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| A swipe side-by-side comparison between a year 1 game and a year 3 of mine. |
Roughly four years ago in mid 2011 ago I was working in a call center working as a tech support agent and due to some office politics (a manager got mad at one of my co-workers) and a bit of bad judgement on my part (we were both using foul language in a private chat to each other ) I was called in to an office and given my “final written notice” that if I did even one more thing wrong I would be fired immediately. This happened in the great Wall Street induced depression of 2008 and jobs were scarce to come by (still are)!
I was terrified.
I had tunnel vision, I had depression. I was losing sleep, and blood rushed to my head on a daily basis every time I saw a supervisor at work.
I was literally in fight or flight mode; but really it was 100% flight mode - I just couldn't leave because my family’s livelihood depended on me staying.
It took a few months of shock and stress but I eventually made a decision that I had to change my life, I could not sit there and cower in fear waiting for them to just find that excuse they wanted to fire me!
I set myself some goals that I hoped would get me out of there, and change my life. I decided I would learn to program as the first step to doing that. I decided I would teach myself to program through the medium of Video Games because I have a deep and enduring love for video games and this would keep me motivated! Having absolutely no clue how long something like this would take me, I set myself a 5 year goal to accomplish this!
Little did I know that within 18 months I would be hired as a Java developer and here I am today at the 3 year mark after starting on that goal and I would like to share with you the retrospective of my first 3 years as an indie game developer!
SideNote: I know a lot of these retrospectives are written in a What Went Right/ What Went Wrong format; I’m going to break from that format here and do an exploratory article on how my perspective has changed in the 3 years I’ve been doing this instead. If interested you can read my year 1 and year 2 post-mortem’s for further perspective.
Goal Setting
The first comparison I want to make is how I have gone about goal setting.
When I started off I set some gigantic life changing goals in total ignorance of how hard they were and I went at them with full abandon.
It was similar to when you’re a child and you say “I WANT TO BE A FIREMAN!!!” and then going out and doing everything you can to actually BE a fireman.
Like Ethan Hawke’s character in the movie Gattaca when faced with overwhelming odds I simply held nothing back.
Vincent: You want to know how I did it? This is how I did it, Anton: I never saved anything for the swim back.
You might think setting such a large goal is setting yourself up for failure ; and I guess I would have agreed before! But instead what happened was I made it much farther than I would ever have imagined myself capable of.
In only a short 18 months after setting this goal I had shipped 3 games on multiple platforms and got hired as a Java Software Engineer.
I thought my five year goal was to learn how to program and make my first game. I really wasn't mentally prepared to be a Software Engineer in less than 2 years.
Mind you I’m not complaining - but all of a sudden goal setting becomes this explosion of uncertainty. What’s next? I found myself stuttering and repeating previous successes - as it seemed like it had worked out pretty well before?
In the last 3 years I have taught myself the following languages & / libraries (in this order):
- BASIC
- C
- C++
- Java
- Javascript
- JQuery
- C#
- Angular
What is surprising to me is that I had planned on really only learning C/C++ as my ‘ultimate’ goal and it was really supposed to be the pinnacle of the 5 year goal and this list would have literally looked impossible to me and had you presented it to me I would have probably felt it was too difficult to do that much in 3 years!
At the two year mark I had written 5 games in C/C++ and was moving on to looking at writing games in Java or C# at that point. I thought learning more languages would be incredibly hard but instead each language has been easier than the last.
In fact the most difficult thing turned out to be something I hadn’t even expected which is learning new API’s for game engines and libraries. I find those can take a fairly significant effort to get up to speed (more than a new programming language). With a new programming language I often just need to set up an environment, learn a little bit about syntax for a few days and I’m able to do things very quickly.
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| Leprechaun's Luck sold an entire 4 copies the first year!!! YEAH! |
So what’s changed between year one and year three regarding goals is that I’ve realized the starting goal of ‘learning to program’ really just means to get my foot in the pond whereas the real long term goal seems to be to get into a life cycle of an iterative approach to learning more about software engineering seen through the lens of whatever engine, language, or library I happen to have picked for my latest project.
