scyfris, on 09 Apr 2014 - 5:48 PM, said:


Wow, this is really interesting. Can you think of anything that you can attribute to this?

That is the ultimate question. Unfortunately there is no certain thing that works. What works for one may not work for another developer. I think everything in game development is the ultimate example of trial and error (including being a success in it).

I have no ideas why either. Just a simple falling blocks game and a snake clone. Both free but with ads. They still get downloaded regularly and they still earn ad revenue.

I've been following Jayenkai's blog for a long time. I had a go at doing it myself and managed to get a couple of games released to the appstore but then it just turned into "an abandoned experiment a week".
One thing worth mentioning is that I haven't updated any of my personal apps for a long time but, the only ones still making money are the quick one game a week apps that I did over a year ago whilst the ones I spent months working on with paid for assets are making nothing.

This is sadly the same for me as well. One of my absolute simpliest games(less than 2 days to prototype, and was finished within a week) is still selling ~100 copys a month a year later, where my 5 other games on the market barely even manage half that combined.

It's left a bit of a soured taste in my mouth, and i've learned to try to minimize my investments as best i can for future games.

Hmm. This is a very good idea. I might try it out. I actually used to do stuff like this. Making ludicrous deadlines that give you that "study the night before the test" crunchtime feeling (in which a lot of people say they do their best work).

Putting that crunch time on something will help your workflow a great deal. I am sure Google returns a lot of results on this. I like this video on an 11 day level design. Might help a bit with the flow of the game design:

I like this video on an 11 day level design

This video is really nice. This gives me another idea. I usually focus on programming, game component design, and visualizing the games during the game a week, but this makes my skills kind of one-dimensional. Instead it would be interesting to focus on a completely different sub-craft of game development, like level design or asset creation (art, music, other?) for a week, and then do a write-up on what's learned as well as the results (no actual game, just whatever content is iterated on or created). This will help to understand the other sub-crafts of game development deeper for when I work in teams with artists/musicians, etc. It will also be a good way to become familiar with those pipelines and tools in those fields.

I actually tried to do something like that my first weeks, but for me it has been mostly about learning to translate my experience of the business world to the game development world. It's kinda humbling to realize that you have so much in your head that wont be useful so i had to start from scratch and see what i could transfer from my background to my passion.

So that's why i've decided to explore more of a technical side of things, like exploring Unity, and then learning about shaders, and about GameMaker or UDK or Allegro or Panda3D and learn the technical side of things in parallel to the theoretical side of game design.

I've been working with mostly sql(postgresql, oracle and microsoft sql server) and java for the past 10 years so programming as a game developer is a different kind of mind set that i have to learn.