I am sitting on an unpublished and (depending on how much I want to do) potentially almost complete puzzle game, thus far entirely my own work, and I need to decide what to do with it. I wrote most of it starting almost 4 years ago, and mostly stopping a year after that, as a way to teach myself to program. I’ve revisited it a few times since then, performing lots of refactoring and optimization as my coding skills improved, and implementing a couple of new ideas as I thought them up. Currently the game mechanics are pretty polished. With a few weeks of bug fixes I would say publishable. I’ve made and tested 40 levels. Because they are short, I would like to make 2 or 3 times as many before publishing. I estimate that this would take several months at the rate I am currently able to devote free time to it. Lastly, the artwork, sound effects, and music are sorely lacking. I would need to commission an artist skilled at 3D modeling, rigging, skinning, and animation to make at least 2 human models (1 male, 1 female), and one giant spider model, with about 20 animations each (the human models can share skeletons and animations). I could use something like this for music, and something like this for sound effects. The code is already in place to play sound and music. I have written a complicated storyline, but I am not confident it is good writing. I have not gotten a million words of bad fiction out of the way. Integrating it into the game would take a lot of coding time (though I have laid some of the groundwork already), and I think it might be better to make it Yet Another Puzzle Game With No Storyline. If I was to include it, I estimate it would take 9 months at my current rate of time spent on this project per time lived. I would also want to make a tutorial out of several intro levels (have temporary overlays “Press these keys to run” and such). It’s using the Unity Game Engine (Currently the free version), meaning I can publish to quite a lot of platforms without much work.
I would like to get the opinion of someone with relevant knowledge, whether it is worth trying to sell this, and how much further work I should put into it first (funging against finishing grad school in computer engineering faster, and ultimately either hardware engineering work for some big corporation plus high-risk, high expected dollar investment on the side (if I can learn to do it well), or working in startups directly). I’m mostly optimizing for expected dollars, because after I ensure a comfortable enough existence for myself (I don’t intend to have kids) I want to use the rest for effective altruism.
I can provide an alpha version of the game or partial storyline notes on request.
My friend did an extremely simple Unity game (with nice graphics and music), added AdMob advertising, put an Android version as a free game on Google Play, and gets about 20 dollars a month (during the recent half of the year, and the number seems stable). That’s the only data point I have.
I suppose your game would be better (but I don’t really know what the players value), so… let’s make a wild guess that it could make 50 dollars a month during the following 5 years. That’s like 5×12×50 = 3000 dollars total. Maybe! If you need 9 months to finish it (beware the planning fallacy!), it is 300 dollars per month of work. I don’t know how much time during the month you would spend coding. Discounting for the planning fallacy and the uncertainty of outcome, let’s make it, say, 100 dollars per month of work.
Of course, besides money you get some additional benefits such as feeling good and having a nice item in your portfolio (probably irrelevant for most jobs you consider).
If the payoff is that low, it’s not worth working in the storyline (which is what would take 9 months (Edit: typo)). I’m already making a decent wage as a TA. It could still be worth publishing roughly as-is. But I’m hoping I can get away with publishing to PC/Mac/Linux and charging a few dollars per player.
You can publish it on google play now, as it is… and if you later decide so, edit the storyline, add a level or two, and sell it on PC later.
The advantage is that a) you get some money now, and b) when the final version is ready, you will already have a few fans, which will be more likely to buy it. (Another advantage is that if your game has some bugs or other problems, you can use the feedback to polish the game before you start charging players. I suspect a paying customer will be more angry about bugs.)
From what you say, it sounds like it would be quite a while before ad revenue from a free game would pay back what I spent on commissioning3D artists.
An ad banner like in AdMob would interfere with gameplay quite a lot. The control scheme is designed for full keyboard (but would work well with a game controller with joysticks). It would take significant work to translate it to a tablet screen (a cell phone screen is definitely too small). Maybe this kind of annoyance would be a feature if I was trying to sell a full version that was ad-free alongside it, but my game is complicated and I expect will take some getting into it, and I think this would just drive most people away and earn it 1-star ratings.
I’m not that worried about bugs that would significantly damage user experience in gameplay. I’ve been playing it for a while myself (Until Minecraft, it was my favorite game to play while listening to debates). The remaining few ones are basically just results of things I’ve added recently, like smooth camera transitions when you’re playing as a spider and you crawl on a wall. (which has caused the camera to wiggle a little bit under some conditions, I think it’s due to numerical instability in the way I made it rotate to follow the character) The bugs I would expect to take time to fix are the ones that only show up on other platforms than the one I’ve played on (PC), and I can find those by looking through the way my game interacts with the operating system (saving user-created files, loading them, browsing for them, changing screen resolution, accessing preferences files). It’s not necessary to play through the game to find them. The outside view says “There will be more bugs than you expect, and it doesn’t take much to ruin user experience.” To which I respond that I have published software before (not that I own, but that I developed during internships) and I have some feel for how bad bugs popping up is, and that I would take that “feel” into acccount when testing it thoroughly on different platforms before release, and I don’t expect that to take more than a couple of weeks.
