
To me, I just treat everything like 'Who's going to pay me' and I'm here to get a job." "It was like 'This is exactly what I want to do'.

"When the opportunity presented itself, it was amazing," Shannon told Ars in an interview. As a big fan of city-building games, Shannon said landing that position right out of college was something of a dream for him. After studying at Florida's Ringling College of Art and Design, he got an internship and then a full-time job as an artist for SimCity maker Maxis Emeryville, designing buildings for the game's DLC expansions. TwitterBefore finding Patreon success, Shannon's game development career was following a much more well-worn path. Shannon acts more like an artist-in-residence within Colossal Order's popular city-building game, supported by the largesse of some of its biggest fans. There are a few other game developers using Patreon in a similar way, but they're all making their own titles, not working on content for an existing game.
#New freelancer mods 2015 for free#
Shannon mixes both models, in a way, taking money from a few hundred patrons but distributing his work for free to the millions of people playing the game. To make a living, though, those modders have traditionally had to sell their efforts directly to interested players or use freely distributed mods to get noticed and hired by an established developer.
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In a way, Shannon's situation isn't too different from other mod makers who have built their game development careers quite literally on top of existing games. He's not working for a developer, and he's not working for himself instead, he's working for a small subset of devoted Cities: Skylines players that want to share his work with the world. Right now, 233 members of the Cities: Skylines community are paying him to create new content for the game, to the tune of $735 per building created. Or you can go the indie route, creating a game by yourself (maybe with a few people to help) and selling it directly to the consumers (maybe with the help of a publisher).Īrtist Bryan Shannon seems to have hit on a third path to a successful living making games, via his unique Patreon campaign. You can sign up with an existing game developer, earning a salary or freelance rate to provide some small part of the art, code, or design that goes into a larger product.


There are two main ways to make a living making games.
