Uhm… I don’t know your exact situation, but from what I’ve read, if I was in your shoes right now, my focus would be to find an alternative form of income by finding a job to pay the bills and survive. By the sounds of it, the worst thing that can happen right now is that you can’t pay your bills and you end up homeless. Absolutely zero game dev will happen if it comes to that. Seriously. Take that passion you have towards game dev and apply that towards finding paid work (either as an FTE or contract work). Save as much of your income as you can.
When you’re not working at your job, spend your free time working on building your game. Make it great. The worst thing that could happen is that the project fails. If it does, you at least have something you can show people and it adds a lot of credibility to your abilities.
When it comes to finding funding from external sources, you’ve got a snowballs chance in hell. I’ve tried and failed each time. The unreal dev grants are nice and generous, but epic is swamped with grant proposals. Like, thousands and thousands of them. Your realistic chances of getting funded for a game project are next to nil. And, let’s be real here: it shouldn’t be your sole source of funding anyways, it should be that extra final push you may need to get your game out the door.
There’s always kickstarter, but that is a **** shoot. You pretty much have to spend a month leading up to your campaign, writing copy and creating media, and then another month running the campaign, so you’re already looking at two months of full time job effort to just finish a kickstarter campaign (if you want it to be successful). But, kickstarter is an all-or-nothing deal as well. What happens if you’re 90% there and the deadline passes? You spent two months doing non-gamedev work and got nothing out of it. And, what happens if the kickstarter goal is less than the necessary budget? You can’t go back to the well for another dip. And then you gotta talk to your backers and send them swag, which eats into your fundraising capital.
What about… venture capitalists? HAHAHA, yeah right. I asked them and they pretty much said that they don’t fund projects. Who can blame them? It’s extremely risky to invest in video games, when 99% of them don’t succeed. Don’t even bother to waste your time talking to a VC. If you do, they’ll ask you for a pitch deck, which you’ll then have to create, and to do that, you’ll have to spend at least a full day building, only to have them brush you off.
game publishers? they’re your best shot, but you also have to realize that they’re like movie studios. Everyone and their uncle has the next best idea and they get swamped with pitches. Game publishers will treat any company like an investor would. They’ll want to see who your team is. Why you’ll win. Why your product will win. Why you’ve got what it takes. Why? Because they’re going to be partners with you. The publishers don’t just write checks and forget about you, they will be spending their own time and money helping to build the product. They’ll figure out marketing, distribution, customer support, localization, packaging, sponsorships, legal, etc. That stuff costs lots of money, so they’d probably be looking at taking at least a 70% stake in gross revenue, maybe a lot more.
Angel investors? They’re much more like venture capitalists, but most of them are independent investors who are old white guys with lots of gray hair who don’t understand most technology, let alone games. They’re not a bad bet, but convincing them to give you money is not going to be an easy pitch, no matter what anyone says. Especially if you smell of desperation. Watch out though, any investment deals you make with any investor needs to be structured very carefully so that you don’t give your company away to get cash.
Friends and Family? These people are your actual best bet, provided you have any and they have the means to fund you. This is where you should spend your most effort if you don’t want to get a job. Be careful not to burn the bridges of your relationships though, particularly if your project fails and you can’t repay them.
Patreon? You can try, but it’s unlikely you’d get even a $1 without a huge social media presence and marketing push. Again, need to spend lots of time creating copy and media. I had zero luck with that. They have a discoverability problem.
Bank loans? Line of credit? Don’t waste your time, you won’t get it. Even with good credit. They want to see business activity and minimize lender risk, and they rarely ever give out unsecured loans. I tried this and it failed.
The best course of action is to just raise your own money through paid work and work on your game as a side project. That’s 100% okay, too! The ONLY thing that you cannot do is give up and quit. Keep trying. Make it happen. It might take 5 years or 20 years to get there, but if you’re persistent and work hard, you can do it. Good luck!