How to Survive in Gamedev for Eleven Years Without a Hit

thanks Matthew hopefully this thing's working okay good so you're not special nor is your game and you'll never ship a hit that's the uncomfortable reality for most of us and the sooner you can come to terms with that the sooner you can start figuring out just how to survive as an indie and of course the longer you survive the greater the chance that one day your game will be special and you will ship a hit so I'm Jake Berkut and I love making games I love designing games I love coding and I love shipping games as well so I went India in 2005 and I've made a whole bunch of commercial games most recently Regency solitaire I also love doing game jams and one game month and I've made a bunch of sort of free mini-games and I also co-founded full indie in Vancouver which has got over 3000 members it's a pretty awesome meetup group and I run the UK version so if you're in the UK look up for Lindy dodo UK so I'm a no hit wonder plenty of talks are out there about hits or maybe abject failures and you know there's the failure workshop down there but there aren't many stories about people who survived for a long time and I've survived for over a decade now and that's what I'm going to talk about today I've shipped over ten games all of them have sort of made some kind of profit ranging from very poor to okay and I've meticulously collected a lot of data which I'm going to share with you today I'm a firm believer that you should focus on your own games instead of working for other people and I'm going to explain with in detail why I also think that having a long tail is extremely important is vital to your success and having a back catalogue is really powerful effect also you need to be adaptable and determine these are traits that you need to develop over time I want to change your mindset from I've made a hit game so I want to make a hit game too I want to build a sustainable business now that's not as glamorous sounding but I do believe it's more realistic so the legendary Jeff Vogel he said nobody knows anything and they're basically aren't any magic bullets you know you hear about big hits and so on but we've got this problem where if you only hear about the successful games you're all sort of ignoring all of the the failures and I don't think it's painting a realistic picture one example is indie game the movie I like that movie a lot but it sort of could lead you to believe that if you wreck yourself physically and emotionally for several years and then you ship on Xbox everything will magically be ok which in obviously I don't agree with that so for years I've been searching for the magic formula for game dev success and I've asked people why they think their games are hit some are honest and they say I got lucky I don't really know why I was successful and good good for them others think it was PR and you know marketing that got them successful and going to shows others you know say it was youtubers and twitches who you know made them famous but you know there isn't really any clear-cut answer and you know you might wish to be like Jon blow maybe but the thing is you weren't him from birth you didn't grow up in the same place you didn't learn the same things at him you didn't the same game at the same time as him so in order to be authentic in the games that you create you need to connect to something in yourself and let that come out through your work and you can't do that if you're trying to be someone else so how do you define success well I ask this question to the dev community on Twitter and got lots of answers some people define success as shipping any game at all yeah that's a really good good starter others thought it was if players enjoyed their game or if they innovated and made something new some people have got loftier ambitions and want to retire comfortably or own a Tesla that's not home to me yet and others you know most people really said to be successful is to be able to continue making games for a long time and that's that's what this talk is about so we all know what this sort of indie dream is but the reality is quite different it is very hard work have you ever watched your basement-dwelling noodle eating single indie friends get rich while you struggle to feed your family and pay the mortgage I have and maintaining motivation in those sort of times it is quite tricky you know there are far easier things we could be doing as Indies but why do we do it we do it because we love it because we want to make games so how can we keep making games for a long time in the face of things like the indie apocalypse is there such a thing probably I think this sort of thing has happened many times before in different platforms and it will happen again but if you're fast the market is fast moving and if you adapt and you plan for sustainability and hopefully you're being more resilient so we're going back to the mists of time to 1984 that was my first computer and it came with a manual that taught me how to program basic and I started making games and then I got a Commodore 64 and an Amiga and they were some of the most fun computing times I've ever had and I've played a lot of games over the years you might remember when games came in massive boxes like this I'm glad they you can download them now so for some reason I ended up in my 20s making business software and we made stock control and accounting systems which sounds kind of boring but I learned a lot from that process and in my spare time I was working on a kung-fu platformer game called iron fist that was very passionate about and I was staying up every evening till 4:00 a.m. and all weekend programming this thing and I soon realized that I couldn't go on like this because I felt like a zombie and I had a sort of early midlife crisis and decided to quit my job and go full-time now at the time I had no savings we just moved to a bigger house we'd had a second child and my wife was a full-time mother and I said to her oh I want to make games for a living and she thank goodness for her she said whoa she trusted me and had faith in me to do that because I believed in it so that was great although I just wondered if she was sleep deprived and she'd have agreed to me being a professional juggler or something so I worked on Iron Fist full-time for quite a while and was enjoying it but I soon realized that I'd really the scope was just too big and it was going to take forever to finish and also at the time there was no market for it there was no steam there was no Xbox Live Arcade and all sort of games were sold via download.com or the casual portals and