But that’s an extremely cool place to be at! I no longer feel like there is anything I’m incapable of doing - its just a matter of having the time to figure it out. I have developed the self-learning tools and confidence to literally do anything I want to do!
How I’ve Changed What I want to do
I’d like to talk about how much my expectations about the marketplace for my applications, and what I want to do with my development time - how these things have changed over the past three years fairly dramatically.
In one way you could say they haven't changed at all - I want to make games! But really there's a dramatic difference that I've learned through experience about what appears to be areas where I can expect to be successful.
The first and most important part of this is my findings about the Mobile Marketplace.
When I started off I felt like the mobile marketplace was the place to be because it was very easy to self publish and potentially have my application seen by millions of users. This certainly remains true today however as you'll see I'm about to explain that is actually a giant problem
While its true it has changed a lot in the small time I've been involved ; and probably even more from before I got in to it - the truth is today the mobile marketplace is a sea of white noise where your application is just one tiny dot among literally hundreds of thousands (soon to be millions) of mobile apps.
As if that were not bad enough; the big corporations have learned by leveraging their superior cash flow they can pay rating companies to have hundreds of fake reviews and amplify their applications ratings above all others to get top placement in the app stores.
Even with a modest advertising budget you can't hope to change your ranking enough to get on the first page of results ... even when searching for the exact title of your game it is often the case that it will not show up on the first page. How many users know your application even exists? How many pages of apps will they have patience to page between before they see yours and give it a quarter of a second glance to see if they like the icon enough to check the details out?
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| The mobile marketplace in 2015, you are just one dot in a massive field of white noise, further diminished by large companies paying for app store ratings. |
So I created a little visualization graphic for you that explains the difference in my perception when I was entering the mobile market place vs how I feel the reality is today. In both cases there is a very small red dot that indicates your application - but in the "reality" side you'll notice very large squares at the top. These are the big corporations paying for rankings that push you and your tiny dot down to page 26 of the search results.
I could go on this is only one of many factors that makes mobile a scary place to be. The other elephant in the room is the cost to acquire users and the dominance of the 'freemium' model which I find to be incredibly predatory and contrary to the spirit of providing my customers with good value for their money and time.
Sure - I would like to get rich but there's a difference between selling food that every one enjoys and needs versus peddling meth that addicts cant turn down. Corporations have decided being meth dealers is okay because its profitable.
This is where its great to be an indie developer. I can literally decide my soul is worth more than that and decide to not participate in that - and I'm not!
So I decided to focus on the desktop market place for now for a lot of reasons. One of the particular reasons that means a lot to me is that I am a desktop gamer myself, and I always have been from the day I built my first PC.
And when you stop and think about it for a few minutes it makes sense for a lot of other reasons too. Mobile users could give a crap less about the games they download most of the time. Those games are disposable and meant to be time wasters. More importantly many mobile users do not identify themselves as gamers most of the time.
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| War Runner for iOS & Android looked sexy , but sold poorly. |
PC/Desktop Gamers identify themselves specifically as gamer's.
Why the hell was I trying to make games for people who aren't gamer's?
Furthermore the limitations of mobile dictate I make a game with low resources, poor input control, limited disk space, users who expect everything to be free and will never even notice my game because of the white noise of the mobile marketplace.
It took me two years to know it deep in my bones mobile is not the place for a dedicated game developer today in my opinion.
In fact I think we should already be discriminating between what we label a Game Developer and a Mobile App Developer. Even those Mobile App Developers who are making games .. its just a different world and a different marketplace. To call these things the same is disingenuous at best.
I already have multiple apps on the mobile marketplace, I'm not going to take them down. But I've learned to see them as time wasters - just as the users of mobile apps do!
Money Expectations
So this is something that I always felt I had realistic expectations about when it came to game development: money.
I expected that I would not make much money.
Most of the time when I get ready to ship a new game I tell myself that no one is going to buy it at all and I'm right.
