Month: May 2026

What to do next

So, left the AAA industry what do I do next, I can get contracts but I need a company setup, what should I do, it should be easy right, right?

Registering a company is conceptually simple and practically exhausting.

Forming a limited company in the UK is, on paper, a 15-minute job. You file with Companies House, pick a name, and you’re done. What nobody mentions is the second, third, and fourth layers, the business bank account that requires a bunch of documentation, the accountant conversations about whether to be VAT registered from day one, the understanding of what you can and cannot run through the company. It’s not hard. It’s just relentless in a way that creative work is not.

It might not seem like it but all the admin work will need separate hours, you will need to make sure everything is up-to-date, send invoices, review and sign contracts, and anything involving government documents is always fun.

The thing I underestimated the most wasn’t the bureaucracy of going solo. It was the sales side. When working for a big studio, work arrives, someone puts a ticket in a system, it gets assigned, you do it. The idea that you’d have to reach out, talk with companies, understand their needs and then convince them, they need someone like you to do it, is much harder than it seems.

The creative outlet is the whole reason any of this is worth it.

I might seem weird going from AAA to indie in order to be creative, and now you need to do a bunch of admin work, plus contract work, but it is very much worth it, I had ideas I was never going to get to build. I knew the companies I worked for could not make them, either, they were the wrong size for a studio, too niche for the market they wanted, too weird to get green lit, or too personal to survive a team review. Solo development exists precisely for these things.

Right now I’m prototyping something small, it’s not going to be mind-blowing, it is not going to be the latest and greatest game ever, but I hope it will be fun for some people and that is enough for me. I’m using tools I’ve never used before, I’m learning new skills I never had to think about, I can make decisions that would have required a meeting in a big studio. I finally feel what I thought AAA has going to feel like, I feel like I can create.

Quitting the Machine

About 18 months ago, I left a comfortable job to find something else, I was ready to leave the industry I spent years trying to get in, I didn’t understand why a job most people would call a dream job didn’t fur fill my creative needs, I had made it, worked for some of the biggest gaming companies in the world, so why did I feel so empty.

Why leave when everything looks fine from the outside?

AAA is a funny thing, from the outside it looks like the dream, big games, if you are lucky millions of people will actually play them, working alongside engineers and artists who are genuinely world-class, getting a steady salary with benefits while doing the thing you supposedly love, I’m not going to pretend it was great, it was.

But somewhere around year five or six, I noticed I’d stopped experimenting. Every technical decision had to be double or triple checked before it could be submitted. Every creative instinct would be ignored and replaced by something safe and familiar. I was creating the same systems I already made for my previous companies, just a different project and team.

But I always told my self “The salary is really good, this experience will look great on the CV, the pension and benefits are excellent. But inside my creativity was dying.”

That’s the thing nobody talks about when they romanticize studio life, it’s not bad, in fact it’s great, it’s comfortable enough to keep you from noticing that the ambition you had as a kid, has been quietly replaced by doing your day-to-day responsibilities.

Turns out the unknown is just as unknown as advertised.

When I left my last AAA job I didn’t really have any plans, I had a temporary contract to give me some time to find something else, but I never even thought about making a company, 1 contract turn into 2, and so on. I know I was really lucky to have savings, I didn’t need to get paid I could just save the money, when starting a company not having the constant pressure of having recurring revenue is amazing, about I also think having that pressure would have made me work harder.

Working on your own seems like a dream but many times you can feel at drift, I kept waking up at 7:30 am out of habit, sitting at my desk with a brew, and having absolutely nothing with a deadline attached to it. That sounds relaxing. It was briefly relaxing, and then it became quietly terrifying.

When you work for yourself anything you need, you need to do it, want a workstation build it, you could buy a pre-built, but the idea is to save as much money as possible, you need a server build it, you need accounting, in this case I do pay for it, but this is the great unknown, anything you need you will need to either do it or find someone who can do it.