So two things arrived today, and I thought they might give a bit of insight into how we spend the funds we raise through Kickstarter and Patreon. I imagine from the outside it can sometimes feel like the money disappears into the void while we quietly work away on things.
The first item is Judas Priest’s British Steel, featuring my favourite Judas Priest song, “Breaking the Law”. Pretty tame as metal goes, but still a damn fine track. I’ve somehow never owned a copy of British Steel, which many metal fans consider one of the important albums in heavy metal history.
It’s a solid album and a great thing to have on when you’re head-down in coding or design work.
That said, I paid for that myself. It’s not a business expense, and definitely not what your support funds.
The second item is a “CyberPower Systems Value Pro VP1000ELCD – 1000 / 550W line-interactive UPS”. Which is a wonderfully clunky name for what is basically a very heavy surge protector with a battery in it.
I know I probably lost some of you at VP1000ELCD. Fair enough.
Actually, I may have lost some of you at Judas Priest. Also fair enough. I am both old and set in my musical tastes, even if I am trying to broaden them a bit. Very selectively.
If you’ve stuck with me this far, thank you. Feel free to drop a comment and tell me what your favourite album to work to is. Or, if you’re a true maniac, your favourite uninterruptible power supply.
Back to the UPS.
This one is a Raguthra Studios asset. It’s there to protect my desktop from the annoyingly frequent power outages we get here. I’m still not entirely sure why we get so many when we’re only ten minutes from the middle of town, but we do. Random ten-second outages, just often enough to be a pain.
For most people, that just means the lights go out for a moment, then come back on and the CD player suddenly starts blasting whatever was left in it.
No one wants to be jolted awake at three in the morning by Judas Priest at daytime volume.
The bigger issue is work. I’ll be in the middle of building a scene in Unity, figuring out flow, or compiling something, and the power drops out. Suddenly the machine is off and whatever I was doing may be gone with it.
Yes, I use cloud backups, but I’ve found them unreliable enough that I don’t trust them as the only safety net. Sometimes things don’t sync properly, and that can be the kind of problem you only discover much later.
Don’t panic – I do have backups and git repos and all the sensible things.
But if my computer died because of a surge, that would be a huge blow. I’ve got a fairly modest machine by game development standards, because of the type of games we make, but even so it’s not something I’d be keen to replace at this stage of the studio.
With the number of random outages we get, I’ve been half expecting the day my desktop just doesn’t come back on.
So for a couple of hundred dollars, the UPS gives us surge protection and enough battery time to keep the computer running for a little under an hour if the power stays out. Plenty of time to save work properly and shut everything down safely.
Indie game development can sound like it’s all creative fun, worldbuilding, and cool tech. Some of it is. But the less glamorous truth is that running a studio also means paying for boring, practical things like backups, surge protection, and insurance.
And it’s because of your support that we can do that.
Thank you for that.
And also thank you for reading this far. Truly.
Lee
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