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Comment by ldoughty | Hacker News Reader

Totally agree. I have great ideas of things to work on, but I'm essentially a single income household (my wife is in grad school, and her part time pay barely covers her education and school). I can't quit my job and work on a dream venture, who will pay for my wife's upcoming childbirth and related expenses? Who will ensure we can still make payments on our home and food?

Living with parents is definitely a safety net. If you have dependants, you can't afford to take risks.

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This may come off rude, but I certainly don't mean it to be, but you have a choice to make. It sounds like you're chosing to have a kid and your wife go to school. If you want to do the startup, skip the kids, have your wife work and support you while you do the startup. Not everyone can have everything.

So the rich kids get to have their startup and kids. And that definitely tilts the balance for a lot of people.

Here's a little tip: The wife and the kid are far more enriching than anything else you will do in life. So don't jeopardize them.

Be that as it may, having no money for decent life is sure as hell way to lose your wife and your kid and is happening far far more then the opposite.

Maybe I'm inferring the wrong thing, but are you suggesting that creating a startup is more likely to provide the money you need to support a family?

It's not rude but it does miss the point, entirely, and is a little condescending as a result.

You don't have to quit your job.

What is the product/service you want to develop? Do you have a defined potential customer (friend/family)?

It's something you can create putting 1-2 hours per day?

What is the minimum amount of work you need to put in to go and show it to someone (even if it is a mockup)

How many customers do you need to break even?

You can do ALL of this and more without quitting your job.

Completely agree! It is certainly hard motivating to do the work 1-2 hours at a time, but that's how I've been trying to approach it. Unfortunately some things like Unity are not great tools to learn at this pace.

I'm hoping to save enough money to hire a student or novice to get me started... Most of my issues are with complete unfamiliarity with the system... I have 15 years of mostly procedural scripting, not much for game development... But I can quickly pick up code from examples...... Just not many people willing to share source code, especially not in my direction of gameplay (which will be a game closer to solitaire in action mechanics, rather than traditional 2D games).

I've debated some 2D games, I even bought 2 frameworks for 2D games, but everyone recommends using something like Unity for production quality games.

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