The Challenge:
I have a 365 day runway (until 9 Sep 2012) to earn £20k (about $32k) from games development.
The earnings value is based on a UK minimum wage calculation of about £6 per hour 9-5 job, and factoring in that I will have to pay money to make them, buying in music ect, and overheads for payment providers?
You can quit right away if you cant make good looking games i would suggest you to do games only for ios and android because they will bring you money.
Fast turnaround on ios. Set up a structure where you can bang a game out quicker than in 3 months per game, you really don’t want to hang around. Don’t be afraid to reuse an earlier game’s codebase reskinned or whatever. You just want to make the 20k at this point.
Marketing isn’t a problem, you just need to do it smart and submit very polished games. And do that within 3 months per game. By sept 2012 you want at least 4-6 games on appstore earning 30k or more. Keep making games. Port the most successful of them at the end of the year.
Play to your strengths. Do not pick a game style you don’t already know. R&D will kill your development times dead. Don’t bother being original, be smart, and fast.
Document any outsourcing you get because the tax man will find you. Before april get an accountant (face to face, not online) and let him sort out your well documented finances. Don’t worry much about that though.
Summary:
make a business plan which includes your workflow, with time allocated for development and marketing
document any outsourced work, save all your purchases and receipts
get to work on polishing and shipping ALL your prototypes on ios today. Just ship them all on ios, make some early cash. Mirror each paid download with a demo version + iad or admob. If you’re dead smart, you can have 2-3 games out on ios in the first month (by porting).
play to your strengths, ignore graphics styles you cannot do. Pick a style you can do very well. Oh and avoid primary colours - it makes your game look cheap.
Just get working now. Pick a game you’ve half finished, finish it and ship it. This is war. it is business. you can’t delay!
android is shit. Ignore everyone else on these forums you’re really not going to get far doing that vs ios as a business platform to make early money. The devices might be fun but you have vastly less chance of making some good cash. It’s a good port-to platform after ios. Android will suck up HUGE amounts of your time with support, devices that plain don’t work and having to deal with a store you have to run manually (including refunds) on the off chance you have a polished enough game that hive of pirates will even buy.
kongregate? are you out of your mind? thats a time sink right there. You don’t need morons from kongregate. You need to finish your game and ship already on ios + marketing. Kongregate alone is a waste of all the time you could spend emailing, making a trailer and shipping your game.
not worth investing in pro license unless you’re hitting higher budgets, know shaders inside out etc. Instead go basic for now, use scene 0 to show your loading text + logo (minimal graphics, not full screen splash) so it switches from the unity splash screen quickly. Scene 1 will contain your game.
I am not trying to be rude, I’m just telling you exactly what I know works from my perspective without frills. You need cash, you need to eliminate kongregate (it doesn’t market your game at all whatsoever and the people are freeloaders en masse). Leave android till later (it may even be ad revenue only).
In short, grab basic ios and shoot for shipping a port within the month, you need to do this to learn how to ship on that platform ASAP. This is about money, not your magnum opus. It’s about gaining enough momentum to break through and be independent.
The magnum opus comes when you personally can afford the time to do it. Classic time is money right here. GO GO GO!
ps. watch less TV. if you only have less than a year you need to really focus. Don’t burn out though, that’ll slow you down more.
Re: ios. set that up early, as sole trader. You’l need form W8-EN and file an EIN in philly (USA) to submit to apple or you’ll get screwed by 30% of your profits being held by the US. Full docs on tax and banking bit in itunes connect. Easy process, just time consuming. Get it out of the way early since it involves posting forms to apple in america.
In one year you will most likely have well over 20k if you follow this path. Aim to ship first game sometime in october.
Later, port to android, throw it at unity’s union. If you reach your 20k goal, immediately port to pc/mac/kong and let them bring in some passive income… but leave those till later and focus hardcore on ios for a bit.
Well I’ve put up a blog post highlighting the challenge the forums I’ve put the question out on and I’m also e-mailing a few of the indies I know about!
No feedback, no blogs. Just a worklog on your desktop. I’ve told you, focus on where the money is. It isn’t other people giving feedback, let that wait till its fully finished then just hack whatever changes are needed on the end. You don’t need people, you’re smart enough.
My first ios game took a week and made 14 grand. I’m sure you can get moving mate
When you’ve made your years cash, why not worry about making a much better game then?
Hey Arowx, I am currently trying to do the same thing as you. But I dont own anything apple so am going to go down the android road, after what hippocoder has said im now a lot more worried than I was, but meh, worth a shot right?
Good Luck, hope you succeed
Have you ever develop games before?
Making games requires much more than you think.
For iOS, the quality line of the store is getting more higher than years ago.
I’m not anti-android, but nearly everyone except those that failed to market right on ios made more money on ios, its a captive market that works well. True, the bar of quality is higher but if you push well and get seen, you’ll make your targets. As for android, well, money can be made, but its a lot more intensive work to make money and everyone I’ve worked with or know personally, hasn’t done as well on the platform. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t, it means that it’s harder and therefore not as high a priority.