I just didn't think that I could make a go of this type of game I probably could now but not then so I decided to abandon the game and start on a smaller project so the point is I wanted a ship a game and get experience in shipping a game and see what that whole whole thing was like and then improve upon that and around that time I saw bejeweled this is the first one and I liked it a lot and I thought hey I could make a game like that but the different theme and some levels and kind of new mechanics I know to most of you making a match free probably sounds horrific but I actually you know like that genre and had fun making games in that genre so I made a christmas-themed match three game and to save money I used stock art stock photos stock music and I even used the comic sans font there we go so this game it actually played pretty well I still believe but it looked like ass and as a result it sold eighteen hundred dollars worth that's net not gross that's what I've received and that is over a hundred and twenty months okay so ten ten years what's interesting though is over on the right you can see it's still selling a few units even now even today and we'll come back to that later so I know kind of how long it took to make and worked out that it was it earned me about six dollars fifty an hour so I would definitely call that a fail however the fact it sold even a single copy made me think okay well let's try this again and I thought I know what to do I will reuse the engine and make an easter themed mastery game and instead of using stock car I'll pay a friend of mine to make some pixel art because I'm sure that's what casual gamers who love pixel art right obviously looking back I realized what an idiot I was because the game didn't do very well either this has made nearly three thousand dollars over ten years so that's not done very well another fail so around this time and in fact for the next two games I didn't make any money at all for eighteen months we just didn't make any money from games and I had to do IT consultancy to make ends meet so I had to sort of set up networks and get rid of viruses and my wife she she did science writing and got a part-time job at the University to make ends meet we also got out loans we told them it was for home improvements but it wasn't and we we shuffled money around on credit card using 0% deals so I buy all my food on credit cards and shuffle the money around and we also got low-income tax credits from the government and we use that to pay child - we could keep working so we live very frugally we didn't do anything fun and it was kind of not not a great time of course I'm not advising this I'm just saying this is what I did and it's very much possible to survive you know if you want to find a way and I sort of did so yeah if you're starting out clearly you need some kind of runway don't do what I did even if you're making your 10th game you still need some kind of runway you've got to make sure you can reach the end of it without you know selling your stall so the only thing is that a lot of people procrastinate so maybe sometimes there is something to be said for just getting started and figure figuring out things as you go along once you start something and it's difficult to go back your brain starts working on solutions as to how to sort of move forward and that's something I found anyway so after Easter bonus and it's sort of flop I got contacted by a guy an American at time who I've still never met to this day who said that The Wizard of Oz book IP was going to expire in a hundred year so then it would become public domain and we could use the book IP and make a match three game and he said he would pay for the art and a musician and I just had to code it for free and we would share the revenue at the end again that's not something I devised but he seemed to know what he was talking about and he had some good contacts and I thought okay let's give it a go the game actually did turn out very well and I also had to switch to a new technology and make a new engine which I sold on the Blitz Macs forums and I sold 200 copies of this engine for $50 each and those people paid me for the privilege to fix my engine and tell me how how to improve it so that was pretty neat one of the things this opened my eyes to the fact that it's definitely worth spending money on art and audio okay I do really believe that if you if you if you make your game look good it will sell better that's not always the case but it really is kind of obvious and I see it a lot of games come out and I'm like that just won't sell people won't equate it with value because it doesn't look good so how did the Wizard of Oz do well you may not see this sort of low level stuff but seven years after it's sold I did a mobile deal with the publisher and got a big sort of advance on sales so anything can happen in the lifetime of a game that's seven years later we can look at in aggregate and you can see that the last five years had a whole new boost of revenue and I'll talk about how I did that in a moment so it's made about $90,000 net about two hundred and fifty thousand gross it didn't cost me anything to make because somebody else paid for the art and so on and it's maybe about $100 an hour but it's taken nine years to get that much money right at the time in the first year only made $20,000 and and we thought it was a flop okay so it's a success now but it was a very long success I also thought okay well I can improve upon this and make another Christmas based map three but this time we better graphics so I paid well actually I had to persuade my wife to let me spend $2,000 on art the 3d shapes are actually made by the guy who made the robots in rise of the robots if and if you remember that game and 3d rendered backgrounds and I had to make it very quickly because Christmas was looming and I think with seasonal deadlines the way the thing with seasonal deadlines is you can't move them you can't phone up the Pope and say hey man can you move Christmas to February because my milestone is delayed it's not it's not going to happen but that game overall has done pretty well each of those spikes is Christmas and every year and if we look at it in aggregate we can see that the most recent five years again have done better than the first five years and that's because well the reap remotion each year was I went back to the casual portals and said just emailed them instead will Yuri promote my game and they did if you don't ask you won't get promotions you've got to try and some portals that wouldn't take the game early on change their standards they'd probably drop