Author Archives: vladimirslav

Lessons after 8 years as indie developer

January 26, 2024 marked eight years since the moment I’ve left my job and decided to work for myself. At the moment of writing this, Coldwild Games, the company I’ve founded, company consisted of seven people. You can find my last year’s summary here.

A tough year

It’s been a tough year expense-wise. Expenses were way higher than income and it took a few miracles to get this far. Big thanks to our previous games that helped us stay afloat.

Am I tired of games?

At one point, I started having an identity crisis. I’ve been running the studio for 8 years and developing games for more than that. I noticed that I don’t enjoy playing games as much, except for very rare exceptions. Does it make sense to make games with an attitude like that? Should I just treat it as a business and milk it entirely? In the end, I got diagnosed with depression and after a treatment course, things are starting to look up again. I don’t really doubt that I want to have my life devoted to making games, I just want to figure out the extent of how invested I am going to be in this.

I definitely became much less social and outgoing. Running a business, with its successes and failures, affects all spheres of my life.

My own personal goal does not change: I still want Coldwild Games to be an umbrella of talent; so that no one would need to leave Latvia if they want to make indie non-mobile games. I don’t have any vision or drive for the new games; it does not mean that I don’t care. I want games to be part of culture and I want to place my country on the map as an indie hub.

Stories from the Outbreak results

For almost two and a half years we were working on a zombie roguelite game called “Stories from the Outbreak.” It’s about a group of survivors trying to leave Riga, a capital city of Latvia, and reach the ferry heading out to North Sea. This is the highest quality game we’ve made.

The launch has been a flop. I got overconfident and decided to do the game I wanted despite getting mixed signals. We had ~20k wishlists on early access launch and close to 30000 wishlists for full release, but it still was not enough to sell at least 5000 copies total up to date.

Some valuable lessons for myself:

Stick to one year projects
Stick to wholesome / cozy games
Don’t expand unless you are confident that you are going to get twofold returns; small studios can’t afford getting employees to fill specific roles, you need to become a generalist of sorts
Porting games to consoles helps

Belarus Simulator

I published my story on how valve decided to stonewall my anti-war game and simply ghost me. It did not get a lot of traction, but I’ve been getting private messages on how ridiculous that is. In short, my idealistic side definitely got a hit. In my opinion, Valve is there for transactional relationships with the devs and they will tolerate you as long as you make them money and not put them at risk, even if you are not doing anything illegal. It’s no longer a company that I look up to, more like a business thing that I need to get my games out there. It definitely influenced my game-making drive for the worse though.

Studio Expansion

When we had 2 good projects in a row, expanding the studio felt like a good idea. The studio went from 3 employees in late-2020 to 7 employees by late 2021. We always wanted to create bigger games so this seemed like a perfect opportunity to start doing that. Unfortunately, I did not read the market correctly and taking Stories from the Outbreak off the ground turned out to be a challenge, despite everyone doing their best.

It’s a major financial loss for the company, but ultimately I’m glad that I decided to give it a try: I always wanted to make larger scale games. It’s just my dreams and expectations from the process did not match reality. Managing the team that makes games is not the same as making games.

I think a lot of bigger developers fell into the same trap. The industry can’t just expand indefinitely: having bigger teams adds so much pressure into making successful games and it’s not always possible. I think it would make sense for experienced studios to budget for 3-5 games and expect 3 flops, one break-even and one success.

What’s next?

We’re not closing down, but we are going to stick to smaller projects. Non-combat, wholesome games are going to return as a main focus. We are renewing our search for freelance jobs, mainly pixel art. Check out our portfolio of latest games if you want to hire a pixel artist:

Despite not having better news, I don’t intend to give up. I’ll see you next year!

How Valve blocked my anti-war game

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When the war in Ukraine started, I’ve spent some time making a game reflecting on absurdity of propaganda. After spending $100 on the usual submission fee, Valve decided to stonewall my game, Belarus Simulator, behind their review process, without any deadlines or reasonable communication.

The Background

As a russian-speaking citizen of Latvia (one out of three Baltic states that share a border with Russian federation), I looked critically at what is happening at our big neighbor’s territory when it came to internal politics and political repressions, but I never perceived it as an external military threat to Europe, not even after the events happening in Crimea in 2014. Of course, that all changed on February 24, 2022. Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine left everyone here wondering: “what if we are next” and “would NATO risk a full-scale confrontation over a small country.” The crimes that were happening in Bucha and Irpen were especially painful to observe because in Latvia the similar atrocities have been done by the soviets in 1940, when the occupation by the Soviet Union has started.

Dealing with it

After working some shifts in Ukrainian refugee centre and seeing all the victims of this unprovoked war, my sorrow was accumulating day by day. The normality of life that was there is no longer possible. My feelings aside, I had no idea how refugees from Ukraine manage in this heartbreaking situation.

One way to deal with my internal crises in Life has always been game development. Therefore it took me a week to make the baseline of https://store.steampowered.com/app/1990760/Belarus_Simulator_Preemptive_Strike/ – my take on what was going on and how the system of intricate lies and compromising brought us to where we are today.

Capsule image from Belarus Simulator, short for B.S.

The game follows a simple formula: what if everything that propaganda tells us is true? Would the illusion shatter naturally? If so – when? It does not feature the war itself (unlike Death from Above – a Ukrainian drone operator simulator which did not meet any resistance when being published).

Screenshot from the game management screen

Belarus Simulator features a simple management system with new perceived threats appearing as time goes by. The player has to use the resource allocation via sliders in order to be dealing with them. The game features my terrible hand-drawn graphics and rather simple resource management mechanics.

