Looks like I won't be getting this call every day.

EDIT: Hi, I'm David S Gallant. I used to be a call centre employee. It was a very frustrating job, and eventually I made a game about it - I Get This Call Every Day. On January 29th, I was terminated from my employment because of the game. Sorry the original post lacked all of this context. Things were... weird that day.

I'm making a note here: HUGH SUCCESS.

Sure, those are some overused Jonathan Colton lyrics right there, but that's exactly how I feel about the launch of I Get This Call Every Day. I expected to make a few bucks, encounter some ridicule, and be back to "business" as usual. I was wrong.

I blogged over at Gamasutra about how well the game has done in terms of sales, but the TL:DR is that the game has made almost $900. That's pocket change for most triple-A games, but for an independent gamemaker like myself, that's world-changing.

To start, it's immediately validated for me that I making games is what I want to do for the rest of my life. Screw this day job - I'm getting out as soon as it's financially viable to do so.

It also seems like I tapped into a common experience for a lot of people. Seems there are many who either have been or currently are stuck in jobs like my own, and they found their experience mirrored in the game. I Get This Call Every Day is getting an incredible number of votes on Steam Greenlight, which surprises the hell out of me. I put it up there with the expectation that it would fail miserably, but it has done very well for votes. If you feel like upvoting the game on Greenlight, head here; of course, the game is still available for sale directly from my website for as little as $2.

I thought I was foolish for thinking that releasing a game like this could ever possibly help me quit my day job. Now... it just might do the trick.

The one thing that I've really cherished above everything that's happened - above the Kotaku coverage, above the reviews, above the game's inexplicable Greenlight appeal - it's that my game appeared for over a week in the Giant Bomb New Release homepage sidebar.

Of course, I'm not stopping here. I don't have any particular projects lined up next, but with the Global Game Jam next month and One Game A Month running throughout 2013, you can expect a few new games out of me in the new year.

Yippiekaiyay, motherfucker.

Hi everyone,

To start things off, I'm this guy. In seven hours as of this writing, I will be making available for sale my "first" game, I Get This Call Every Day. You might think that I would be nothing but excitement and enthusiasm, but I've been nothing but a big ball of nervous stress.

Some of that is launch-related: I don't have time to make a launch trailer! and what if the payment processor goes down? and I'll be at work all day on launch day, what if something goes wrong and demands my attention?

Some of that comes from everything else going on around me: cash is tight, bills have piled up, the usual holiday gifting pressure, and medical scares for both my wife and my mother-in-law that haven't been resolved.

Two years ago at Christmastime, my dog Kayla got irreparably sick. I made the call to end her suffering. I constantly question whether I made the right decision. The memory of holding her during her last twitch, watching her limp body being carried away... it haunts me. Especially this time of the year. I probably should have waited until the Holidays were over, because ever since Kayla passed, I hate this time of year.

I know there's a part of me that has deliberately lowered my expectations. I've gotten super-enthusiastic about my work in the past, only to have it shot down (often by my own father). I've become resilient to criticism by lowering expectations. There's less disappointment if it wasn't a big deal to begin with.

Last night I imagined what would happen today if I woke up and found out I was dying. My first regret would be that I wasn't leaving the world with something more positive. I Get This Call Every Day is bleak. It expresses everything I hate about my day job - dealing with idiots, dealing with a bureaucracy sorely lacking in human empathy, existing in an ugly world for eight hours every day. There is no good ending to the game. Others have found humour in the script, but I find none of it funny because it is EXACTLY what I named the game. I get this call every goddamned day. It's not exactly how I want to be remembered.

I wonder if other gamemakers feel this way when a launch is upon them?

I specified "first" in the beginning because I Get This Call Every Day is technically my seventh game. Zombie Zapper, EscapeOut, Ouroborn, A Game For Ana, Josephine, and Apocalypse Later are all a) jam games, made in 72 hours or less, and b) browser-based games that don't warrant a page on this site. You can find them on my website if you're interested, along with my interactive fictions. I Get This Call Every Day is the first game I made outside of a jam, the first game I ever did a huge amount of audio work for (over 250 voice clips, which are bloody hard to produce), and the first game I invested a significant amount of my time and my personality. Part of me hopes that it does well, and another part of me doesn't expect it to do much of anything. That's the defense mechanism talking.

I have no idea how to end this.