them and then took my game so that was good and I also got the game localized which met gave us new opportunities and I also double the amount of levels in the game and slapped a gold label on the game because everybody loves gold stuff and that did very well and gave the game a new lease of life so keep your game alive there are many different ways you can keep your game alive way after you've shipped it and obviously I only do that as long as it makes sense to there may be a time where you just need to let it die in and move on to something else so it's made nearly $100,000 it really didn't take me long to make and it's made about two hundred dollars an hour now which was pretty good I think but it took a long time to get there so in the first year it only sold a thousand units so just let that sink in only six percent of the total revenue in the first year so that's why it is essential that you think long tail about your games and hopefully that will give you an idea that you shouldn't really be heavily discounting your game or bundling it in the first year or maybe ever okay so around this time as I said I was totally desperate for cash because these games haven't made any money and big-fish games they contacted me and said would I do some contract work for them and I decide to deal and they've been gave me some money and I paid off my debts and it was like how in a first-person shooter game when you get all shot up to and you have to go and hide behind a wall in heel that's what this was like for me so I worked on that game for nearly a year and I worked with a great designer at big fish called John cutter and it turned out to be a casual game hit and it's been cloned many times and is a very popular game that people still play today but I can't share their sales figures sorry because that's owned by big fish and they probably SiC a lawyer on my ass or something so then after that game we they asked me to make another couple of games and I agreed I made this game on well mail about a dude who's got kind of all kinds of food and bugs in his gut and you have to go in and explode them the theme wasn't really everyone's a cup of tea and really any game you make the themes not going to appeal to everyone unless it's about candy so so because these games went well they said to me hey why don't you move to Vancouver and join the studio that we're just starting up and you can work there so I talked to my wife about this and and we thought it would be a great opportunity for us and our kids and so so we moved over there the overall experience was was good for sure in Vancouver so oh I'm on the wrong slide sorry guys that was the thing about contract work obviously I chose good contract work then I've had lots of offers of terrible contract work over the years and you really got to know which ones are right for you and within your skill set but I moved to Vancouver and one thing that I that I made sure happened was I was allowed to keep my company so I made sure the contract said I could keep graylien games whilst I work for them because I didn't see it as like a long-term you know thing that I would do forever so I learned to say yes to opportunities early on I became manager of the business software company I also ended up running an Aikido Club and I moved to Vancouver to work for this studio all of these things have been growth experiences and I'm glad I said yes to them that's my dad he's the guy who bought me the spectrum in 1984 and sadly he passed away when I was working at big fish games and it was a big big shock for me and I like to think he you know can see what I've the successes I've had up to now and that he would be proud of me but unfortunately I'm an atheist so I don't think that's happening that dick is passing was that I really ate what was important to me in life and that was things like my family you know how I spend my spare time and what I'm working on and what the long-term goals were so that is when I really began to learn to say no to things okay so you know if you ship on mobile you get all these ridiculous emails through about ad monetization platforms you ship on Steam you get all these emails through about key giveaways this is a great opportunity for you to give away ten thousand copies of your game no no it's not but you also get some deals that maybe do sound quite juicy you think well maybe I'll do that you know this this crap you bundle or that crappy bundle but you have to evaluate them all in terms of will they help me grow and will they meet my businesses long-term goals and if they don't you know and they I'm kind of fun distraction you have to ditch them and move on so whilst I was in Vancouver I co-founded a group called Phil Indy with Alex Vause drove any full Indy members in the house all right but this happened because in 2007 I went to an Indy meetup in Birmingham in the UK and we met in cliff Harris's hotel lobby and got very very drunk until about 4:00 a.m. in the morning but it was actually a revolutionary thing for me because I got to meet other developers and find out you know what they're up to but it was just the fact that somebody understood what I was doing sorry and the problems that I was going through and that for me was revolutionary and that's why I wanted to set up for Lindy in Vancouver for Lindy now has monthly meetups with over 3,000 members it's got they didn't all turn up at one so it'd be a nightmare they also have game jams and an annual conference we've done three conferences so you know there's probably hopefully be one next year go to Vancouver it should be awesome now most people tell you to do networking but for me networking is really it's about making friends I don't have any co-workers or no HR department to support me so being part of a like-minded group is very powerful and really important to me so I've been to game jams shows meetups and I spend far too much time on social media but one of the things I've learnt is it's really important to help people out to share information and when you start sharing information and tips and so on it comes back to you and over the years I've got consultancy gigs and found investors and just got loads of really useful tips to help me sort of move forward in fact the main reason I would say I've survived as in India is because other successful developers have helped me out unlike business software where you have to basically keep everything secret from your competitors and they do the same with you Indies aren't competitive we're collaborative and long may that continue so um after a while at big fish games I decided that corporate life wasn't for me and I