HN user
I'm a bit of a long time lurker, but I just have to say that I'm genuinely incredibly proud for there to be a discussion about my game on hacker news - I'm not sure it's really the right place for it (I'm no startup), but I've screen-capped it nevertheless.
Hi, I'm Adam, the guy that made the game. I completely see where you're coming from, but in the article you'll read that my measure of success was making back the few hundred dollars I spent on art - so as far as I'm concerned I've succeeded beyond my wildest dreams!
I understand that my success is another man's failure, and that's fine with me. The 'success' of Pumped 1 is funding the development of Pumped 2 - I actually have a budget this time! But it's definitely not a bootstrapped multi-million pound startup - just me making games about grown men on kids bikes! :)
Because it was a huge black box before I started - I'd never touched an IDE before.
I don't want to put other developers off - when I talk about 'new car money' I'm not talking about earnings where I can afford a car and nothing else, just that I'm not out buying mansions in Beverly Hills (or Primrose Hill for those in the UK).
I didn't go in to this to make money, so the financial benefit has been a hugely pleasant surprise!
I think 'all downhill from there' is pushing it a bit far - I certainly don't want my story to put off any potential developers! If I wasn't such a sensible / boring fellow I could still (a year later) be comfortably living off my monthly income.
I kind of agree with you, but being a UK citizen I was watching the UK app store by default. Bearing in mind that I was hoping to make a few hundred quid / dollars being in the top 100 in any chart was a result! :)
I disagree with the cheap / free and then 'capture extra value' model, purely because I personally hate games that do that. That's not to say that it doesn't make good business sense, just that I wouldn't enjoy making those kinds of games. If it was my livelihood perhaps I'd feel differently, but I'm very happy being in a situation where I can make exactly what I want, for the market I want! (full disclosure: I'm the guy that wrote the blog post).
Well, yeah! I'd done a tiny bit of VBA scripting for work, but this was first effort to do anything 'proper'.
The curve was pretty tough to start with (and I'm definitely nowhere near the top of it yet), but I kept my goals small and gave myself a lot of time to read books / websites / stack overflow.
One downside to this approach is that I'm still working with code I wrote a year ago, so my code base is pretty horrendous! Needless to say I won't be reusing much of this project...
Thanks very much!