Geez ... I guess I should start paying Unity now...

News & General Discussion
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So I did my projections and I expect to reasonably make around $70,000 from my game development hobby this year. Made about $47,000 last calendar year. So I decided I should finally start paying Unity and bought a Plus subscription. I technically didn’t have to, of course, but I’ve been feeling like a free loader for a while and wanted to support them.

If you’re interested, I did the tactical RPG’s for mobile:

  • Demon’s Rise
  • Demon’s Rise 2 - Lords of Chaos (Pocket Tactics RPG of the Year)
  • Strike Team Hydra (launched last week on iOS and Android)

So just wanted to say thanks to the Unity team. I hope to be a paying customer for a long time and hope that I eventually am forced to upgrade to a full Pro license. :wink:

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Plus is worth it for the extra services anyways, Cloud Build, Analytics, and performance reporting are very useful.

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Question regarding cloud build. Where exactly do I upload my project file? And if I use a system like Crashplan, how does it keep that project backed up?

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That’s a profitable hobby :smile:

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if you are using a Git, Perforce, Mercurial or SVN you just feed it the url and log in details for your repo.

I currently use it with a team of 5 developers on GIT, and we just having it automatically triggering builds whenever code gets pushed to certain branches. We got a QA_Internal Branch that makes a build for our QA team, then we got master which we pushed builds we are intending to release to the client to.

It takes much longer to build than doing it locally, but it also takes no effort for the devs to start a build, and it builds all platforms we support at once.

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Congrats! That is great but before anyone asks…how did you do your marketing? Any tips.

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This is kinda encouraging to keep developing when somebody is facing hard times. Thanks for sharing. :slight_smile:

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Aww, so sorry for your misery! There are support groups for people who have too much money, and I happen to run one. PM me to discuss membership fees! :stuck_out_tongue:

I second using cloud building (continuous integration) if working in a team, as you can instantly know who to blame for a bad commit :slight_smile:

But note that Crashplan is not version control. You should be using proper version control also.

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Best thing I did was post on the Touch Arcade forums. People were interested in my WIP screenshots and then the journalists contacted me. I then submitted my first game and very diligently kept updating it with the feedback I got from the TA community. Once I was in with Touch Arcade, it was a lot easier to get replies from other sites like Pocket Tactics and so on. It was a gradual and slow process.

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What would you recommend for version control? I need to also learn what GIT is exactly … I don’t actually know.

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i would recommend Git for version control, it is pretty much the best one around for versioning code, and there are lots of providers like GitHub, Assembla and BitBucket. Some of them like GitHub and Assembla even provide a wiki, project management tools as well.

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Git is the most widespread VCS nowadays, and I use a combination of self-hosted GitLab and GitHub depending on whether it’s a private or public project. Sometimes I use both (start on private GitLab, publish to GitHub if it looks useful to the world). My preferred client is SourceTree, but it’s useful to know the basics of the command-line client (setting up, committing, pushing, pulling, stashing, branches).

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Congratulations. You’ll be able to quit the day job soon.

Git (and VCS in general) is a system where you can store changes to files. There are several advantages to this approach:

  • It takes much less storage space then storing entire files
  • It only saves files that are changed
  • You can browse through specific changes

There are also more complex uses for the system

  • You can create branches, which are versions of your project where you can try things out without affecting the main project.
  • You can integrate it with services like cloud build
  • You can collaborate with other people

You should also make sure you are paying your government correctly. They tend to get antsy if they don’t get payed.

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He may be able to do it now even if the numbers are in Canadian dollars (1 CAD is 0.79 USD is 1 AUD). :stuck_out_tongue:

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Cross country comparisons aren’t super useful, as living expenses can vary dramatically. The Canadian medium household income is $76K. So you’d want to guarantee at least that much before you quit the day job. Probably more to take up the additional risk of running your own business.

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I wouldn’t be quitting the day job any time soon. I actually really enjoy it and they let me work from home so no commute.

Regarding taxes, yes … I pay those monthly. I set up a corporation and do a tax filing and monthly tax provision payments based on revenueminus expenses.

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First of all thanks Raj for sharing! It’s very inspiring!
After following for a while, i decided not to be a lurker anymore. ;D
I have a few questions if you allow:

You said on another forum " it took 3 years to build the core engine of Demon’s Rise": How difficult is it to add new features after all this time? Did you consider allowing other devs to use it for creating tacticals games?

Regarding the $$, do you speak of revenue or profit? Demon’s Rise 2 has many 3d models, asset creation must be quite expensive? Speaking of which, what is the most efficient way you found to recruit people to create your own assets? Unity forums?

Just a word about my curiosity, i’ve developed a D&D campaign world for over 20 years, i want to believe it’s original enough, and had many writers and illustrators working for me along the years. My objective is now making a tactics rpg with all the material. My big issue is technical: i got the artists, the writer, lots of cool encounters and unique hooks, but no good programmer.

Thanks by advance for your time and any pointers, and looking forward to play your next games!

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Really great to see successful developers.

Now if only I could commit to a game project…

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Truly inspiring, indeed. Congratulations and keep up the good work. :slight_smile:

I’m sure there are lots of people who’d like to collaborate. If you’re very proficient, just apply or try to do freelancing work. :slight_smile:

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Oh it’s not a question of skill, but concentration. I’ve been doing this a while and have released nothing finished game-wise. I get bogged down with ideas or worrying that ideas aren’t good enough. I’m also sure it’s a common problem. It’s just nice to see when people actually do release something and earn well from it, and a dream a lot of us share.

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