quit and I quit with some experience I also had a big fish games pension which I immediately cashed in to make a runway for my next game so I made a game called spring bonus I'm a bit salty about the spring I like you know the flowers and so on and I like the fact the Sun is coming back so I enjoyed making this game and I use social media to recruit artists and I made a big list of them and tested them and went through and picked the ones I needed and I crowdsource localization that would probably make ization experts cringe but it totally worked for me and I learned about using metrics and doing extensive testing at big fish games so I was able to push the game out to a load of people get their stats back and then balance the game accordingly the best thing was I actually shipped the game seven minutes after my non-compete with Big Fish Games expired so this is what the graph is someone panicking looks like I love the amount of hours I work on every game and I was cruising through January February you can see it there and then in March I was like oh my god Easter is a month away I need to actually finish this game and get it out the door now that highest peak of 84 hours or something on the day I was supposed to ship the game the night before I'd stayed up all night long and I tested all the levels had 1 hour sleep and was built making the final build my wife came into the office and said she didn't feel very well and I had to take at a hospital and when she was in hospital they said she had a rare form of cancer and luckily it was a treatable form and because we lived in Canada who has a healthcare system which you any us guys have got to sort out I can't believe it anyway she got the treatment she needed and I'm very pleased to say that she has the all clear now but that was an extremely tense launch game launch and since then it was very harrowing for her but it was tough for me and the kids as well and I had a whole summer just very listless didn't really feel like doing anything considered quitting making games I actually sort of sort of took some medication and sort of managed to come out of that time period eventually but it was very tough and it reminded me that unhealthy deadlines are just not good and to try to avoid those I'm not I still haven't perfected that but this is something we we need to treat ourselves with respect because you don't know when the proverbial will hit the fan you know when some kind of family thing will crop up and cause problem anyway how did spring bonus do after all the agony it's that's five years of sales there are small bumps for spring and it's made pretty good money $18,000 net revenue it didn't cost me much to make because I paid the artist an upfront to sort of say I'm serious about this let's get started and I gave them revenue on the back end and that's worked very nicely for me and I recommend that approach it's obviously easier if you shipped games before and they trust you one of the things is it's made about hundred thirty dollars an hour total but it could have made way more if I hadn't wasted hours and hours on stupid mobile ports because mobile is not very good I've tried mobile games for three of my games developers actually came to me and said hey would you let me port your game to mobile and we do a revenues split and I've tried that and thing is it's really boring and soulless they sing in these builds and then they don't work very well and you have to send them back feedback and keep testing them and then you have to do all the iOS provisioning profile crap which is just horrible and at the end of the day they don't make that much money that's what I found obviously people have had different success with them and so for spring bonus the green bit is what what it made from mobile it made $12,000 for mobile which I split with the dev and okay that's more than zero but it meant that I wasn't focusing on something else which is desktop games which is where my skillset lies so after spring bonus I worked with clay entertainment for a bit on EETs munchies in various roles and Jamie Chang is the CEO there and he helped us out at a time when we really appreciated his help Fran actually and so on and so I learned a lot from him he's an expert at business if you can ever accost him and get some tips do so he'd probably hate me for saying that because he's a busy guy and I also did a lot of consultancy work around the time because I built up a reputation as knowing what to do in casual games and now it's time to talk about this graph which is the dollars per hour of all of the projects I've worked on the green one in the middle is when I was an employee at Big Fish Games now that obviously had benefits like medical and sick pay and holiday paying a pension but ultimately it's one of the lowest earnings things I've done per hour even though it was a good job and the blue bars apart from the first two failures which you saw are my own titles and they've all made more money than being an employee and being a contractor so early on I said there is a problem with contract work and the problem is that it's got a fixed ceiling whereas if you make your own games and pay play the long game you should hopefully come out all right in the end also if you track your business like I've done you can find out which of those projects you're working on you should do again if I didn't track things I might think contractor what was great and keep doing it I mean I know there's a time and a place for it and maybe a lot of us need to do it at different times but just think very carefully about should you be doing that or your own games so this is a breakdown of the revenue I've earned from games over ten odd years and you can see they've come has come from many sources but in 2011 I decided to switch focus from working for other people to working on my own games and that's the blue part of the graph so that's going up hopefully and I'm not even earning more money than I was eight years ago but it's a hell of a lot more satisfying and my quality of life is a lot better I've also got my eggs in many baskets so I earn income from multiple different revenue streams that's one month in in June last year the black is that's a payment from the FBI for adding a backdoor into my games also on the on the right you can see all the different platforms I've used over the years and some of them have died some of them have been bought out and there will be new ones in the future it's an ever-changing space and that's why you need to keep looking for these opportunities so in 2012 I decided to move back to England for many reasons I missed a lot of my friends