Like everyone here, I have some great ideas I''d like to see realized in a great game (or games).

Currently, I''m just finishing up on a smaller title I hope to market to web sites (hopefully I''m not 2 years too late for that market). You can see the progress of it at http://www.borngamer.com/bgslots/slots.htm.

My goal right now is to sell at least 10-20 copies a week so I can drop my consulting side work. Once I have more time I can focus on some of my bigger titles and make some really cool games.

The small games are not too bad to work on though. Some of the benefits I have found is I can produce something quickly (the slots has taken me about a month) and I also get to try a lot of different techniques in each game to find out what I like best.

My art is improving since Halloween Havok and by the time I get on the titles I really want to do I should be a seasoned pro.

borngamer

quote: Original post by __ODIN__
Anyone here tried the growing your own company route ?

For me the travel is on its first step. I played a lot with my code to understand all the techno (DirectX, recently OpenGL, Win32 prog) and since this month I use my free time to make my game on my own. I plan 6-9 month of technical work and 12-9 month of artistical work. So globally 18 month.

I must say I had to do some strong choices to keep things simple, otherwise I would end up with a trilogy game that would take 20 years to achieve...

Also, I have set up a "release plan" : writing the app progressively and achieve partial requirement of the whole game to get quickly something real and motive myself to continue.







----
David Sporn AKA Sporniket

That article is very correct in all aspects.

I''m going through almost the same process right now with some value games for a small publisher, and I''m still attending school.

I think the most difficult aspect of the independent game production is time management. It''s hard to go to school for 6 hours, come home, then work for 6 hours solid, then sleep 6-8 hours and do the same thing everyday.

Having said that, the last 3 months have been some of the most rewarding of my life, although I''ve still got at least 2 months of development to go =)

If all that matters is what you get in the end, why go through life?
~Michael Sikora

quote: Original post by __ODIN__
So, Steve;

you gave up your day-job, started focussing full-time on doing games, and ate into those 20k until you released your first game, or did you make the game, then quit the burger-flipping after it started generating a profitt ?

I guess saying that Dexterity started with $20K is a bit oversimplified. The whole story is more complicated, but hopefully some will find it inspiring....

That $20K only lasted about six months. At the time I started, I setup shop as a traditional retail developer, making games for larger publishers, who pitched in a total of $120K in funding, all of which was spent on development. After years of dealing with flaky publishers, I ended up in late 1998 with no published games to show for my efforts and no intellectual property that was worth anything to anyone but me. Plus during this time I had gradually piled up $150K of debt trying to make up for the shortfalls in publisher funding. I thought I might be able to eventually pay it off, but my creditors weren''t willing to wait, so I ended up declaring Ch. 7 bankruptcy.

At that point you could say I woke up and realized that this model wasn''t working. At the end of 1998, I had no money, and my shareware income totalled about $300-400 per month.

In typical Aries fashion, I consideredd the bankruptcy as "feedback" and just kept charging ahead. From reading the stories of many successful people, I knew that great success often lies just beyond the point where most people would give up. I learned that the list of people who had gone bankrupt included many of the greatest successes of all time, such as Abraham Lincoln (twice), Walt Disney (several times), and Henry Ford (twice). When you hit bottom, it can act as a coiled spring that propels you ahead. That was certainly true for me.

I finally realized the traditional developer-publisher model wasn''t working for me, so I switched my focus to shareware. I noticed that these old Windows 3.1 shareware games I had trickled out along the way were still making $300-400 each month, even though I hadn''t done any marketing on them in years. So I thought... what if I made a really decent game and marketed it as shareware. I spent the next six months creating Dweep, doing C++ tutoring for 2-5 hours per week to bring in some extra cash while my wife worked. I hated tutoring so much that it really motivated me to finish Dweep and get the sales up. We brought in just barely enough to pay our bills each month and keep me working full-time of Dweep. We had two garage sales to raise extra money, selling just about everything that wasn''t bolted down. Taco Bell was about the only place we could afford to eat out, but once in a while we would splurge on Subway.

Perhaps 4-5 months after its release, Dweep was bringing in a sustainable $2500/month, enough to cover all our expenses. I later released two Dweep expansion packs and then Dweep Gold, and sales continued to grow.

It''s interesting that all the money I poured into the business -- $20K of personal money, $120K of publisher funding, and $150K of debt -- ultimately gave me nothing of tangible value. It was purely the shift in mindset to independent development (and later publishing) that made the difference.

Dweep was actually developed for a budget of $0. The art was done solely for a cut of the sales (the artist has been getting monthly royalty checks since 1999). The music was done for free in exchange for credit in the game. I created the sound effects myself. The squeaky noises Dweep makes are actually my voice saying "Dweep," pitch-adjusted with some filters applied. I programmed every line of code for the game and designed all the levels in the original version. I didn''t have any money to spend on marketing when the game was released, so I did what I could for free, and then I parlayed part of the sales into additional marketing.

So it cost me $290K and five years to learn that I should go indie. But to finally do so was free and took only ten months to develop a new game from scratch and reach a sustainable positive cashflow.

