I’m Back Home
I never planned to wait so long to do my quarterly reports this year. I planned to continue them on my usual 3 month basis. But Bluepoint kept me busy. Then they extended me a month. Throw in a few bits of crunch and my general mental exhaustion from the work day and you have what happened to my blog this year. A handful of posts when I had a long weekend and that’s it. It’s unfortunate too. When I was in New York Last year, I had the energy to pump out a few posts, including an E3 blog. I’m disappointed that I didn’t write more this past year.
Part of me wonders if the lack of movement added to my exhausted mental state. I move more here on the east coast naturally than I did in Austin. East coast cities have feeling of moving faster in general than the south and the mid-west and I feed off of a part of that. As Elliott Hulse likes to say, the body is the mind and the mind is the body. I absolutely agree.
This blog is structured a bit differently. I’m going to do my usual Quarterly Report information below, but I’ll modify it to match the time frame that I am writing about (January to September). The second part will cover some broad strokes about the Contractor Business Lessons I learned while working away from home for so long. I have a post or two which will cover my psyche in a deeper way planned for later.
I will be teaching and working remotely (for the most part) for the foreseeable future, so expect a fairly steady (but still somewhat irregular) stream of content from me. I hope to be better with my writing schedule next time I’m working away from home.
Quarterly Report
Task Tracking
I mentioned it in late May during my Memorial Day blog, but I chose to track my tasks using Bluepoint’s choice of software. I did this to keep my workday a bit simpler in the office. Because of this, I don’t have specific numbers for billable hours or my efficiency. Tasks were tracked as simply as possible to keep the artists and programmers focused on their tasks and not on the specifics of producing. At Bluepoint, I got to go back to being a simple artist.
It was fun, but I like metrics.
I do have a few numbers I can extrapolate rather easily using my income and my hourly rate.
- Hours worked (total time spent at the office): 1,508.5
- Estimated Billable Hours using 80% efficiency: 1206.0
- Hours worked from January to September 2016: 1219.6
- Billable Hours from January to September 2016: 1051.6
- Estimated Efficiency from January to September 2016: 86%
- Year over year increase in hours worked: 19%
- Year over year increase in estimated billable hours: 12%
I used 80% as my efficiency for Bluepoint because the majority of SCRUM planning uses 80% efficiency for the average work a person can do on a given workday. In essence it builds in a 20% buffer for deadlines when planning and producers can add more time in from there to budget for things like power outages, data loss, or ‘acts of God’. Secondly, I billed for my total hours worked, or time spent at the office. Much like Vayner Media or Psyop, I get paid for being on-site and in the office versus strictly for the work I perform on the project from home. Third, I never billed for any lunch over an hour long (or a half hour lunch and a half hour walking session later in the day). I took the hour the majority of the time and thus stayed at the office long enough to make sure I had at least an 8 hour day in the books.
What do the numbers say exactly? The first note I see is the difference in hours worked versus my billable hours. A 19% increase in raw working hours resulted in an estimated 12% increase in what I could bill, in theory. I am very efficient when I’m at home and that shows a bit here in the numbers. I will have to dig into this more, but my trend for 2016 was to work roughly 7 hours a day here at home with roughly an hour of that time ‘wasted’. Some days are great (90% efficiency) and some days don’t go well (65% on my worst days). I will have to do the math to prove this idea out, but I believe that if I can work an additional half hour a day at full efficiency I can come close to increasing my billable hour percentage. It can come close to matching my estimated billable hours for this year without the large increase in total hours.
The other note is the clear 19% increase in raw working hours. I work more raw hours when in an office setting where other people are a part of the team. That’s just a fact that’s clearly laid out here. I believe this is a mix of deadlines (crunch was needed from time to time) and human nature.
Income
This is going to be pretty simple. This year blew last year completely out of the water. There was a cost to it though.
- Year over year Income for January to September (2016 vs 2017): 155%
That’s right. 155%. But there’s a catch. My expenses skyrocketed as well.
Excluding leisure and daily life, my business expenses significantly increased. I rented an apartment from a co-worker. I rented a car for the duration of the contract. I ate out occasionally and went downtown to make connections for meet ups. I also took advantage of my income growth to purchase equipment like my Oculus Rift and my new Wacom Intous Pro. Those expenses need to be factored in to show a more realistic income gain.
- Realized Income Gain for January to September (2016 vs 2017): 92%
- Amount of Income Gain that went to Business Expenses: 63%
Everything has a cost, and working with Bluepoint Games was no different. I made more money per an hour at Bluepoint than I have my entire career. With it came the cost of maintaining a life in Philadelphia (mortgage and gym membership) and in Austin (apartment, car, gym membership, etc). The price I paid was not being able to save nearly as much as I would have been able to if I was local. At least these gains were put to good use.
I don’t have student debt anymore!
Looking Ahead
I don’t expect the remainder of 2017 to be nearly as lucrative as it has been thus far. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.
I return to teaching at Drexel at the end of September and I’m looking forward to it. I have new experiences and wisdom to bring to my classes with the same classic “I’m basically a kid too” charm that helps me identify with my students. In addition to teaching, I’ll be working with Tanner to bring the GameTextures blog back to the long form articles and interesting topics and interviews that it’s had in the past. Naturally, some game game reviews will appear but there’s a lot to cover these days and the thirst for knowledge is there.
Contract wise, I am looking. I’ve reached out to a few of my old clients as well as sent out some emails to some of the bigger contract jobs this week. I can’t say for sure they will allow remote work but it’s always worth it to check. I’m also on the lookout for smaller jobs as well with indie studios or other non gaming work.
Ideally, the next few months will be a bit on the slow but steady side.
Some Business Lessons
- If I end up with a contract in a similar situation to Bluepoint (or work with Bluepoint again!), where I need to rely on a car and live elsewhere for an extended period of time, I’ll focus on finding the cheapest monthly AirBnB I can as close to the office as I can. Splitting rent wasn’t overly expensive, but I knew of a few AirBnB’s in the Austin area that would have saved me a few hundred a month. Car rental wise it’ll be difficult to avoid renting, so it might be worth purchasing a temporary beater of a car and driving it if the contract is longer than a few months.
- I will not be doing any more cross country moves for contract work. The next cross country move I do will be if Kelsey and I pick up and move to Seattle. I made the mistake of thinking I’d be picking up some freelance on the side, so I packed my desktop. I didn’t. I barely did any personal art and I could have done that art in the studio if I needed to. I’ll pack a large suitcase, a small carry on, and a backpack. I can learn to do without a PS4 for a while.
- Instead of my desktop, I’ll run out and buy a Surface Pro or Surface Book for the next contract. They have enough power to be functional for personal work and are super easy to travel with. They can also double as a tablet, so that’s one less item I need to bring with me. They can game OK too on low settings as long as it’s nothing demanding. Rocket League and hopefully Paragon should function.
- While I like Trello and Toggl for my personal tracking, Shotgun by Autodesk is pretty cool. I don’t think our implementation at Bluepoint was ideal (Trello frankly would have worked better in some regards) but I can see it being absolutely invaluable to larger teams with dedicated producers and SCRUM Masters.
- I haven’t use JIRA before working at Bluepoint. It can be annoying, but I found it pretty easy to use after asking a few questions.
- I cannot stress enough how well Bluepoint treats contractors. They make sure you have what you need tools wise. They treat you like you’re a part of the team. You’re also contracted directly with them and not through a third party like Randstad or Work Force Logic. This means you are absolutely a 1099 worker and not an employee of a firm who then contracts you out to the studio you work for. I’m going to push for this whenever I do contract work for big studios.