Why I started my own project team

In the beginning, I was not someone who wanted to spend my life making video games. I started down a completely different track in school. Sure, I spent a lot of time playing video games, but when it came time to pick my major, I took my fathers advice and majored in electrical engineering technology, something you can make money it as he put it. It was only too late that I realized I had no intrest in working at the kinds of jobs that require that sort of degree. I walked into this one place my first day, and knew I would not enjoy it. As a result, I did not go to work, nor even look for a job. I did not worry about money at first, because my husband has a four year in the same proffession, so I figured he would be making big bucks. Little did I know, with housing price inflation, his salary would not be enough to afford the kind of lifestyle I wanted.

I could not deal very well with the negative choices I had made, so I spent a great deal of time playing Ultima Online. I also got very intrested in GNU/Linux and the free software movement after one version of Ultima Online did not run on windows XP when it first came out. (then windows xp deleted my files)
I thought that everything would go in the Linux direction, so I just needed some patience, and Ultima Online would create an official client for Linux. That did not happen, and also Ultima Online changed the game play in ways I did not like. The more I played Ultima Online, the more fundamental design flaws I saw in the game. For instance, found items were still better than crafted items, doing too many things client side caused cheating to be rampent, there were no other races except human (elves and gargoyles were added later, but never orcs or undead) Player run shards existed, but there was no easy way to add new artwork to an existing game without the source code, in addition all the fundamental design flaws of the game, plus the fact that it is intellectual property of EA posed problems.

After a while, I realized that if I did not start the design team from scratch, no one would bother to do it. I considering joining other project teams for games unrelated to what I really wanted to make, but mostly found that either I did not enjoy the game enough, or the project had policies that I did not agree with (either dependency hunt or standards of realism aka "quality")