Confessions of a failed indie developer

http://www.altdevblogaday.com/2013/07/30/confessions-of-a-failed-indie-developer/

by danso • 13 years ago

155 79 13 years ago

I think as a developer, the easiest thing to screw up is the understanding of what a business is and how long it takes to build (and how much it costs to run).

Say you are making $50,000 a year. The owner is probably paying more like $75,000-100,000 when you include insurance, rent, taxes, equipment, etc.

Now, imagine you are on a small team of five - an artist, game designer, 2 devs, and a qa person. That is an outlay of about $500,000 a year. So, shipping a smallish game in 6 months is about $250,000.

The author seemed to think that building the whole thing from scratch was "saving money", but it was costing him a tremendous amount of time, which was in fact costing him A LOT of money.

So, if you are trying to start a business, understand that it costs some combination of money and time, and if you are short on one, you probably need to substitute the other.

If you are short on both, you're screwed.

pjmlp• 13 years ago

This is what people usually miss when discussing about the costs of software development.

free652• 13 years ago

Also trying to playing multiple roles sometimes doesn't work - while I can do dev and probably qa, no way I can do gfx or level design. It's just a waste of time.

bluedino• 13 years ago

If you don't have an artist, you need to be able to do art+code. Even if you're making as simple puzzle game, your game is going to look a hundred times better with jewels/blocks drawn by someone who knows what they are doing, compared to something you hacked up in MSPaint.

And don't go super-cheap on the artist. It might take them a few hours to do just a few simple icons/items, so pay them what you'd want per hour for a contract job. Don't pay them $10 an hour or offer $100 to do an entire replacement of your development art.

The same goes for music. Even an original theme song is going to take 10-12 hours of work. So asking for a $50 song isn't going to yield good results.

chii2• 13 years ago

what's a good rate for music for games? I can see two situations - you either find an artist whose style you liked/suites the game, and pay them for an original composition, or find an existing song that suits the game and pay a "licence" to use it.

I have no idea how much it costs to do either - i'd really like to know.

sfjailbird2• 13 years ago

A couple of observations.

You probably shouldn't think that you can get your indie game done in a year, release, and ramp up revenue so fast that you'll soon be self-sustaining. Sounds obvious, but most guys starting out actually believe that there's a chance of it playing out like this. Starry-eyed optimism is probably a precondition for going anywhere near this business in the first place, but it must be tempered and kept in check at all times.

If you are building a game of substance (rather than a simple puzzler/platformer mobile app - which is a lottery ticket more than a business model), the game will likely take way longer to develop. As it should. Good games take time. This means that you should either be very well-funded, or have extremely low costs of living, or be working on the side of another income (in which case it will take even longer). This is not the way to instant riches, but since when did that ever work? Double down, dig your heels in, this will take years. But the end result is an awesome game.

Further to the point, you should probably not think in terms of the release that ends the project and where all your efforts either pay off or fall flat. Instead, the game should be put in front of users continually, gathering feedback, going back to the lab to improve it and repeating the cycle until momentum starts to pick up. That's when you know that you are near the final shape of the game. Don't even think about talking to the press before this. Luckily, if there is one community that is ready to try new things at any and all times it is gamers, so you shouldn't have much trouble getting this feedback. (Conversely, if even the ravenous internet hordes are indifferent to your project, you might need to tweak the formula).

While a long and hard road, a game developed this way actually stands a chance of success in the market, unlike the 'overnight success' stories that play well in the press.

marijn2• 13 years ago

you should probably not think in terms of the release that ends the project

Yes. I want to stress this some more. I know several people who are/were working on big ambitious projects in a kind of stealth mode, citing concerns that their idea will be stolen, or emphasizing that it isn't "ready yet". I suspect this is usually rationalizing a fear of criticism.

A single-person personal project shouldn't be worked on in isolation for more than a few months. You'll lose perspective. Feedback is extremely valuable. It'll help you grow your idea, and it'll help you abandon something that's not going anywhere. (The same probably goes for small teams.)

tieTYT5• 13 years ago

Do you have any advice on how to put it in front of users to get feedback? Friends are good for a while, but they're biased. Just go on IRC and ask a few folks?

GBKS• 13 years ago

Reminds me of the story on how "Settlers of Catan" was created.

