I actively have a throbbing headache from a meeting at work.

To those who haven’t seen my previous meltdowns about my place of employment: I work at an indie studio. This studio has no future, and seemingly no plan. They’re making a custom game engine, with a custom programming language, using typescript and electron. They originall wanted the main selling point of their engine to be multiplayer compatibility and having enemy AI that was actually smart, but the AI tech is kinda doodoo so they gave up on it, and in this very meeting I was told we may do multiplayer “in a year and a half atleast”. So what the fuck’s the point.

They pay me incredibly poorly for hi-tech standards and said they cannot afford to pay me more, it’s four hours a day which is not full-time but it’s four hours of my life per day, and increasingly the work I’m doing feels more like churning water. I started here by programming an entire board game into a digital format, through some pain and complications, but I got it going. Now? I’m copying over dialog windows. “Oh, it’s just copying text, what’s the prob-“ nononono, every dialog window is a unique, separately designed game scenario, which I need to recreate, and then copy the relevant values over. There’s over 100 of them and only half the game’s dialog is written. “Wouldn’t it be a pain to change anything about the dialog later though?” yes. yes it is.

The main benefit I’m getting here is crossing the “junior dev” threshold. Like, having it written on my CV that I worked here for X amount of time as a programmer. But at this point I’m wondering if it’s even worth it anymore.

I’ve gotten a site running with rust, postgres, and s3 out on my spare time while working here. If I had more spare time, I could probably make that even fancier (and resistant enough that I could link it here without worrying that it might blow up) and have that on my resume. Money isn’t that much of a concern for me, even though I very much do appreciate not being in red in the bank right now.

Is it even worth it?

I’m honestly considering quitting. Have been for a while. I am barely motivated to work anymore.

I’ll probably ask my parents and family what they think.