So what''s the lesson? Go indie now for free, and save yourself a lot of time, money, and headaches.

On the bright side, I had gone through so much frustration dealing with traditional retail publishers, that as I expanded Dexterity into publishing, I was strongly motivated by the desire to treat developers as valued friends, not as property. Of course this is how all people should be treated. Our release schedule is now booked through September, with a new game to launch every two weeks, the next slated for June 20.

The money is nice, but I think the much more important thing to consider is your own happiness. I know a lot of developers who''ve gone indie, many of which do not consider themselves financially successful. But I don''t know any who regret the decision to jump into their own businesses full-time.


Steve Pavlina
Dexterity Software
www.dexterity.com

Thanks for another very informative post, Steve! Game development may always remain a hobby for me (it''s my number 2 interest - later this year I''ll be making the leap to Starving Full-Time Musician) but I really appreciate your candor and your helpful nature.

If you wouldn''t mind revealing a little bit more detail about one thing, I''ve always wondered how it''s possible to rack up $150K in debt (if you''re not already rich). Lots of credit cards? Home equity loans? I mean, at a certain point you''d think that people would stop extending credit to you.

Steve, that is a great story! Your success after a little failure has really put something into me. The fire is lit. Now I''ll see how long before I can get the bonfire I have always wanted!

-Escaflowne75

Great article and great post Steve, it''s definately helped me realize the obvious, and that I shouldn''t be scared of failure so much as long as I learn from it. Hopefully I''ll be able to get one of my half finished projects finished soon =)

- Dustin Hubbard
Owner of Spooky Tornado Studio LLC.
www.spookytornado.com

Good story steve. Lets just hope a bunch of people dont walk away with the wrong moral...that its a good idea to go bankrupt. I''d be curious to see how business holds up for you with so many newly released titles, and whether or not they will maintain good sales or stomp all over each other (although it appears you are being smart about it...each upcoming title is distinct from the others).

Yeah, self-funding is the way to go if you have a decent day gig that doesn''t involve 14 hour days and weekends! That''s the single advantage of my day job - few crunch times that cut into evenings-and-weekends coding and design sessions. Oh, and it pays for all my books, dev tools, and rent as well as the inevitable computer upgrades to track the latest technology.

Downside: I''m on a 24-month development cycle, I''d say, given current progress. This forces me to engineer for where I think things will be when I finally ship.. sigh.. "Magic 8-Ball", anyone?

Upside: TOTAL control. No selling off ownership to VCs, no giving up my IP (intellectual property) to publishers, and nobody but me yelling at me if I miss a milestone (lol)!

It''d be great if I could quit my job and do gamedev full-time, but I''m not willing to (a) Give up control of stuff to get the cash (as if I could in the first place!) or (b) take a giant pay cut to work for a Real Game Company (and be cranking out someone ELSE''S idea of a game anyway). And nobody has died and left me a bazillion bucks, and no Lottery winnings either! Oh well, it''s worth the sacrifice...

quote: Original post by Diragor
If you wouldn''t mind revealing a little bit more detail about one thing, I''ve always wondered how it''s possible to rack up $150K in debt (if you''re not already rich). Lots of credit cards? Home equity loans? I mean, at a certain point you''d think that people would stop extending credit to you.

Over 90% of the debt was on unsecured credit cards... 14 of them. The highest had a limit of about $25,000. Most of these were from pre-approved offers with low interest rates that came in the mail, shortly after I graduated from college. I certainly wasn''t rich to begin with, so I''m not sure why I was offered so much credit. At the time my car was worth less than $1000, and my girlfriend (now my wife) and I were renting an apartment -- We didn''t own any real estate. Excluding cash, our total possessions were probably worth less than $10,000.

$6,000 was borrowed from my sister-in-law, and we did eventually pay that all back from Dweep''s sales, with interest.

Even though a Ch. 7 bankruptcy stays on your credit record for 10 years, in practice you can fully recover in 1-2 years, as my wife and I learned in a great free seminar from the After Bankruptcy Foundation (www.afterbankruptcy.org). It''s odd, but you actually become a better credit risk after declaring bankruptcy because your debt is erased. What most prevents people from recovering quickly is that they label themselves as failures for having gone bankrupt, so they just assume they aren''t a good credit risk or that they''ll only be able to qualify for high interest rates. Yet the reality is that you can qualify for a new home loan two years after a bankruptcy at the same interest rate as someone with perfect credit.

The U.S. bankruptcy laws were designed to prevent financial mistakes from becoming lifetime financial ruin and to give people a fresh start who took a bad turn. That''s exactly what they did for us. Over 1 million Americans declare bankruptcy every year. I''m very grateful to live in a country with such a system, since it makes it easier to move on from past mistakes and apply the lessons learned to new challenges.

Material possessions are nice, but what matters much more is being able to look at yourself in the mirror each morning and know that you''re doing your best. And the way to do that is to do the things you fear.


Steve Pavlina
Dexterity Software
www.dexterity.com