Mexico

The summer after I started Red Thumb Games, I realized I needed a little more reliable income than just doing contract programming and computer repair work to fund my game. So I did something I dreaded: gave up my independence and got a job. I was doing a tech support contract for Microsoft for an unknown length. It lasted 10 months, and it funded Shelled! for the bulk of its time in development. The job ended last October, about a week after IGC. I was still doing a dash of contract programming work, enough to float myself modestly while guaranteeing Shelled!'s completion, if completed modestly.

Many indie filmmakers have made movies in Mexico for cheap, so why couldn't you do the same with a game? So I went to Mexico to go check out the possibilities. I was hungry to live cheaply while I worked on completing my game.

Actually, I stayed in a border town for the first two months living in a friend of a friend's basement for cheap while I took my first steps and stays into Mexico. Crossing the border wasn't such a big deal after a few weeks and eventually I'd even go and get my car washed in Mexico and come back, or go for ice cream and sit in the park there for the afternoon. It was a good first step, Mexico wasn't so scary and I was ready to dive in more.

My first big trip was to a town called San Carlos. It's south enough of Northern Mexico that you get to the "real" Mexico in terms of culture. It is on the Mexico mainland, not Baja, but on the Baja side. I wanted to avoid Baja altogether because it's generally more expensive on that side, and more touristy. If you go straight down from Phoenix and keep going until you hit water, this is where you end up, about a day drive.


San Carlos is an ideal place to start up a studio. Rent and food is cheap, the town is small, friendly, and safe, it's right on the beach surrounded by mountains and is gorgeous, year round weather is great (no storms, no monsoons, no hurricanes), there's not too many gringos there but enough to make conversation once in a while, and it's easy to drive to a major US airport from there (Phoenix) to drive over the border easily without being so far south that you're forced to fly. And they've got high speed internet which is not to be taken for granted; I spent January camping in the desert where the only internet available was from an RV satellite and was butt slow, I couldn't even download builds!

Anyway, San Carlos was pay dirt. Modest, non-touristy, cheap, friendly, accessible. But what if there was somewhere even better?

This time we drove way deep all the way to Puerto Vallarta.


We checked out every little town on the coast along the way but nothing was as compelling as PV. PV was a tropical paradise and a world away from San Carlos, but also with its share of problems: overrun by tourists, more gringos than Mexicans, zero culture (i.e. US culture), monsoons, expensive as hell, too far to drive, expensive to fly. But internet cafes everywhere, and we camped out on the beach the whole time which was awesome (except one night in a landfill, that's another story).

As for Mexico in general, it was completely not the scary place I'm always hearing about from people. Probably from the same people who carry around hand sanitizers. Sure, stay away from Mexico City and watch yourself in TJ, but on the whole Mexico is a developing nation with humble religious people that will go out of their way to be nice to you and expect nothing. That's not to say they won't get pissed if you go nude at a non-nude beach (oops). But twice I had minor car repair work done in Mexico and both times the mechanics insisted the work was so minor that no charge was needed. And sure, it is a little different to drive down the highway and see military guys that look like teenagers with automatic machine guns standing around waiting for action, searching trucks for weapons and drugs, with bunkers at checkpoints like they're expecting the gates of hell to open, but they see you're no threat and and you move along. We had no passports, no paperwork, didn't speak a word of Spanish (except hola and gracias), drove at night, always slept outside or in the car, and we never bribed a cop, went where we pleased, and never had a problem.

A great people and culture, beautiful mountains, oceans, jungles and desert, good cheap beer, easy living, internet access, beaches, americanos on spring break... oh yeah, Mexico da bomb. Future aspirations include renting a huge house on the beach in Mexico and filling it with eager interns in tandem with remote contractors, but not in the next year, probably not the next two, and hell I'll be lucky if my studio is even still around then given the statistics, so one thing at a time. BUT -- it's doable. And I'd love to see another studio take the Mexico dive before I do, so if you're thinking about it yourself, research it and go check it out, you can save a ton of cash and make twice the game for the same budget.

Not too exciting a write-up -- wish I could share the more interesting stories... hehehe. Well that's it for Mexico. In the meantime, I'll brush up on my Spanish.