from Vancouver but I learned a lot of stuff there I learned how to be a better designer and producer I learned how to direct artists I think this one in the audience we probably disagree with me I think you can only really heard artists you know in the in the direction you want them to go I also learned the importance of metrics and testing we actually worked on a free-to-play game at big fish games but that was sort of enough to put me off forever and I learned about networking and I joined Toastmasters which is a really good group if you want to improve your speaking skills and also in Canada everyone is obsessed by hockey they just talk about it all the freaking time so when I go back to the UK it cost a lot of money to move continents right and I had to equip our house of all the sort of appliances and buy a car and everything else and some of that debt is still on 0% credit cards today ok another time a friend of mine cast Prince from puppy games he said will you port Titan attacks my PC game to mobile and I was desperate and I said ok yeah let's do that and I liked the game a lot but it turned out to be a lot more challenging to do the port a lot more complex than I had originally thought so I had to sort of put it to one side and turn it into a side project while I did other things eventually it shipped in in a humble bundle and made some money but it's one of the worst performing projects I've ever worked on so do not make decisions out of desperation it's really important to remember that every game project will take longer than you think it would take a game project is never quick and you really need to explore your options very carefully before you decide what project to work I know that's kind of obvious but just remember it so whilst I should have been working on Titan attacks I ran out of money so I needed to make another game and I work made this game spooky bonus a lot of people thought spring bonus was for kids because of the Easter theme so I thought well okay let's make a darker game and after living in Vancouver I realized that North Americans are obsessed by Halloween we're nowhere near as obsessed by this in the UK that's were thought let's do a Halloween themed game and I spent some money on art and music and so on I had to get a loan to spend that money and it's actually done very well indeed it was a casual game hit and it's made it's actually our best-selling game to date the only problem with casual game hit is the portals take most of the money like 70% of it you get 30 it's the opposite of steam so even though it made them a lot of money it did me okay but it wasn't it wasn't my golden ticket so why did it work out well well it was a very small scope it took me three months to make it definitely resonated with the audience I spend money on art made it made it look good I didn't do a mobile version I focused just on making the PC one as good as possible it was localized at the beginning and it was my seventh match three game okay I don't know if I should be ashamed of that or proud of that but it by that point I knew I was doing and it turned out well we launched a good time in the casual market which is sort of dying now and I launched on all the right portals and I even got an advance from one of them to give them an exclusive deal which really helped with cash flow but the most important thing I learned was everyone loves exploding pumpkins so if you can fit one of those into your game somewhere maybe make shower in the shower shower with a pumpkin simulator or something like that I think you'll be okay so while we were making spooky bonus my wife suggested we make a Regency themed Jane Austen romantic card game and I said actually that sounds like a really good idea no one's done it before and so I asked her to work with me as researcher designer tester and so on and she agreed and we made the game but but at the beginning we heard about a grant for the southwest of England which is a sort of tech wasteland that I live in I think we've only had you know computers for a few few years mostly it's just tractors and stuff and we heard about this grant we pitched for the grant and we got it and I did all these things which you should do to get a grant but basically they're the foundation of a good business plan and you should do it for all of your games I think one of the things that helped is I had a track record and I said to them I said to them hey at the end of this funding you want to tick a box which says you back some projects which actually you know made some money and were successful and if you want to tick that box back me and they did so that worked out pretty well nevertheless the game took longer than planned and I had to find other funding sources this is a recurring theme you may notice so I tried to get a bank loan but that was just no good they just they're not interested in Indies because you don't have anything they can come and send round guys with baseball bats to collect if you don't pay the money back I actually ended up getting a loan from another indie business which took like 30 minutes to set up and was that came about through making friends I also put my own personal savings into the game and we managed to get tax credits for the game in the UK you may have some similar thing in your area our tax credits were tied into making a culturally British game which ours was and we actually were able to claim backs 25% of our salaries which was pretty cool I got that in a lump sum at the beginning of this year I didn't do crowdfunding I'd rather convince one investor that the milestone is delayed then 10,000 braying Kickstarter users your mileage may vary but that's just my sort of particular paranoia so there's apparently a the Jason Della Rocca he's a very clever guy and he's doing the whole talk about funding so if you've got a full pass you might want to go and check that one out so how did Regents solitare do well it turned out to do very well on the casual portals and it got people loved it they gave it great reviews it want to kind of few awardee type things the only thing it didn't get is an IGF nomination and I'm I'm not bitter or sour about that at all one thing to note is that it made 14 percent of its revenue on Steam okay so most of its revenue is off of steam however it only got press once it came out on steam and it's kind of a bit of a sad fact that games aren't really viewed as you validated as games until they've come out on Steam I don't really like that really but that seems to be the way things are so as I mentioned I worked with my wife on Regency solitaire we did the whole thing like this for for