For me I can work on gamedev stuff full-time. I’m currently on disability because I have some issues that make it difficult for me to hold down a traditional day job, but that affords me the freedom and opportunity to only really spend time on stuff that is interesting to me. I’ve spent the last 2.5 years teaching myself music production and not really doing much programming, but the programming bug has bit me again so I’m pursuing gamedev as my primary focus now.
Probably my main technical skill is in systems integration, which I picked up as a result of doing web development for many years. I’m good at making things talk to each other; for example I did a huge project that involved getting an old IBM System/32 to communicate securely online through web and mobile interfaces using C# and asp.net. I also spent a few years doing enterprise mobile development with WinCE and .NET Compact Framework.
Besides that I ran Xubuntu on the desktop for a few years, and know quite a bit about sysadmin stuff, so I’m really comfortable with Linux. I just bought a Mac Mini yesterday; although I have only really used OS X for A/V editing, I specifically bought this system to use for testing and deployment purposes since I feel passionate about supporting the major desktop platforms. So I’m really interested in improving support for these platforms.
I ran my own company for many years and based on my experiences I largely feel that success in indie game dev has more to do with game design and marketing than it does with the technical stuff. Which is why Unity is so popular and successful and why more stuff like RPG Maker is popping up. Frankly, I’m of the opinion that lowering the barriers to entry as much as possible will have a net positive effect on humanity. I don’t see new developers as potential competitors, I see them as potential creators of fun games I’d enjoy playing. As such I’m really happy to open-source like 90% of all my code. I’d much rather have people focused on game design and story-boarding and mechanics and art and music than on spending hours trying to figure out how to code some basic UI functionality or whatever.
I just have been looking for areas where I can contribute to the cause while also building up my skills and I don’t see those as being mutually exclusive activities. The more I contribute to open source projects and tutorials and documenting and such the more freedom and flexibility I’ll gain by having a larger arsenal of creative tools at my disposal. I also feel like the feedback I receive from the code and tutorials I put out there will give me insights I may have missed if I kept everything proprietary.
Anyway I’m rambling on too much at this point. I’ll check out the github for this project and see if there are any open help wanted issues that I can tackle.