No is the hardest word
The verdict is in. I will not be working for a game company. If I want to make games, I will have to make it on my own. There is something sort of comforting in not having a choice, but this is not easy for me by any means. The feedback I got from 2KBoston was awesome. Not that it did not hurt, but it is good to at least know why you have been rejected and what are the things that you need to get better at. And I will get better at them. Not to make it into the game industry, which is not going to happen anytime soon, but for myself. The awesome things that these people make, the way they work as a team and just how plainly freaking brilliant they are makes me admire them a lot. Those are all of the things I want to be, what I aspire to. It is just that I will have to somehow learn to be like them without working amongst them.

For now, there are more pressing things to worry about. The motivation to make games is intact. That will never leave me: it is just what I need to do and that is that. But I need to provide for my family, so I also need to do a lot of thinking to figure out how to do both at the same time. Currently, working part-time for my old employer is not going too bad. I do not know how long it will last, and I do not really enjoy it that much. There are so many things that are wrong with that company. But it affects me a lot less right now, or so I tell myself. And really, if I found a way to make this a long term arrangement and could work on indie games the rest of the time for a while, it would be absolutely great. So, I will postpone interviewing for jobs I do not want to do until the part-time contract is over. I will go with the flow.

Independent game developers are incredibly motivated people too, and perhaps more creative than their big company counterparts. But also extremely individualistic. It seems that every single one of them has The Great Idea and wants to work on it without any help. Many simply get bored with a project and drop it when it is close to being done. I think I am somewhere in between these two types of game developers. I would love to work on something that I care about, but I also would prefer to work cooperatively with a group of people that cares about it too. That is a very difficult trade-off. We will see what happens. I have no more plans, I do not know where I am going. I will do my best, work my hardest, put myself in the hands of fate and let go.