No chance of working under contract or tele-commuting?
Nah. You'd have to have a development kit at home (e.g., the specialized Xbox machines for MAKING Xbox games instead of playing them) so you could get daily builds of the game, which is a logistical nightmare as far as preserving trade secrets and keeping game code off the internet. For a small game without many sounds, it would be theoretically possible for them to hand me a completed game and I hand them back thousands of sound files a few months later--but if there's any dialogue, the artists would need it earlier to do lip synch, and publishers don't like adding time at the end of the schedule if a sound designer could be doing the work concurrently with the rest of the game's development.
Contracting locally is pretty common (moreso than hiring full-time, actually,) but short-lived. It just depends on the development cycles--right now there's nothing, but in a few months there could be several 2- or 3-month jobs opening up.
What'll probably happen is I'll go back to doing tech support, and just keep waiting for the contract jobs to spring up. On the other hand, my husband has decided that an ideal job for me would be a technical writer--if I could just get someone to believe me when I tell them I could
totally do it, despite lacking any specific experience.