"Every once in a while, he would bring the new game upstairs to test it out on his family. They would play along, but Teuber could tell that the game wasn't working. Sometimes, in the middle of a match, he would notice his youngest son, Benny, reading a comic under the table. Other times his wife would suddenly remember a load of laundry that needed immediate attention. After each of these sessions, Teuber would haul the game back downstairs for further refinement. He repeated this process over the course of four years..."

http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/magazine/17-04/mf_...

jiggy20112• 13 years ago

With some exceptions like Minecraft it seems that most games are basically developed in a vacuum with little user input (except maybe small groups under an NDA?).

I guess the reason is that gamers can be a fickle lot and there's a large risk that the game will be written off as crappy if you release a poor prototype.

This is probably more the case with games than other applications because the line between an unplayable game and a great game can be very slim indeed.

sfjailbird2• 13 years ago

I guess the reason is that gamers can be a fickle lot and there's a large risk that the game will be written off as crappy if you release a poor prototype.

You only need feedback from 15-20 people to get the gist of where you stand with the game. For that you don't need to release anything, just post a link on a forum and be sure to engage with the comments that follow.

jlees2• 13 years ago

It's more because building a game of this kind is an intensely personal effort and developers have trouble seeing it as "ready" for others, plus, don't care about player feedback because it's not the players they're building for -- it's themselves.

cousin_it• 13 years ago

I never worked on games and don't want to, but this question bugs me: what would it take to convince someone to invest in a gamedev effort? It just sounds like a very poor investment. If Alice and Bob are both willing to invest in their own pet projects, but not willing to invest in each other's, doesn't that mean one of them is provably irrational?

6d0debc071• 13 years ago

Well, most people seem to be irrational - to varying degrees.

Though I'd expect them both to have information advantages in their own projects so maybe that's not as big a factor as one might think.

mangotree2• 13 years ago

Proven success in the past, a unique idea, and lots of progress on the game.

unz4• 13 years ago

Doesn't this guy realize that asking for money they way he did with flex funding defies logic. If you only raise some of the money, how were expecting to finish the project, and what about the people who gave you money - you just scammed them. He still hasn't paid them back yet, instead saying he owes them a game!

Trying not to be harsh, but this guy is obviously clueless - built his own game engine - maybe he should've started by wiring together his own circuit boards and then building an OS.

And another thing slightly disturbing about a lot of game devs - in your teens or early twenties I can understand the desire to make Indie games, you're young and retarded. But later on in life, late 20s and on - can you not find something more worthwhile to do?

Sure, a side hobby making games, or your main job working as a game dev to pay the bills, but for that be the focus of your life? Can you not open your eyes to the multitude of problems that exist out there, in the REAL WORLD, and fix those?

You could say the same about other artists like writers and musicians - and thankfully, almost all of them suffer financially for their insanity. As time progresses, Indie gamers will also realize that they are just the starving artists of modern times (minus the groupies that writers and musicians get).

lod• 13 years ago

First of all I would have to say that's really harsh, both on the industry and the developer. He may have been a bit delusional and not thought the plan through but he learned why he was wrong and got better from it.

Calling game development "useless" is a stretch however, they have always combined math,art,computers,music,... into one single piece. They have also personally broguht me into the world of programming.

Saying writers don't have a purpose is also a bit over the top. Some can be reporters, others send ideas to people who otherwise wouldn't have even considered them.

Games are a firm example of entertainment, and people get joy out of seeing people loving their product. Can you honestly say you want to live your life without TV, movies, games, music, writing, art, stories, dance?

unz4• 13 years ago

I'm not saying that entertainment doesn't have value. I said it's perfectly fine if you're earning an income from creating it and it's OK as a hobby to create. But otherwise, the market (the people that constitute the world) have told you it's not valuable.

Art for art's sake is great, but it doesn't mean artists should get a free pass to do whatever they want and the rest of us digging coal mines and waiting tables give them money for art we don't like.

rabid_fish• 13 years ago

I write software for a living, and I found this comment to be dead on: Trying not to be harsh, but this guy is obviously clueless - built his own game engine - maybe he should've started by wiring together his own circuit boards and then building an OS.

He wrote his own game engine because he had always wanted to is the obvious reason. He's a deluded fool for thinking he could do so in a couple months. It should have been a side project while still gainfully employed somewhere. Hard to do with two kids at home.

