crop up?

I started making my own game a while back and got extremely discouraged by the layoffs and technical hurdles I was running into, to the point where someone told me maybe I wasn't cut out for it on discord. This really killed my drive, and it would be awesome to hear about some success stories or even some struggles that you may have overcome.

Hey, so I'd really just like to get an idea that's been in my head for god knows how long out into a program, even if it's just a demo of what I've imagined. But I never had enough knowledge in a particular engine to just get the idea out. My main programming knowledge is from Java classes, and I've dabbled in enough in HTML/CSS, Javascript, SQL, Powershell, etc. enough to get through classes, projects, small scripts, deployments, etc, so I have programming experience from a conceptual point. But I've never really worked with GUI elements in a serious manner outside the Cocoa IDE handling all the heavy lifting. Any time I get the itch to tackle this I give GameMaker or Godot or something else a try via some tutorial, I never get to the end of it. I figured learning by example would help, but I forget most of the basics on how I'm supposed to set up an object or attribute... Then I try it the other way around where I try to learn it bottom-up and I get overwhelmed if I lose my way in the middle of a process... It's extremely frustrating, I swear I've been through this about three times in the last seven years or so.

I'm curious, has anyone had this much trouble with this? What did you do, what was your in?

I was working on a VR experience showing wealth inequality in true scale. By a habby coincidence I discovered a game jam with the rather blatant title Fuck Capitalism Gamejam 2024 which just happened to end in a time span where I'd might be able to finish off my game. So, great, now I have a deadline! I began to plan what I could reasonably expect to finish within that time frame.

But today, I read the game jam page a little more closely. Turns out the deadline is for voting on the submitted games. The game jam had run out a long time ago. So, no deadline. And of course, I became aware that submitting it to said gamejam wouldn't have mattered much anyway.

Guess I just have to keep working on the stupid project. Everything just feels so pointless, because, well, I guess it is. And trying to build up some pretend excitement gets a bit stale.

Anyhow, how are you folks dealing with the good ol' what's-the-point-of-it-all feelies? Is life just a yo-yo movement between hopelessness and semi-engaged pretence of meaning, or are there other roads to travel?

Take-Two posted a legally-required notice that it is laying off 70 workers and closing a studio in Seattle. This is part of mass layoffs announced across Take-Two. This has also been mentioned by Games Industry.biz, although without much more details than what I have here (at time of writing).

The only Take-Two studio in Seattle is Intercept Games, who have been making Kerbal Space Program 2. We also know that Intercept had about 65-70 people working there (half of which were on KSP2, half of which were on an unannounced project).

Various KSP2 devs have also posted on social media that they have been impacted by layoffs (not sure about the rules re: linking social media profiles, so I'll hold off).

We may or may not have more news in the coming days. It's hard times in the industry right now, and my heart goes out for everyone affected.

EDIT: From Game Developer:

When approached for comment by Game Developer, Take-Two wouldn't confirm whether Intercept Games has been impacted by the cuts–despite multiple Kerbal Space Program developers indicating they recently left the studio, with one expressly stating they were "laid off." A company spokesperson did, however, explain that its Private Division publishing label will continue to support Kerbal Space Program 2.

...

When pushed again on the current status of Intercept Games, Take-Two told Game Developer it has "nothing further to note."