The gaining fans thing is a good and important point. I might be able to do that with a Humble Indie Bundle,which has the advantage of a precedent that is pretty much accepted where basically giving it away for free ends when the humble bundle ends, you don’t have to create a “deluxe” version of the game to justify it not being free anymore.
As far as feedback about things besides bugs (level difficulty is a concern), I bet I can find people willing to test a beta version and give feedback for the privelege of playing it early, or (at worst) in return for playtesting their own games (if I ask around at my school’s gamebuilders club, whose meeting I’m planning to attend next week to demo my game and get their opinion on the same question I asked here (“how viable do you think this is commercially?”)). I have looked at the games they are making online. They appear to be a lot less complicated and polished than mine, and will not take much work to play as much as I expect them to maybe expect in return for playing some levels of mine. I have played many games, and never sent an email to a developer giving them feedback. I wouldn’t expect much feedback if I just published a game, even if I included a message saying “please send feedback.”
It’s not going to be worth spending nine months making a complicated storyline that players will press A to skip. Save it for an RPG.
Would would be worth doing, if you can do it well, is to take elements of a storyline that set a tone, and integrate it into the game to provide a unique setting (eg Braid, Binding of Isaac). But don’t do a convoluted plot that pops up between levels.
I think I will take this advice. I have code to let the player read “memories” of other characters scattered throughout the levels, which I can provide a little text for. And I like my backstory and setting more than I like the story that I came up with for the player to play through. Edit: Double post, sorry. It looked like it wasn’t submitting my comment so I copied the text opened a new tab, checked to see that the comment wasn’t there, and then pasted, but apparently the other comment was just late to show up.
I think I will take this advice. I have code to let the player read “memories” of other characters scattered throughout the levels, which I can provide a little text for. And I like my backstory and setting more than I like the story that I came up with for the player to play through.
I am sitting on an unpublished and (depending on how much I want to do) potentially almost complete puzzle game, thus far entirely my own work, and I need to decide what to do with it. I wrote most of it starting almost 4 years ago, and mostly stopping a year after that, as a way to teach myself to program. I’ve revisited it a few times since then, performing lots of refactoring and optimization as my coding skills improved, and implementing a couple of new ideas as I thought them up. Currently the game mechanics are pretty polished. With a few weeks of bug fixes I would say publishable. I’ve made and tested 40 levels. Because they are short, I would like to make 2 or 3 times as many before publishing. I estimate that this would take several months at the rate I am currently able to devote free time to it. Lastly, the artwork, sound effects, and music are sorely lacking. I would need to commission an artist skilled at 3D modeling, rigging, skinning, and animation to make at least 2 human models (1 male, 1 female), and one giant spider model, with about 20 animations each (the human models can share skeletons and animations). I could use something like this for music, and something like this for sound effects. The code is already in place to play sound and music. I have written a complicated storyline, but I am not confident it is good writing. I have not gotten a million words of bad fiction out of the way. Integrating it into the game would take a lot of coding time (though I have laid some of the groundwork already), and I think it might be better to make it Yet Another Puzzle Game With No Storyline. If I was to include it, I estimate it would take 9 months at my current rate of time spent on this project per time lived. I would also want to make a tutorial out of several intro levels (have temporary overlays “Press these keys to run” and such). It’s using the Unity Game Engine (Currently the free version), meaning I can publish to quite a lot of platforms without much work.
I would like to get the opinion of someone with relevant knowledge, whether it is worth trying to sell this, and how much further work I should put into it first (funging against finishing grad school in computer engineering faster, and ultimately either hardware engineering work for some big corporation plus high-risk, high expected dollar investment on the side (if I can learn to do it well), or working in startups directly). I’m mostly optimizing for expected dollars, because after I ensure a comfortable enough existence for myself (I don’t intend to have kids) I want to use the rest for effective altruism.
I can provide an alpha version of the game or partial storyline notes on request.
My friend did an extremely simple Unity game (with nice graphics and music), added AdMob advertising, put an Android version as a free game on Google Play, and gets about 20 dollars a month (during the recent half of the year, and the number seems stable). That’s the only data point I have.