Which is why I can't fathom how a dude with a loving wife and two young kids quits his job and gambles their savings away. I've seen it happen before, but it was 'honest' gambling at a casino and it ended in divorce and general unhappiness. Maybe it's a form of mid-life crisis?

EDIT: fixed format and grammar.

victorf• 13 years ago

That's basically all you need to know about the entire article. Bleeding money from a mortgage, he decides to build his own game engine. He is an industry professional of many years. I am surprised he didn't see failure coming from the start.

corresation4• 13 years ago

open your eyes to the multitude of problems that exist out there, in the REAL WORLD, and fix those?

I had originally thought you were going to comment on the financial risks and unlikely returns of indie development, but instead it sounds like you're morally judging?

Most of the developers who frequent HN are not working on "real problems".

unz4• 13 years ago

They're the same thing, you'll only get paid if you solve real problems (though that's not really true, a lot of people get paid by stealing - most of the finance industry, many government employees, and much of senior management in industry).

pnathan• 13 years ago

can you not find something more worthwhile to do?

Games have a straightforward business model easily understood. Let me explain...

I'm developing a game in the evenings & weekends. I do not have to go to all the local business networking groups to find some SaaS problem to develop into a solution for B2B sales. I don't have to poll everyone I meet about my new social local mobile wotsit to figure out my B2C sales. I don't have to look for a problem. The "normal" people I know who have computer problems have problems that are solved through education or using a comprehensively better toolset: both solutions are not wanted solutions. My "awesome app" ideas would generally take years to develop and may not even be wanted. Remember, people like & usually want what's familiar (faster horse, etc). Games, on the other hand offer a simple business model: entertainment. If it's catchy and entertainy enough, you wind up making some money; if you really get lucky and the game is smooth enough, you make lots of it.

All that said: The probability of my game making 'f u' money is, loosely, nil. What I'd like to be able to do is make rent money; what I'll probably do is make beer money... for one six-pack of microbrews. :-)

The big problem with solving "hard problems" is that they are (1) time consuming (aka expensive) and (2) often they are solved in an ad-hoc fashion already which makes the switchover brutally difficult or (3) there is simply not the infrastructure to support your solution. If you've done enterprise development, you'll have a glimpse of the grief involved with simple problems on a complex domain.

Given the above, games seems like a low-reward low-risk way to make some cash (to me).

eropple• 13 years ago

Can you not open your eyes to the multitude of problems that exist out there, in the REAL WORLD, and fix those?

I am minimizing my risks in ways the OP is not, but I fully intend to transition to game development full time because building things that make people happy is of value to me. A paucity of art that communicates what I want to communicate, that entertains in the way I wish to entertain and be entertained, is a problem.

As for you: trivializing art is a sign of a deeper misunderstanding of the world than anything this guy has managed. So be less of a douchebag. You might even be a happier person for it.

wpietri2• 13 years ago

Can you not open your eyes to the multitude of problems that exist out there, in the REAL WORLD, and fix those?

Yes, original author! You should be spending your time on forums bitching about things, not trying to bring a little fun into people's lives! Can you not see how anonymous abuse of strangers VASTLY IMPROVES THE WORLD?!?

crazygringo• 13 years ago

Sometimes I wish there were an article like this on HN every day.

The relentless upbeat-ness of the startup world can get to be too much, and it's healthy to hear humbling stories of reality.

protonpopsicle• 13 years ago

agreed.

soup10• 13 years ago

Agreed. Most startups and indie games especially are fucked. More emphasis on how long the odds are or how difficult the journey usually is for a startup or small business would be good. I know a bunch of people working on startups who are just so naive when it comes to the risk and low probability of success.

It's so easy to get excited about a project and caught up in hubris and optimism.

pseudometa• 13 years ago

Are there any more stories like this of failed indie devleoper retrospectives?

primaryobjects• 13 years ago

I say this with humor, but this weekend, I took part in an indie 48-hour game-jam contest. I created the game, Fire Starter http://dummysoftware.com/games/firestarter

Created it with HTML5, targeting the desktop, rather than mobile. Didn't win, but had a lot of fun. That's kinda like the op's story compressed into a time-span of a few hours, sort of.