What works for me might not work for you at all. That’s worth bearing in mind.
Yeah you don’t actually need unity pro at all. I do, because I use both render to texture and the extended sound stuff like reverb and so on, so it was a no brainer.
For the most part, occlusion culling and static batching seem geared towards FPS games rather than what you could do with unity ios basic, because in basic, its sufficient to cull whatever’s offscreen (platform games etc).
@hippo: reading all this sounds crazy… it sounds like its soo easy to make a living from a months work a year? If what your saying is true I really am contemplating on learning Unity and basic code.
On paper it sounds well, but quality is going up big time and you need to come out with polished products: there are many stories of decent products selling quite bad actually. One detailed, success story shared here in the forum is from Martin and his racing game, but he is not at break-even yet.
As for you, being very young you can go on improving your skills at your own pace and pave your way as a contractor, which is the easiest way to make an income here.
He sounds just like me. My little hippo is all grown up. sniff
To re-iterate and reinforce many points:
Forget your magnum opus, save it for when you have the luxury of time. Build a machine that you can crank a handle on and turn out a game.
Don’t create new technology until you can afford to, stick with tried and true ideas.
Reskin any games you currently have ready and get those out the door. Get yourself used to the delivering process. Polish up something simple and ship it. Do it again, again, again, and again.
Don’t try to make an all singing, all dancing version up front. Get it out the door, then go back and add fancy things like online high scores, social integration, etc.
Get your core game play done early.
Don’t spend money you don’t have. The only reason I use Pro is because clients insist that the splash screen is removed.
Track everything you spend and everything you earn. Everything…
Only build a blog about the development process if you want to get congratulations and slaps on the back from 15 yr old dweebs or you are looking to build a name and reputation for yourself so you can get hired by a company to create games for them. It is a great resume builder, it is a lousy marketing tool unless you are making hard core games. You’ve got one year, you aren’t making hard core games.
If you do build a development blog, keep it on a completely separate, totally unrelated domain to the marketing specific web site. Do not muddy your message. If you pick up client work, keep that on a completely separate, totally unrelated domain to the game website. Make sure your development blog doesn’t out rank your marketing website when people search for your game.
Pick a strong name that you can own in Google so that no matter what search engine the consumer uses they can find your game on the first page of results.
Build a game specific website. Build a game specific page on your larger website. Info dump on features, lots of call to action statements, lots of pictures, oversell the game.
Forget about analytics or anything that isn’t core game play until after the game has shipped.
Push Android out to a late part of the development cycle. Every client I have interacted with in the past year has been “we must be on Android” and my work plan for them has been to push Android out until well after web, PC, iOS, Facebook (in that order) and a few other biggies, Mac before we finally get to Android. It really is a problem platform, huge numbers of consumers but the platform is fragmented and the consumers are freeloaders wanting almost everything for free.
Forget Kongregate or anything web based that is ad supported for making money unless you a) push it out to after your game has shipped on other platforms or b) use it as a test bed to ensure there are no egregious bugs in your game. Do not do tight integration on platforms that don’t pay you lots of cold hard cash on a regular basis. Kongregate is not one of those. Neither is Wooglie. Ignore your non-paying customers unless they are reporting bugs.
Unless you have a highly anticipated hit on your hands, i.e. you’re Popcap and you are upselling your next big game to players who already own your current crop of games don’t worry about pre-marketing your game, just make sure you have a marketing plan. You can market your game years after it has been on the market, just don’t forget to actually market and advertise otherwise you won’t hit your numbers.
Send out review copies to every single large, medium, small and piddling little review website you can find. I don’t care if the guy running the website has ten readers, send him a review link. Get a press release professionally created, send those out with the link. Follow-up. Hit up the really big websites multiple times (don’t spam) until they listen.
Every time you make a change to your game or port it to a new platform, send out a press release. Use a press release writing and sending service if you can.
Spend your early dollars on making people aware of your game, not on fancy tools that won’t add immediate value to your bottom line. We’re all geeks, we all like shiny new toys, and as programmers, we will sit and lament that we can only ship our cool new game if we have that expensive tool. Forget that, ship the game first, you can go back and fix your mistakes later. This isn’t console development.
Avoid competitions like the plague, e.g. IGF unless you are just looking to get a boner from all the congratulatory hugs of other developers. Your paying audience doesn’t give a s**t.
And finally, stay away from FPS, MMORPG, RPG, platform, or any nonsense that requires networking until you have made some dough. They are a huge time suck that won’t net you very much unless you actually have a much, much longer runway. You can make money on these things, but it is highly unlikely you can achieve it in just one year.
Quality bar is rising all the time: I have a massive edge as I’m an artist first and programmer second. Plus working with me, is a hardcore AAA artist, so I can’t lose presentation wise.
