This was a nice read and showcases the sad reality of many game developers.
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I can understand people wanting to make their dream games and I can also understand people wanting to do everything the best they possibly can. I really can. Outside of game dev everyone who knows me knows my motto is if youāre going to do somethingā¦ do it right!
But man I really donāt understand people spending 5 years, 4 years, 3 years or even 2 years on their first game or second or even third. It just never makes sense to me from a business perspective. People need to set a project scope and quality level they can do in a short amount of time. Short being 1 year or less. Because as this game and so many other games show people can work their asses off and focus on trying to make something very cool very high quality and that doesnāt mean it is going to be a commercial success.
Iāve thought about going Indie at some point and if I do it will be like 3 to 4 months max for first game. Depending on how it goes maybe 5 to 6 months for second game and so on. Also I think doing it as a business it makes sense to make a series of the same kind of games. So that second game can build on the work done for the first game.
Anyway, I agree it is sad but also reality. Alright I will finish reading it. I only read up to the first line of the second paragraph āItās been a long, almost 5 year journey that has changed us foreverā when I came back here to post this. Because I immediately thought why? Why on earth spend so freaking long working on the game.
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The last section titled ā2016 & the worst year of my lifeā is pretty much all you need to read. Itās interesting.
Iād never even heard of Poncho. Itās a shame, because it actually looks pretty nice. At least from an art perspective.
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@SteveJ I remember seeing it. In fact, I am pretty sure it was here in the Work In Progress forum where I saw it.
Iām not sure how he arrived at this conclusion in the wrap up: If you ever get this feeling: āMeh, itās good enough, letās just release and be done with this hellā. Wait. You will regret it, even if youāre on the brink of homelessness and need money, suffer through it and wait. It will be worth it.
It seems like that is backwards based on their own experience. It likely would have been much better experience for them to have said āokay, this is good enough letās get it out there and focus on marketingā instead of continuing to sink more and more time into it. Maybe I am misunderstanding what they are saying but it seems to me this should have been one of the most important lessons to have learned from this: donāt keep banging on the game forever, get it done and out there so you can see what happens. It certainly appears the extra 1 year, 2 years, 3 years of time poured into it made no difference.
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Ponchoā¦ Fezā¦
What a remarkably blatant ripoff.
A decent takeaway:
Itās a huge amount of time to spend on a game when youāre working full time. The end result doesnāt look like it should have taken nearly that long. Sounds like they might have Phil Fished it though, and redone the art and stuff a bunch of times. They also mention that they didnāt know Unity going in. I think thatās a big mistake. You should learn your tech (Unity) working on small projects that donāt matter quite so much to you - figure out the wrong way to do things so you know how to do it right the next time. Only once youāre a total ninja should you dive into making your dream game. That way youāre not restricted by the technology; you think of an idea, and you implement it, the interface between you and the game isnāt a bottleneck.
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I wouldnāt say that at all. I think if anything, itās much more heavily inspired by Cave Story. At least, at first glance.
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A good idea would be to release a trailer/gameplay of your game on Youtube, and if it gets less than 10k views, donāt bother with a kickstarter.
Unfortunately, 2D Pixel platformer with charming graphics are a dime a dozen nowadays.
Itās hard to make a dent with that, if you have nothing that sticks really out of the masses.
No offense, Poncho does look really nice and all.
But with literally thousands of games published each year (Steam had roughly 5,245 releases in 2016, making it a third of all games released on Steam) you need more than just a nice game.
You need an outstanding game, or a niche-game with a starving audience, or both.
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Amen brother 
At least they didnāt give up and working on a new game now.
Thatās the spirit!
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The article reads like a Greek tragedy, all thatās left is for the heros to commit suicide. They managed to make almost all of the common game dev mistakes in a single game. And let it ruin there lives.
Year 1
- We decided to go indie and make a huge game, despite never having made a game before.
Year 2
- We made the art work. Then we remade the art work. Then we remade it again
Year 3
- We realised the art work still sucked, so we hired a freelance artist.
- Since this was out first time designing a game, we went with a super complex, open world, 3D and 2D platformer. Full of twitch puzzles.
