I would buy a modest house, with just enough space for my stuff and a nice room to invite friends over. I would buy a lot of books about history and sociology and try to expand my knowledge on humanities as much possible. I'm a self taught artist, but I've only worked with digital or black ink... so I would spend time learning traditional painting. I would travel around Brazil, I know so little of my own country. Then I would travel around South America, to see how other latin third world countries are doing. Then travel around all Europe, to know the old world. Then go to Asia to see how different it is from here... and say hi to Australia, because all brazilians who go there say wonderful things about it's people.
After getting so much knowledge and experiences, I would start making indie games about things that I consider more relevant.
Now, back to reality...
IndomitableSam said:
I'm burnt out. Dead tired, mentally exhausted, and I don't enjoy my job. At all. On paper, it's agreat job.
...
Every day I come to work, sit down at my desk, and do maybe an hour or two of work a day, the rest is spent looking at the same few websites over and over. I don't care about my job, I don't take pride in it, and people are beginning to notice that I just don't care anymore. I'm ashamed, and every day I try to psyche myself up and get some work done, but I can't. It's all so pointless and I'm getting seriously depressed.
That describes my current situation with exact words. The difference is that I already work with what I dreamed about. I'm a well paid game artist (well paid for an a artist, at least). But the thing about transforming your hobby in profession is true... I'm so fed up that I don't even draw at home for myself anymore and I'm becoming a cynic with games. Guess I'm suffering a 27 old crisis: lived enough to fully realize that things don't work so beautifully in real life, but not experienced enough to deal with this disappointment. All the compromises because of clients, market, surreal deadlines. The unpaid work hours. All kinds of racist, sexist, homophobic and insane things you hear when people are having ideias of what "sells". At the beggining, I though that it was okay, real life is like that. After 4 years, I'm really questioning if this is what I want.
I got to a point that I realized that the only way I gonna be happy working with games is doing stuff of my own, but then there's the money problem. So I feel stuck, but at least I'm able to save lots of money and maybe I'll be able to live a while without working... and maybe try to make at least one game on my own and see what happens.