Despite acknowledging to myself that my sales will be very low I simply had the expectation that I would not make much money.
But what has actually happened most of the time is that I lose money by making games.
I already have multiple apps on the mobile marketplace, I'm not going to take them down. But I've learned to see them as time wasters - just as the users of mobile apps do!
Money Expectations
So this is something that I always felt I had realistic expectations about when it came to game development: money.
I expected that I would not make much money.
Most of the time when I get ready to ship a new game I tell myself that no one is going to buy it at all and I'm right.
Despite acknowledging to myself that my sales will be very low I simply had the expectation that I would not make much money.
But what has actually happened most of the time is that I lose money by making games.
Starting any business is usually a process of losing money for the first few years and game development has been no different.
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| I made Holiday Cheer at the prompting of my wife in just a couple of weeks and it is my best selling game to date! |
Mind you I've had a small success or two Pirates Jewels on iOS continues to make small residual sales over the past 2 years, and I had a surprise small hit with Holiday Cheer published by WildTangent has made the most of any of my games! My wife was telling me that I should make some sort of Christmas Game and I took her advice and this turned out to be my best selling game to date!? (Thanks honey!)
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| Pirates Jewels II was a complete financial failure. But it sure looks pretty! |
Particularly Pirates Jewels II I spent the most money on to date to produce and it definitely is a good looking game!
Unfortunately no game sites wanted to take Pirates Jewels II and after three months of trying Desura finally took it .. In the end though Desura really isn't a big place for match-3 games so it only sold a handful of copies!
So as a result I lost almost my entire investment in time and production on Pirates Jewels II and this really is the most common scenario : most of the time and money I've put in to producing games so far has been a loss.
Despite being a bit of a sobering proposition - losing time and money has not deterred me from making games. It does however change what I'm willing to spend time on.
At this point I decided that it no longer makes sense to make games for other people hoping I would somehow make them happy and get a bunch of sales.
After 9 games and that hasn't happened I realize now that I need to be making games for me. I need to make the games that I've always wanted to play - and it will be worth my time because when I'm done with it I will be happy and proud of my accomplishment.
So I've stopped making casual oriented small games and decided to work on my first RPG - The Rise of Dagon which is a dungeon crawler in the style of Eye of the Beholder, Lands of Lore and The Legend of Grimrock.
If it so happens that some gamer's end up liking it too? Hey that'll be awesome! But in the end my attitude between year 1 and year 3 is - I absolutely have to be doing this as the game itself will probably be the only reward I get!
At this point I decided that it no longer makes sense to make games for other people hoping I would somehow make them happy and get a bunch of sales.
After 9 games and that hasn't happened I realize now that I need to be making games for me. I need to make the games that I've always wanted to play - and it will be worth my time because when I'm done with it I will be happy and proud of my accomplishment.
So I've stopped making casual oriented small games and decided to work on my first RPG - The Rise of Dagon which is a dungeon crawler in the style of Eye of the Beholder, Lands of Lore and The Legend of Grimrock.
If it so happens that some gamer's end up liking it too? Hey that'll be awesome! But in the end my attitude between year 1 and year 3 is - I absolutely have to be doing this as the game itself will probably be the only reward I get!
Conclusions and Advice
You might think that I have a pretty bleak outlook at this point given all the adjustments I've spoken about over the past three years but really that isn't how I feel at all.
There's a big difference between dreaming that I would like to make games some day, and working on my 10th game. I have an overwhelming sense of confidence that I can accomplish what I set my mind to now.
That confidence changed my career path and got me a job that pays 40% more than my old call center job! Not only that I have a more promising career in software development than any call center could ever offer.
When I talked earlier about making games losing me money - I did not take in to account the change of career fields that learning how to program enabled me to make. The reason for that is I don't make games in my day job - we write a web based school SIS with an oracle database back end!
I've had to learn a lot to be able to do that job that is very separate and different from writing games and I spent 30 days cramming down a 1300 page Java book before interviewing with them .. which is totally separate than all the work I do on a daily basis to improve my game dev skills!