- We spent ages on story and back story and side story and forward story and stuff.
- We realised that we couldnāt actually implement most of the stuff we just said, so scrapped most of it.
Year 4
- We quit out jobs. Because things have been going so well on this game.
- We ran out of money and decided to do a Kickstarter. We thought maybe a couple months out from the Kickstarter was a good time to start marketing this game.
- We took out a loan to run a marketing campaign. Which failed because no one was interested in the game.
- We went to Kickstarter anyway, no surprises, it failed.
- We went to a convention with a buggy version of the game. No one was that interested.
- Out of nowhere had a bunch of publishers who offered us funding. We went with a super low offer from a company youāve never heard of, because every one else wanted to change the game.
Year 5
- The publisher screwed us over on the contract big time, and ended up taking the game to another studio.
- We started doing drugs.
Year 6
- We released on steam. We were totally shocked when no one brought the game. I mean, all of the signs up to this point had been great.
- We are currently in major debt, depressed, doing drugs, mentally unstable and unable to hold down a regular job.
- We decided to do it again.
Itās also notable the things they didnāt do, which are normally in a successful post mortem.
- Playtest early and often, and adapt the game to meet players feedback.
- Build a community in some way.
- Market the game at all.
- Research the target audience.
- Develop a consisistient, focused core expereince.
- Use a publisher who cared about the success of the game.
- Have a backup plan.
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Thatās when they said it happened. However I have my doubts. Some of the decisions they made indicate they must have been on something since day one.
Super Mustache was released beginning of last year and seems to have sold over 140,000 copies. Of course, it is priced at only 99 cents now so that helps them to get sales while simultaneous helping to make it harder for the rest of Indies to charge a decent price for their work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVt3kuOXnGs
Still it is an interesting study. Mustache Man generated probably around $75k for the developers (assuming a 30% Steam cut). Poncho generated probably around $95k for someone (the publisher I guess). I bet Super Mustache was in development a much shorter time. Iād seriously be surprised if the developers spent more than 1.5 years building Super Mustache. It looks like the kind of thing I could knock out working very part-time within 6 months (assuming I contracted out at least some of the art work). There might be more to the game than I realize though.
This is the reason I donāt get why people keep going after these huge projects or overly complex projects. When you break it down to money for the time angle it doesnāt make any sense at all. To me anyway. It might make sense to others.
Kind of feels sometimes like āfailing as an indie devā is the new āsucceeding as an indie devā. Like itās cool to talk about how badly your good game failed. People seem to enjoy the battle scars or something.
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It might be like that Sky (whatever it was called not No Manās Sky but that one game where the developers wrote post mortem about their failure) gameā¦ where the post mortem of failure was some of the best marketing they had done for the game.
Thatās not a bad idea. Considering their ātrailerā only got a few thousand views, one would be insane to assume that you could attract anybody to a kickstarter.
The view counts on the YouTube videos for homeless simulator indicate this is a thing. Iām picking that game is going to fail just as much as this one did. At least homeless simulator has a chance to produce some controversy.
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I donāt believe iconic means what that guy thinks it means.
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So you allā¦ it seems to me that many people are making games expecting to make a lot of money from them. I am pretty sure weāve read accounts of other developers not only quitting their jobs, burning through their life savings but also accumulating debtā¦ and then ending up needing to find a full-time job again only they are in a worse condition than they were originally because now they have no savings and more debt.
It makes me wonder am I just one of minority who when I think about doing the Indie thing a big part of my business thinking is to keep development cost & time down so it is worth my time if the game generates $10k?
Seriously I figure if I value my time at $50 per hour then I can put no more than 200 hours of time into a game because I donāt expect it will generate more than $10k for me. And if I contract out art that lowers the amount of time I should invest into the game because Iād be looking at $10k - cost of art which then needs to be divided by $50 to get the number of hours I can put into it.
I mean sure I wouldnāt worry about putting in an extra 10 to 20 hours if absolutely needed. But I mean what are peopleās expectations? Are you guys and gals all expecting to make $50k per game, $100k per game, $500kā¦ even more???
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