Btw, I recommend game-jams to anyone interested in indie game development. It forces you to create something quick, take decisive actions, and finish the game.

tinco• 13 years ago

He participated in Ludum Dare (ludumdare.com), as did I, it's always a blast. I think you can't be thinking of going indie without having participated at least once sucessfully in a ludum dare (either in the jam or the compo, doesn't really matter)

zanny• 13 years ago

As a 21 year old, I don't see how you could try to go indie with a family and mortgage. I'm in a position where I could now (couchsurf my family until my thing is ready and have $0 expenses) but I just look out at a sea of mediocre indies with "fresh" ideas that are just respins on the same old, often in the form of some 2d platformer with sprites or on Unity.

That just isn't compelling to me, but that is a personal thing. So I don't do it. But while I don't do it now because of my personal outlook (also considering I'm not interested in game dev because the industry eats people alive) I definitely wouldn't fathom risking my family for a pipe dream. And then build my own game engine.

My question is, if you are a game dev dissatisfied with being an office robot, why not get a few friends and make your own dev house? It would be "indie" but you could ask around publishers pitching ideas or doing a kickstarter with more people and a fixed funding goal, with a much better understanding that games take 500% more time than you expect minimum, and make something big. You have the credentials after a decade or more in the industry to attract attention, I'd hope.

corresation4• 13 years ago

As a 21 year old, I don't see how you could try to go indie with a family and mortgage.

As a seasoned developer with a family and mortgage, I don't see how you could go indie as a 21 year old. Your probability of achieving absolutely nothing approaches 100% (and the end result may be career damage that will carry through for the rest of your professional life).

This story really has nothing to do with the fact that the guy has a family or a mortgage, and exactly the same realities apply to a 21 year old with rent and car payments. So it's a little humorous seeing every 21 year old (speaking of many if not most of the comments on Reddit) trying to declare that his core issue, which is really wishful "it won't happen to me!" denial. If anything, the guy with the mortgage and family obligations should have the motivation to achieve what is necessary, whereas this guy seemed to make horrible choice after horrible choice.

The story here is simply that he had a gross inability to estimate (if, as his runway comes to an end, he has so little...wow). And despite the fact that you disparage 2d platformers and Unity, the reality is that Unity, for instance, does a dramatically better job as a basic engine (for essentially all sorts of games) than the overwhelming majority of developers will do on their own - if you aren't John Carmack, your probability of doing something better is incredibly unlikely.

This isn't about pride (oh, boastful "I'm too proud to use that..."), it's about raw stupidity. It's building your house by deciding that you'll first make your own drill because surely you can do it better than DeWalt. Starting your web app by first making a custom web browser. It is project planning and introspection gone perilously off track.

GuiA• 13 years ago

and the end result may be career damage that will carry through for the rest of your professional life

I agree with the rest of your post, but this is just silly.

JabavuAdams3• 13 years ago

As a 21 year old, I don't see how you could try to go indie with a family and mortgage.

Older devs can more easily have 6 mo to a couple of years in savings. It's not fun to burn that down, but it's quite a different situation from having no savings and student loans.

Also, having a partner with whom you can talk about money, strategize about money, and share income / savings with is a huge advantage.

a8da6b0c91d• 13 years ago

I am struggling to imagine how a guy working for 13 years in software wouldn't have years of living costs covered with liquid assets. What the heck do people blow their money on.

JabavuAdams3• 13 years ago

Re: Unity

I've often heard the "Unity look" criticized, but there is no Unity look. That's just a failure of art direction. I.e. any engine that supports shaders well doesn't have a particular look.

Because Unity and UDK are such time-savers, they're used in a lot of student projects. Often these have very low production values that bias people against these engines.

A good analogy is particle systems. The fundamental technology hasn't changed in 20 years. However the final look is extremely sensitive to iteration and art direction.

Having good artists is much more important than having good tech, much as it pains me to admit it.

chii2• 13 years ago

yep - the default art assets tend to have a style that people can recognize. But sometimes that's hard to fix since you don't have budget to make new assets. I guess it must be up to the developer's creativity to break the mould - and not many can achieve that.

JabavuAdams3• 13 years ago

Sounds like a couple of my failed indie attempts.

pjungwir2• 13 years ago

I really enjoyed and appreciated this article. So many harsh comments! Yes, what he did was foolish, but thank god for foolishness. And these things are easier to see from outside and after the fact than when you're following a dream.

