Rekindling My Love for Game Development After Burnout

I left game development after burnout, industry culture, and social media changed what making games felt like. Now I’m coming back for the part I never stopped loving.

I didn’t get into game developmenet because I had dreamed about working in the games industry my entire life. That is my husband’s story. I got into it because my husband wanted to make games with pure creative freedom… and I dove in head first as the programmer to compliment his graphic artist talents.

He wanted to make the games that he actually cared about… not the games a company thought would sell, not ones that fit into current trends or a marketing strategy, not whatever project someone else decided he should be working on. He wanted to build something because he was passionate about it and I was here for it!

So like any good wife would do, I jumped in without any programming knowledge and taught myself Obj-C.

This was back in 2008 well before Swift was ever announced. Neither of us knew where this new App Store was going, we just knew we wanted to make something together. By 2009, we founded Black Hive Media and I was officially in the game business.

And for a while, I loved it!

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Then Games Became a Job

Over the years, game development became less about making things we were excited about and more about making products that paid the bills.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Bills are remarkably persistent.

But eventually, I realized I was spending an enormous amount of my creative energy building things I didn’t particularly care about because they were commercially useful. And somewhere along the way, I got tired. I wasn’t just tired of development though, I was tired of the industry surrounding development.

There was the strange culture of game events where everyone seemed to be networking, posturing, selling, and performing some carefully constructed version of themselves. The whole industry just became ingenuine and superficial. There was an exhausting amount of arrogance, narcissism and boot-licking.

And then there was social media…

For a while, it felt like you couldn’t just sell a game. You had to sell yourself. You wer supposed to be the thing.

Make the game. Build the brand. Build the audience. Become the product.

And as a woman, the expectations around that became increasingly uncomfortable. All of the women in STEM I would follow closely on social media were slowly becoming this “female beauty sells” type of content creator. I didn’t particularly want to turn myself into an influencer. I didn’t want to constantly perform my personality for an algorithm. I didn’t want my appearance, my personal life, or my willingness to put myself online to become part of the product.

Eventually, I decided I didn’t want to play that game anymore. So I left.

The Thing That REALLY Burned

There was another piece of it that was harder to shake.

At one point, my husband and I were working for a software company that fired us. Coincidentally (or not) we had just previously announced our adoption. Now, I can’t prove the two things were connected. I also can’t pretend the timing didn’t leave a mark. But sometimes, you don’t need absolute certainty about why something happened to know that the experience changed you.

For me, it contributed to a growing feeling that I had given too much of myself to an industry that wasn’t giving much back. So I stepped away. And honestly? I thought I was done.

Except I Never Really Stopped Loving the Work

That’s the funny part. I didn’t stop loving making things. I stopped loving everything I thought I had to do in order to be a game developer.

That’s a huge difference! Because I still love code.

In the time that I stepped away from online facing game development, I have taught kids to code, built games with my son, built an app for our hockey club, and tinkered with apps to help my kiddo.

I love sitting in bed on a hot Texas day with the A/C blasting, a cup of coffee beside me, and a script open on my laptop.

I love sitting on the patio on a beautiful fall day while the animals wander around the farm and I’m trying to convince some ridiculous piece of code to behave.

I love building something completely unnecessary simply because I can, I want to, and I find it fun.

And I especially love doing all of that with my husband.

Sometimes we’d planned to spend the day working on a construction project and instead end up talking about a game mechanic. Somewhere along the way, the conversation turns into, “What if we just made it?”

That’s the part I’ve missed. Not the conferences. Not the networking. Not the online/social algorithms. Not the marketing treadmill. Just making things.

And then there’s the opportunity to show my son this process. There’s something amazing about letting a kid see a game, before it’s a game. Seeing the terrible prototype, seeing the bugs, letting him notice what’s missing in the controls or game scene.

I want him to see that creative work isn’t magic. You have an idea, you make it, it breaks, you fix it, make it better, then try again. To me, that is much more valuable than watching someone present a perfectly polished finished product.

So I’m coming back to game development. Coming back to publishing games. Coming back to spending days coding.

But I’m not coming back to the game industry as a whole. I’ll publish the games we make and if someone finds them, great! But I am NOT coming back to selling myself. I’m not chasing every connection. I’m not trying to be an influencer. I’m not trying to be everyone’s friend. I’m not interested in building a personal brand around being a woman who codes video games.

I just want to make games.

I want to write code. I want to build weird little tools. I want to experiment. I want to make games with my husband again. I want to publish the projects that we are proud of, and I want my kid to grow up seeing that making things (whether it’s a game, garden, goat fence, chicken coop, a business or some completely unnecessary piece of software) is a perfectly good way to spend your life.

I’m not coming back because I miss the game industry. I’m coming back because I miss making games.

Maybe that’s the distinction I’ve been mission all these years.

The first time around, I thought being a game developer meant participating in an industry.

This time, I’m realizing it might simply mean sitting somewhere comfortable with a cup of coffe, opening Visual Studio and making something with my husband today that didn’t exist yesterday.

And honestly? That sounds like a lot of fun and way more sustainable.