a year normally I'd advise against hiring employees because there are sort of can of worms in terms of finances and legal stuff but we've been together for 15 years at that point and we sort of knew what we were getting into even though Helens friends said you know it would drive me insane working with my husband but we managed that by having different office spaces we come together for meetings and then we can go back and be introverts in our own spaces again but we discussed the design together the visual design the story all kind of aspects of the game and we also shared PR and marketing duties which was great because I you know that sort of thing can be a bit of a drag and we also indulged our passion in British history and went to sort of various locations for research which was nice but it was a learning curve Helen expected certain amounts of mentorship and I had to balance that with the reality of shipping an indie game she had to get used to using Photoshop to do all of the sort of art direction and so on and we did do a lot of design by committee and as I've done a lot of design over the previous 10 years there were some arguments about that sort of thing also Helen had to make the story fit the game so she was used to sort of writing but we had to change the story many times to make it fit the game so that's something there was a learning curve for us and I had to be a project manager for not only the artists and the musicians but for my wife can you imagine being a project manager for your partner and telling them what they should work on and why I also had to give her timely feedback when all I really wanted to do was hide in my room and code and we had different daily routines she's a morning person and I'm an evening person so we had to find one sort of part of the day that that worked but ultimately two heads were better than one it was really good to have an invested team member and this is one of the best decisions I've made in the 10 years is to have someone else to bounce ideas off of to improve the game and it's not having a jogging partner you know you they turn up to work you turn up to work and you get stuff done together however a friend of mine is sitting over there actually he once described my life as indie hard mode because when you when you've got kids the thing is your productivity will suffer but paradoxically you have to earn more money to survive so is it's very tough so my advice is try to work hard and get rich before you have kids okay so after Regency solitaire I pitched an idea to Cliff Harris of positive he sort of publishes indie games he actually rejected my first idea and I went back with another one which was shadow hand which he accepted so he's helping fund this game which is sort of big relief off my mind because I've spent most of the last ten years trying to Scrabble around for money and this game is a RPG card game which involves a sort of solitaire style mechanic that drives these battles it's set in 1717 you're a highway woman who is an aristocrat by day and a highway woman by night and we've got our full sort of inventory system you can even wear a beard if you want there's a black one as well if you're you know into that something and we've got a full sort of visual novel aspect to it like we did with Regency solitaire so that it should come out this summer hopefully and if there any press here who want to talk about it I'm here for the week and we're showing off at rezzed in London in April so a little while ago I asked on gamasutra Indies I asked them to give me their sustainability tips don't worry if you can't read that it's on Gamasutra indy sustainability sustainability top tips you can look it up I got loads of them and they contradicted each other as well so most people were sort of saying stuff like spend as little as money as possible some of them said don't go to conferences so I guess I'm not here now and others said do spend money on art and tech and go big I think the reason for the discrepancy is as people are at different stages in their indie adventure and I do believe is sensible early on to control your costs figure out what you're doing learn you know the most from your mistakes and then start to spend money on the right project whether it's your money or you've got investments or grants even better spend right money on them on the right project later on so one key thing is to be able to weather flops so over the years I've had a couple of really bad flops at the beginning I've had games that have only made money after like five or ten years and I've had some hit games but somebody else took all the money and I've had a few you know spooky bonus was pretty good so I've had a few successes have kept me going and Dan Cooke he's a very clever man and he's written a blog post called minimum sustainable success which talks about making many many games and hopefully you know surviving by making sure that you can survive not one just one flop but multiple flops in a row my biggest and most important tip is to get a cat this is my cat Sookie she is very fluffy and stroking her is just the best possible thing you can do for stress and and I must have come up with so many ideas sitting in that chair in the garden another thing I need to give a nod out to some old people will know this reference in 2004 I read cultivate burning desire by Steve Pavlina and it it set me on a path of well that that's what made me go indie when I read that article made me quit my job and everything I'm not sure if I should thank him or not but I did follow our path of personal development and looking at what motivates me and how it can be more efficient and so on it's a whole separate topic but it really did help me get ryeom today and there's a lot more work to do so this is the graph of someone who didn't give in this is my revenue from my own games over the last 10 11 years it's going pretty well now but it's taken you know a long time to get here and there's no guarantee that the future will be bright either but one thing is that I'm kind of certain of is that I will find a way somehow I always sort of find a way to keep going and there's a lot of advice out there for how you can succeed and hopefully you've got some ideas from my story but what ultimately makes the biggest difference is you and what sinew and whether you've got the will to survive on the flight over here I watch the latest Rocky movie ok it's pretty good it's like Rocky 7 or something and in it he says something like one step at a time one unto the time one game at a time and that my friends is how you do it thank so yeah if you have any questions please