I've had a lifelong dream of building my own game, and I'll be sad if I die without trying. I'm way less prepared than the author. I've done web dev for 15 years. My last game was an ASCII roguelike in GW BASIC. I'm almost done reading Game Engine Architecture by Jason Gregory, and building my own engine sounds like a blast---but also like a 20 year project. Fortunately my dream game is more like an old 2-D Zelda 1 or 3. Still, it's tempting to build even that with 3-D techniques. . . .

The big lesson I'd apply to myself is to build something modest. That seems even more true given my lack of experience, although I'm not sure I'll listen.

I guess the difference between the author and myself is that I fortunately don't have the expertise to think of game making as anything other than a creative hobby.

tieTYT5• 13 years ago

Do not build a game engine unless your goal is to be selling a game engine. If you're going to make a game that requires a game engine, use another engine that's already built.

Lets put this in terms of web development: You wouldn't start building a webapp by building your own web framework first.

gavinpc• 13 years ago

You wouldn't start building a webapp by building your own web framework first.

Umm, yeah, I kinda did this. And as I am not ready to promote either the framework or the app, I can certainly relate to the OP.

Having said that, I don't regret my decision at all, and I'm now using the framework in some production work for clients. This is very satisfying.

I also have a mortgage and two kids, and I am paying the bills while my wife is in grad school. So my side projects must remain just that. But they keep me sane, so for me it's not just about the end result.

Having kids makes moonlighting much harder than having a day job does, IMHO. (But what do I know, I've been freelancing since Katrina.)

And I really am going to publish them this year! Really!

rgbrenner2• 13 years ago

"You wouldn't start building a webapp by building your own web framework first."

If I were starting from scratch TODAY, then I agree with you.

I started a small ecommerce site back in 2003, and django, etc didn't exist. So I did develop a framework from scratch in C. 10 years later, it's the engine my new data storage startup (Nuevo Cloud).

Point is, things like web app engines and game engines aren't things that pay off immediately. They require _a lot_ of development, and during the entire time that you're working on it, you're basically handicapped until it catches up with other engines/frameworks. But after it's far enough along, it can be a big advantage, letting you do something unique compared to your competitors.

usea2• 13 years ago

I've also read Game Engine Architecture, and I've written a (much less sophisticated) engine on a small team in school. Unless your goal is to make a game engine rather than a game, it would be the height of foolishness to build a game engine.

The main takeaways of the article are "have a business model" and "don't build your own engine." It adds years to the process, it's extremely difficult to get right, and the end result will be worse than using existing tools.

If your goal was to make a web app, would your first step be to write a garbage collector and a database management system? Would you invent a templating language, and build a parsing engine for it in C? Would you think it responsible to pay a web developer a salary to do those things if their goal is to just make a website? If not, then it'd pretty foolish to pay yourself to make a game engine.

pjungwir2• 13 years ago

You and tieTYT have convinced me. :-) But when I worked at a dev shop around 2000-2005 we did have our own app server (begun in the 90s), with its own templating language (two actually), its own "NoSQL" database, and its own scripting language (all operators and function calls in Reverse Polish Notation). And it was written in C. It was pretty fun to work on it, actually. But there's no way I'd build something like that today. And I think my desire to make games is stronger than my desire to make a game engine.

benihana• 13 years ago

I like this analogy much better than the one above about using a web framework. This is more in line with the amount of work it would be to build a game engine.

tieTYT5• 13 years ago

"When I say I started building a game, this isn’t strictly true – what I actually built was a graphics engine."

This is really surprising to me. If you google for how to make your own game, the first thing you see is usually something telling you NOT to do this. I don't understand how someone in the gaming industry for 13 years could miss this advice.

JanneVee• 13 years ago

From the paragraph preceding about the graphics engine: "My fellow indie friends advised me I should start small, perhaps making a puzzle game for iOS/Android using Unity and building the company from there. Arrogant as I was, I completely ignored this advice..."

gutsy• 13 years ago

This is a fantastic view into indie development that I don't think enough people get to see.

mangotree2• 13 years ago

I switched from making simple games on iOS to making simple utilities, it is so much quicker. Games require a lot, good graphics, unique gameplay, lots of testing.

jlees2• 13 years ago

For folks who liked this post, you would probably find Indie Game: The Movie interesting. (It's on Netflix.)

voltagex_• 13 years ago

And DRM free from http://buy.indiegamethemovie.com/

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

It is always interesting to see how individuals come at the process of creating something like this. When you combine this with the guy who created a game for his kid using paper and refrigerator magnets to cover up undiscovered parts you can really see the difference.