I suppose your game would be better (but I don’t really know what the players value), so… let’s make a wild guess that it could make 50 dollars a month during the following 5 years. That’s like 5×12×50 = 3000 dollars total. Maybe! If you need 9 months to finish it (beware the planning fallacy!), it is 300 dollars per month of work. I don’t know how much time during the month you would spend coding. Discounting for the planning fallacy and the uncertainty of outcome, let’s make it, say, 100 dollars per month of work.
Of course, besides money you get some additional benefits such as feeling good and having a nice item in your portfolio (probably irrelevant for most jobs you consider).
If the payoff is that low, it’s not worth working in the storyline (which is what would take 9 months (Edit: typo)). I’m already making a decent wage as a TA. It could still be worth publishing roughly as-is. But I’m hoping I can get away with publishing to PC/Mac/Linux and charging a few dollars per player.
You can publish it on google play now, as it is… and if you later decide so, edit the storyline, add a level or two, and sell it on PC later.
The advantage is that a) you get some money now, and b) when the final version is ready, you will already have a few fans, which will be more likely to buy it. (Another advantage is that if your game has some bugs or other problems, you can use the feedback to polish the game before you start charging players. I suspect a paying customer will be more angry about bugs.)
From what you say, it sounds like it would be quite a while before ad revenue from a free game would pay back what I spent on commissioning 3D artists.
An ad banner like in AdMob would interfere with gameplay quite a lot. The control scheme is designed for full keyboard (but would work well with a game controller with joysticks). It would take significant work to translate it to a tablet screen (a cell phone screen is definitely too small). Maybe this kind of annoyance would be a feature if I was trying to sell a full version that was ad-free alongside it, but my game is complicated and I expect will take some getting into it, and I think this would just drive most people away and earn it 1-star ratings.
I’m not that worried about bugs that would significantly damage user experience in gameplay. I’ve been playing it for a while myself (Until Minecraft, it was my favorite game to play while listening to debates). The remaining few ones are basically just results of things I’ve added recently, like smooth camera transitions when you’re playing as a spider and you crawl on a wall. (which has caused the camera to wiggle a little bit under some conditions, I think it’s due to numerical instability in the way I made it rotate to follow the character) The bugs I would expect to take time to fix are the ones that only show up on other platforms than the one I’ve played on (PC), and I can find those by looking through the way my game interacts with the operating system (saving user-created files, loading them, browsing for them, changing screen resolution, accessing preferences files). It’s not necessary to play through the game to find them. The outside view says “There will be more bugs than you expect, and it doesn’t take much to ruin user experience.” To which I respond that I have published software before (not that I own, but that I developed during internships) and I have some feel for how bad bugs popping up is, and that I would take that “feel” into acccount when testing it thoroughly on different platforms before release, and I don’t expect that to take more than a couple of weeks.
The gaining fans thing is a good and important point. I might be able to do that with a Humble Indie Bundle,which has the advantage of a precedent that is pretty much accepted where basically giving it away for free ends when the humble bundle ends, you don’t have to create a “deluxe” version of the game to justify it not being free anymore.
As far as feedback about things besides bugs (level difficulty is a concern), I bet I can find people willing to test a beta version and give feedback for the privelege of playing it early, or (at worst) in return for playtesting their own games (if I ask around at my school’s gamebuilders club, whose meeting I’m planning to attend next week to demo my game and get their opinion on the same question I asked here (“how viable do you think this is commercially?”)). I have looked at the games they are making online. They appear to be a lot less complicated and polished than mine, and will not take much work to play as much as I expect them to maybe expect in return for playing some levels of mine. I have played many games, and never sent an email to a developer giving them feedback. I wouldn’t expect much feedback if I just published a game, even if I included a message saying “please send feedback.”
It’s not going to be worth spending nine months making a complicated storyline that players will press A to skip. Save it for an RPG.
Would would be worth doing, if you can do it well, is to take elements of a storyline that set a tone, and integrate it into the game to provide a unique setting (eg Braid, Binding of Isaac). But don’t do a convoluted plot that pops up between levels.
I think I will take this advice. I have code to let the player read “memories” of other characters scattered throughout the levels, which I can provide a little text for. And I like my backstory and setting more than I like the story that I came up with for the player to play through. Edit: Double post, sorry. It looked like it wasn’t submitting my comment so I copied the text opened a new tab, checked to see that the comment wasn’t there, and then pasted, but apparently the other comment was just late to show up.
I think I will take this advice. I have code to let the player read “memories” of other characters scattered throughout the levels, which I can provide a little text for. And I like my backstory and setting more than I like the story that I came up with for the player to play through.