find a mic great thanks for the talk my name is Mark McCulloch I am also an indie game developer hi mom and I have three small questions that I may have large answers so the first one is spring bonus you said right yeah was that a premium game or free-to-play game Oh on mobile you mean okay just in general like you said it's a it's a casual game right okay whether all of my casual download games on PC were premium so people paid $9.99 or $6.99 if they're a member of a club some of the sites have a system where you can join up and play as many games as you want like Netflix or something and then I get paid per minute of play one of my games spooky bonus had 5 million minutes of play in the first month which I think has wasted a huge amount of human the time right but we did launch spring bonus on mobile and it was a demo like seven level demo and then at the end it said pay whatever to get all of the rest of the levels which some people just didn't understand they just didn't seem to get this idea so it wasn't technically free-to-play it was like gated content or something I guess demo full version okay second question you inferred that you do not like free-to-play why do you not like free-to-play so bring in why don't I like free-to-play okay so when I worked at big fish games I read and studied a lot of stuff about human psychology and all the tricks and tactics you can use to make people spend money and about whales and all this sort of stuff and after doing all of that I just felt dirty and I decided that I didn't really want to employ those techniques ever again on human beings so that's why great and final question you said that you've made seven match three games yeah why have you liked how different were the match three where they still like is it just like a reskin or where there were the mechanics different like why did you sort of stick in that sort of Nisha so why did I make seven match threes and were they different okay well basically whenever you ship a game you never put in all the stuff you wanted to put in and you have a big list of features you didn't complete so for every game one of those games that I made I change the theme up and I added in some more features from before that I didn't have time to do before plus the theme always kind of change is what kind of power ups you can put in and what kind of objects you can use so every game improved and the last game spooky bonus had a quite a large meta game about decorating your house with first goopy objects and I use that same meta game in Regency solitaire so there was always an improvement for me for each one even ray skinning again people talk about rescanning Bri skinning again properly still can take a couple of hundred hours let alone making all the new levels and all the new features perfect thank you so much thank you hi you talk a little bit more about how you trapped your hours and the views like the special software for that or okay yeah no I'm pretty old-school I just used Excel and I just basically typed in start and end times on particular tasks and then summarized all one thing I did was I still do is is I categorize tasks so they might be coding they might be testing they might be dealing with contractors so I'm able to look within a certain project on the breakdown of tasks what I actually find is that making a game the coding portion might only be a quarter of the entire time there's a lot of time just dealing with assets and plugging those in and doing design and doing marketing and PR yeah so that's how I do it just old-school but it works did you do it like a daily basis as a routine or like a weekly basis yeah no a daily basis every time I open up the compiler or do any work I just make a log entry okay I'm bit sort of yeah well the cool anally retentive I think is the word that looked very useful thank you okay go there I was curious if you had any tips on how to sustain motivation through the failures so there's the financials but there's also the sort of emotional side of that so how did I sustain motivation through the phase is it just because well a couple of things I sometimes think having a family is both a blessing and a curse in the sense that I had to provide for them and and when you have to provide for your family you you know that you can't sort of fail you've got to kind of find a way and keep going and so I've always had to keep finding away and keep going so that's one sort of form of motivation I also stayed motivated by doing stuff like one time I had some money in my company and I took it out and paid a small chunk off the mortgage and I did that because I knew that when I got hungry I would start to be motivated and make the next game that's not healthy it's not healthy motivation but I knew that it sort of work for me luckily I'm sort of beyond that now and I feel that I've made good games and I want to keep making good games and improve that sort of skill so I think my motivation has changed over over the years but I don't know this is such a wide topic there's a lot of stuff about figuring out what time of day work best about having to do lists where the easy tasks you know you can do here everything's broken down the whole one step at a time thing is big for me but also at the same time visualizing the end goal which is a successful game that you've launched I just love launching and chipping games and seeing how well they do and wanting to improve from one to the other so it's a culmination of things I guess Thanks right I think we are done less anyone's got any more or one at the front maybe you better use the mic sorry yeah now leaves now these kind of have all these games that have a long tail do you find you spend much time maintaining games that you've already released from a long time ago or has that not that maintaining work not stacked up against you right so do I spend time maintaining games I released a long time ago I did up until recently that's how come I got you know this whole new lease of life from these old games you know it keep sort of maintaining them and it's more to be honest about maintaining a relationship with the distributors and getting them to reap remote the game but I did I was maintaining them but recently I've decided to sort of let these ten-year-old games go to the side now and just 100% focus on my new games because I want every hour every thought I've got to be for the new games and not to be distracted it'd be great if I had someone else in the team maybe who did deal with all that stuff a biz dev person or something but it's not yes not something I'm doing anymore ok I think we are done so thank you very much