One of the coolest game developers I met was working at Maxis but also working on their own game, but hadn't written any code. They had a notebook with sketches of things and notes about mechanics and small essays on conflict and resolution, risk and reward. All of the parts that are essentially a game but not the six-sided die, the game board, the art assets, or the code. It struck me how important it was to design the core of something before designing the moving bits.

That said he also had about a zillion little hacks, one page programs that would do some thing he was imagining and trying to see what that would look like.

erikb2• 13 years ago

In my eyes this is not an article about a failed indie, but about one who never started. And yes that is exactly what is the biggest source of failure: Not starting.

You still didn't make that iOS/Android game with simple mechanics! You still didn't earn even 1ct by selling any kind game! You still didn't start to be an indie developer. Maybe it's still too hard to finish a 3D game with so many different programs and IDEs. But maybe it would be easy to make a Candy Crush clone for Android and sell it for $0.5

edit: Btw I'm sexist, but living off your wife's pay check with a mortgage and children in the house? Wtf?

erikb2• 13 years ago

Everything I wrote here was serious criticism.

elnate• 13 years ago

"Building my own engine, whilst fun and a great learning experience, was an expensive mistake. For six months’ work all I had to show for it was a short proof of concept demo. I should have used UDK, Unity or one of the other available game engines and got on with building a game, but my pride as an experienced game engine programmer didn’t let me!"

This has been my biggest mistake. I have to keep chanting 'Build a game not an engine'. It would be silly to start building a house by building a brick factory but that is, unfortunately, what I find myself doing.

vacri• 13 years ago

I was way too ambitious with the game I was trying to build.

In the days of yore, I became one of the admin staff for a MUD I played, and you had to write an area. My proposal was for a vast frigid wilderness, and was 500 rooms big. I was significantly talked down in scale by one of the other admins, who'd written half the areas himself. The area ended up being 330 rooms in size (and the MUD prided itself on atmosphere) and it was quite a feat to write at that size.

At completion, I was very grateful to have listened to the other admin - the extra size wouldn't have changed the quality of the area, but would have meant 50% more work. It certainly made me more humble in accepting advice from more seasoned folks.

Also interesting at the time - I was going to school and working in a sleep lab. Semester break came at the time I was trying to finish the area. For a period of two weeks, apart from the sleep lab shifts (10-12 hours) it was a weird 'natural' cycle of 4 hours sleep, 4 hours awake and writing. I was glad I did it... and that I don't have to do it again.

gfodor• 13 years ago

Honestly this guy was never developing a game, as he said, he was deluding himself into thinking a game would materialize if he built a game engine. He also managed to burn many bridges along the way by taking money from people in his personal network for the luxury of spending his afternoon messing around with computer graphics algorithms in Visual Studio. A total and completely expected and avoidable disaster.

Honestly if you start a company and don't have a plan and can't connect the dots to how you'll actually ship something you aren't "learning from failure" you are just being stupid and ignorant. And selfish if you are leaning on others to enable you to do this. If the guy read a little bit more he'd know "build a custom 3d game engine" is not anywhere on the list of things to do if you are bootstrapping an indie game. If anything it's on a list of what not to do. Beyond that, there was no game in mind to warrant building a new engine. At least if he had a game in mind that clearly needed a stunning new engine that current tech couldn't handle he could argue he was trying to pull a Carmack and failed. But this wasn't the case since he had only a vague idea of what the game he was creating even was.

The thing to learn from this example is that you should at least do a little bit of reading on entrepreneurism and product development before trying to be an entrepreneur and create a product. (In this case, "product development" means "game design.") Even more simple, realize what product you are even trying to build before you start building intellectually-satisfying but ultimately useless software.

bandushrew• 13 years ago

Aspects of that comment are true, but that is a pretty harsh indictment on someone who took a real risk and worked to make it happen. Its easy to call someone ignorant and stupid because they did not approach a problem the way you would. Dont do it.

Confessions of a failed indie developer

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