Being a moonlighter, sweet and sour.

Hi everyone,

Long time I didn’t post anything on my blog. Today, rather than to talk about a project, I’ll comment on the status of moonlighters. By moonlighters, I mean enthusiasts artists or programmers who work on various projects on their free time, usually aside from their daytime job.

I consider myself as one of them, and work with moonlighters quite often. Working with moonlighters is usually a very interesting experience: it would be a mistake to think they cannot provide the same quality professionals do: unlike pros, they work the week end, the evening, and it requires a huge motivation to do this after one day/week of work. Their daytime job is also sometimes related (or at least not so far) from their moonlight activity, so they are moonlighters AND professionals. Of course, you have to pick up your moonlighter very carefully: many crooks will pretends they can do the job. However, after you made sure about the previous work of your man, and setup milestones, you should be happy with the result, for a very competitive price.

I recently asked Michael Deforge to design the icons of the gametool suite, and Michael Taylor for the soundtracks of Aerial Heroes, and what they sent me was much beyond my expectations. (if you read this, thanks again guys:-)

Working as moonlighter is something tricky: you usually don’t have a legal status (unless you are an official freelancer), so you have to prove to your potential customers you are honest and skilled. Since you can’t provide a bill, you also have less legal options to fight back if someone fools you. It is very tempting to become a freelancer for this reason, however it’s a lot of paperwork for a small side income.

My own moonlight activity is split among Teapot-Hosting, and software dev. It will never make me a rich man, however I learnt a lot thanks to this. And Coding something you like is something quite different than coding what you’re asked for. (I’m not saying I don’t like my day-job, but I do not decide what should be developed or not.) I have an excellent relationship with 98% of my customers, and this relation is build on trust. However recently, the 2% reminded me I’m sometime too naive…

End of the year, I had a very specific request from Stanley Ybanez, Jacksonville (FL, USA). He contacted me in this thread. “Stn” asked me for a special version of GXView to allow edition of XNA 2.0 compiled assets. He wanted to modernize his Sweepstakes game. Since it was not something I planned to implement in a future version of the GameTools suite (nobody use the 2.0 framework anymore), he proposed to pay me for this development. We agreed on milestones, and I spend about 3 weeks on the project. Our communications were good and polite, and everything was going well until it was time for him to send the first payment. He started to delay his responses as much as possible, and then stopped completely to reply. Since he didn’t get the fully functional version, I assumed he changed his mind. In his last mail, he asked for my bank infos, but, of course, it was more to make me wait than to send anything. He didn’t bother to explain anything or propose any compensation.

[Edit: paragraph removed: issue solved :-)]

Being someone optimist, I’ll move on and forget about this. I like my activity as moonlighter, so I won’t let those bad experiences ruin it. However, If you are about to work for one of the above mentioned people, I couldn’t recommend you more to be extra careful. Use an escrow service if you can, and never start working for them without good warranties. I wanted to write this ticket to avoid to other people to be fooled as I was. I’m lucky I have a good day job and no money problem, but if this could have happened to someone who really needed this money, and Stanley Ybanez doesn’t seem to be the kind of people to worry about such thing.

Raph