The first video is great, thanks.
He says Canadian government grants require you to have trannies in the game. Had a good laugh at this. Really didn't know. The dev says he has none of it, thankfully.
As a sort of response to the video:
I personally did go down the route of "release your unfinished game on the marketplace in form of assets", but it's not as easy as you perhaps make it sound. I sold a sort of an "RPG Kit", but while your game may require a specific/original implementation of a lot of mechanics, the marketplace kits require a generic implementation, plus a highly flexible architecture, which takes a lot of extra time. The two approaches don't mesh, so you want to sell your game engine, but you end up rewriting most of it and half a year later you realize you're not working on your game anymore. And ending up as an asset maker is a terrible career path if you're excited about making games. I spent years making assets, because it's a quicker buck, but it's like selling your soul. I wish I could quit it, but it pays, so I can't afford to.
You also make self funding sound a bit easier than it is. It implies maintaining a day job, and working on your game in your spare time. I know a lot of indies who tried that, and realized they have zero energy left after a day's work, eventually dropping out of the gamedev entirely. Part time job would do the trick, but how many part time jobs in IT have you heard of? I've never seen one. Which I think is an absolute shame, that it's a binary function: either you work full time or you don't work for us at all.
You're very blessed to have the energy to do this kind of stuff. Most people don't. It's probably something hormonal, but at this stage, the medicine doesn't know how to make all people as energized.
As for Epic grants, they're actually not as hard as you think. We've got one for $20k and our game director who was in contact with Epic didn't even speak English, so I can only imagine how limited the pitch was. A playable demo and half a page of description at most. Then a representative contacted him and they talked on Skype for an hour (a local representative, who knew the local language). I think that was it.
Thanks for sharing your well structured thoughts, though. Good stuff.
