Postmortem: My first year as a Indie Developer

One year ago on February 1st, 2012 I began my journey to learn how to program.

So here we are exactly one year later, I have decided to do a developer postmortem and share my experiences.

To get the full story on my decision to become a programmer you can read my announcement post here but in short I had decided that after doing game related development in every other aspect since 1995 that I would finally take the last step and learn to program myself.

Warning this is going to be long, but I'll try to include as many pictures as possible!

So as part of my motivation plan to learn to program I decided I needed to pick a goal. I decided to try and pick something easy to learn with. Something that would be more motivational than constantly doing tutorials!

So I decided I would make a classic 'match-3' style gem game.

This being a postmortem this is where I tell you how that worked out for me!




The Good

1:  Motivation

It is much more motivational to have a goal than to do random tutorials that don't add up to a larger whole.

I felt a sense of developing progress over time as I checked off each item of my game that would be needed to finish this project.   The building up and progressive sense of accomplishment provided tons of motivation when it was sorely needed.

2: Focus

I knew what I needed to do.  There is nothing like doing a tutorial and being hungry for information. Everything you read you look at and say "I can use that for my game!"   Understanding exactly how something can help you when your reading it is the definition of awesome.

I actually had a paper check list of all the things I would need to be able to do and checked them off as I went along. This was almost like pseudo code I just did not know it yet.

An early beta of what would become Pirates Jewels

The Bad

1: I was wrong thinking it would be easy

I picked a match-3 gem game thinking it would be easy - but I grossly underestimated the difficulty of this challenge.

The logic needed to match the gems, and then match special gems, to determine 3 in a row up, but also 3 in a row down.

Oh yes also logic for hints.  Oh did I mention logic to determine if any moves are left so the game does not end prematurely or never ends even when there are no moves left?

 I could go on but lets just say I spent many a day graphic out logic on  graph paper before I got this right.

In retrospect this was not even close to an ideal choice for my first project.

But the silver lining to this is that it forced me to work harder and I learned a lot in the process.

2: It took way too long.  

It took me about 6 months to finish this first game. That probably ties very strongly in to item number 1 above.  A lot of people would have lost interest, given up, changed projects before finishing this.  I'm not sure how I did it honestly.

Quite possibly pure bullheadedness is the only thing that got me through in the end.

There was a significant risk that this could have destroyed me and my goal.

3:  Gem Games aren't my passion.

I've played a few and enjoyed them a bit. But I wonder if my somewhat detached interest level resulted in a lackluster end product.

But after being hip deep in it for so long I have utterly lost perspective. I like to think it is a decent enough gem game. I worked my butt off and put a lot of love in to the look and feel of it.

I hope I did a good job but even now after its been out for six months I still don't know if I did a good job or not.

The finished version of Pirates Treasure in BASIC ran very slowly, but oh so pretty!

4: I made the game twice

So I did not mention this yet but I started off learning to program in Dark Basic Pro , this means in BASIC.

The first complete version of my game worked but ran incredibly slow probably because BASIC is an interpreted rather than compiled language.

As soon as I got it done I realized that it was not good enough to ship out. I could not let my reputation as a new indie developer start off  like this with a slow crawling molasses of a game.

So I started over.

Yep you read that right.   I started over.

Not only did I start over, I decided that BASIC was done and now I would teach myself to program in C.

Yep I re-did my game twice in the first year in two different languages.

I probably should have picked a different game but I knew so much about freaking gem games at this point I figured it HAD to be easier.

So while I think making the same game twice in a row was over-all a mistake , it was in fact much easier the second time and I got it done much faster.

So I completed my first game for the second time and shipped Pirates Jewels on iOS.

Oh yes did you notice the name change from Pirates Treasure to Pirates Jewels?

That's mistake 5!

5:  I did not check that my game name was available.

So when I went to submit my game I found that it was taken.  Uh twice.

Yeah apparently

Pirates Treasure
and
Pirate's Treasure

Are different games according to the Apple App Store!

In either case I wasn't going to go with Pirates Treasure! and be confused with two other projects so I re-did all the title art and renamed my project to Pirate's Jewels.


So that's it for the good and bad of my first project.

I finished the second project in time to get the game on the App Store in November 

I then decided that I would try to make a game for the upcoming holiday season but with only 1 month left it had to be something I could do quickly.

Believe it or not I made another gem game.  Yep after 10 months of gem games I rewarded myself by doing another one for Christmas.


I won't get in to too much detail here but I basically re-did all the artwork for Pirate's Jewels and turned it in to Holiday Cheer.


So this would have been a really great idea.  Except something happened, and I still don't know what exactly.

See this game never showed up on the App Store what's new page and has only sold about 12 copies since release.  

That's less than Pirate's Jewels sold the first day on the App Store.

My big idea for Christmas bombed out dismally.  I had thought I was going to have a a holiday hit on my hands, but instead I made about $8.00 for a month of work.

So I know you think this is going to end poorly but I also decided to submit the game to WildTangent .. and they accepted it!

I did not make a fortune but getting published by WildTangent for my second game was possibly the crowning achievement for the year when it came to my first year as an Indie developer.

I honestly wasn't sure I would ever make a game that any one would want to publish other than things I could self publish.

Many people dream about doing something creative. About writing a book, or a screenplay, or making a game but actually doing it , and then having a publisher accept it and publish it?

It's a dream come true.  I'm ready for year 2.

Oh yeah , I also squeezed in one more game before the year ended .. FINALLY NOT A GEM GAME!!!

Space Chickens VS Angry Zombies my first NON gem game YEAHH!!!!

I just uploaded this to the App Store last night, we will see how it does. Hopefully better than 8 dollars.  

Wish me luck in year 2!

- punchy out