Channel: GDC

Views: 539,362

Rating: 4.900589 out of 5

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design

Id: JmwbYl6f11c

Length: 52min 12sec (3132 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 20 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/ramosmarbella]

Yes, finally a post I can relate to.

[u/Dani_SF]

This is a great talk.

[u/rotomangler]

I did 16. Never had a real hit. Kind of aged out of the industry. Doesn't matter too much about not shipping hits. There are a ton of fellow developers who have never enjoyed it either

[u/Pidroh]

Pretty solid concept, if you focus on not increasing costs while upgrading yourself in a long term basis you can increase your revenue in time, I believe.

I really wished all GDC talks had text versions though

[u/jhocking]

oh neat, I remember Jake/Grey Alien from back when he started the company by developing casual games with BlitzMax. I think he's mentioned in the credits of this little game I made back then, for inspiring the idea:

http://www.newarteest.com/games/flamewar.html

[u/Mattho]

How relevant are any of those portals today? It's an old talk. Alos, he really downplays his games it seems.

[u/h4tt3n]

saw this and loved it. He does a complete money earned/work time breakdown of his complete gamedev career. Also, the guy's got a great sense of humor.

[u/[deleted]]

I'm old enough to not last in anything 11 more years.

[u/Zerve]

This was a nice watch and somewhat motivational. But he "did" have a hit or two didn't he?