But I guess what I'm saying here is getting off my ass and developing games changed my life for the positive and I have no regrets.
But I also did not quit my day job and move in to my parents basement to pursue these goals!
I see a lot of contemplating quitting their day job to try to gamedev full time - without ever having even finished their first game?? Honestly I wrote a lot of this as cold sober advice to you (yes you - the person who is thinking of quitting your job to make your first game!)
You can change your life through development, you can make games, you can also do this while holding down a job that pays the bills. And honestly my recommendation at this time is that you do exactly that because succeeding in the game development arena is not simple, not instant, not cheap, and not guaranteed!
Finishing your first game will be a personal legendary landmark that you'll always remember but unless you have almost the same luck as a lottery ticket it also is not going to change your life financially very significantly - and in fact it will probably be a monetary drain!
If you really want to succeed at game development my advice is you need to have a plan for durability and sustainability.
That might mean not progressing as quickly as you might like - but really do you want to end up bankrupt, homeless, and have your wife leave you because your child has no food?
Take that 'boring' developer job working on something that you don't really care about! Two things will happen - firstly you'll get to spend all day thinking about coding ; and while its not game code at least your exercising your brain around code instead of burgers right?!
And the second thing is you'll have a much better financial ground to pursue your game developing and maybe buy the next up and coming game engine or a few assets off the asset store to put in to your game! Never mind the obvious benefit of providing yourself and family with a much higher quality of life.
And so that's it if your the TLDR type the super summary is:
- Goals Rule
- Mobile Sucks
- Don't Quit Your Day Job
Thanks for reading!
You might think that I have a pretty bleak outlook at this point given all the adjustments I've spoken about over the past three years but really that isn't how I feel at all.
There's a big difference between dreaming that I would like to make games some day, and working on my 10th game. I have an overwhelming sense of confidence that I can accomplish what I set my mind to now.
That confidence changed my career path and got me a job that pays 40% more than my old call center job! Not only that I have a more promising career in software development than any call center could ever offer.
When I talked earlier about making games losing me money - I did not take in to account the change of career fields that learning how to program enabled me to make. The reason for that is I don't make games in my day job - we write a web based school SIS with an oracle database back end!
I've had to learn a lot to be able to do that job that is very separate and different from writing games and I spent 30 days cramming down a 1300 page Java book before interviewing with them .. which is totally separate than all the work I do on a daily basis to improve my game dev skills!
But I guess what I'm saying here is getting off my ass and developing games changed my life for the positive and I have no regrets.
But I also did not quit my day job and move in to my parents basement to pursue these goals!
I see a lot of contemplating quitting their day job to try to gamedev full time - without ever having even finished their first game?? Honestly I wrote a lot of this as cold sober advice to you (yes you - the person who is thinking of quitting your job to make your first game!)
You can change your life through development, you can make games, you can also do this while holding down a job that pays the bills. And honestly my recommendation at this time is that you do exactly that because succeeding in the game development arena is not simple, not instant, not cheap, and not guaranteed!
Finishing your first game will be a personal legendary landmark that you'll always remember but unless you have almost the same luck as a lottery ticket it also is not going to change your life financially very significantly - and in fact it will probably be a monetary drain!
If you really want to succeed at game development my advice is you need to have a plan for durability and sustainability.
That might mean not progressing as quickly as you might like - but really do you want to end up bankrupt, homeless, and have your wife leave you because your child has no food?
Take that 'boring' developer job working on something that you don't really care about! Two things will happen - firstly you'll get to spend all day thinking about coding ; and while its not game code at least your exercising your brain around code instead of burgers right?!
And the second thing is you'll have a much better financial ground to pursue your game developing and maybe buy the next up and coming game engine or a few assets off the asset store to put in to your game! Never mind the obvious benefit of providing yourself and family with a much higher quality of life.
And so that's it if your the TLDR type the super summary is:
- Goals Rule
- Mobile Sucks
- Don't Quit Your Day Job
Thanks for reading!
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