What happened afterwards was a Kafkaesque system of stonewalling by Valve, devoid of any observable logic.

The Process

The first hurdle was during the page approval process: before approving the page, I was asked to provide a playable copy of the game. This has never happened for any other games that I’ve made. A few days later, the page actually have gone live. This is when the problems with the review process started.

The usual build review did not happen: instead, it was replaced by this message.

Clicking on “here” started a usual support ticket: after trying to actually ask what was going on and getting vague replies, the support ticket eventually disappeared. The link now leads to a closed support ticket. There is no way the game can be reviewed. It has been like that since August 2022.

You want to actually view and respond to review feedback? That’s too bad

What surprised me the most is not the fact that Valve does not want to see something like that at their store. It’s the different thing: they essentially stonewalled and ignored me. Rather than saying “no, we don’t want this” privately, they kept ghosting me and not answering both my emails and support tickets at all. My requests for a brief call (in case they did not want to put rejection in writing) were dismissed. The ignoring happened with at least 3 new support requests that I’ve kept opening every 3 months or so.

Any other ways?

I’ve reached out to three people at Valve personally: my main company Steam rep, an employee that I’ve met at GDC in 2019 and Gabe Newell. I got a brief response from my steam rep essentially saying “I can’t the influence review process, if you don’t like it – we can remove the page entirely.” Afterwards he started ghosting me. Everyone else avoided answering me entirely.

Reply 2, which is a copy of reply 1 with an added paragraph of “we can remove it if you don’t like it”

After this, I could not get any new replies, no matter how much I asked:

In the end, none of my emails got answered.

Why am I writing this?

Most of the time, I’ve been feeling unsafe: I can’t really go public with this because Valve can easily close my accounts as a silent means of retaliation (both my shitposting account and my main company account – even if I run both of them as separate entities). Still, I don’t think I did anything wrong. If anything, I should be angry at the system that ignores me and allows this to drag for more than 1.5 years.

Even if you look at this practically: imagine you’ve ordered a package from Amazon and paid $100 for it. It does not arrive – what would you do? Now imagine that support keeps stonewalling you and plainly ignoring your messages after you’ve paid the $100 store submission fee.

Knowing that Valve did not release a statement even during the George Floyd and BLM protests, I never expected them to pick a side here too. What I _did_ expect is to not be blocked by trying to voice _my_ protest to Russian aggression and help gather some donation money while doing it. Realistically speaking, the game would have been played by 5 people tops, so I don’t understand why they stonewalled it behind the “review process” that allegedly lasts for 1.5 years. Meanwhile, games like Angry Putin apparently get published without any obstacles.

What’s Next?

I’ve completely lost my will to make the games for some time, but I have been recovering gradually. I’m not sure which was more painful to me: the fact that my game won’t get published or that the company that I looked up since I was a child essentially threw away our 7 years of relationship and decided to ghost me. You can say that corporations are not people, but I always found it as a cheap excuse: behind every screen there is a living person. Valve has the power to change the world. You can say that this is not their responsibility to do so. I’d say that this is _everyone’s_ responsibility. But in any case: even by doing nothing, Valve is picking their side.

The war in Ukraine is far from over. Please consider donating if you can.

Lessons and statistics after seven years as an indie developer

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January 26, 2023 marks seven years since the moment I’ve left my job and decided to work for myself. At the moment of writing this, the company consists of eight people. You can find my last year’s summary here.

The Data

Luna’s Fishing Garden has broken even in March 2022 and started turning in profit. Merchant of the Skies sales has decreased and dropped under sustainability range for the studio of this employee amount.

Expenses have been larger than income in 2022

We’ve released Lazy Galaxy 2 in March 2022 (broken even and started bringing in profit) and Crown of Pain in Early Access (published by us, made by another Indie developer from Latvia; still in development) – but no major releases means that we essentially had to live from our savings.

I’ve started providing contracting services both from the studio (allowing developers I know take on small tasks) and by myself occasionally: but it’s not the main part of studio income.

Income from our own games vs income from freelance

Stories from the Outbreak

Most of the year has been spent working on Stories from the Outbreak by all members of our team. This is closest I’ve been to dabbling with how “big studios” do things: the project has been in development for roughly 1.5 years (ready to be released on Mar 31) and had 10+ people working on it at some points.

When it comes to production quality and gameplay balance: this is going to be our best game so far.

I could not do as much programming as I used to do before, because I assumed the role of the producer, making sure the tasks are properly set and the team has everything they need in order to complete the game.

It’s both exciting and terrifying to work on something for so long without knowing the possible results. We’ve agreed that this is our attempt to do something bigger than we usually do: try to see if we can make a big, expandable game with world lore and vast potential for content updates and additions.

Studio Plans

The thing that would make sense business wise would be to keep making peaceful/wholesome games. We are going to do that later. For now, I’m very happy that we decided to take a risk and see if we can challenge ourselves to make something that we wouldn’t typically make. This is also our attempted step away from the usual aesthetics-first formula: don’t get me wrong, Elena and Zane are doing a great job making art for the game, but this is the first time in a while when the main driving force behind the game was the focus on great gameplay, supported by great art, and not the other way around. Whether this works out or not is a separate question.

Being a head of the studio

Crown of Pain, one of the games we’ve published

My thoughts are still the same as last year. Leading the studio requires consistency which I’m not always capable of, so I have to force myself to do things quite often, essentially making it similar to the office job. I have my day scheduled via calendar, but I often feel like I’m going against who I am. Discipline matters, but at one point I do wonder if I’d be better off making games for a few weeks, then taking longer rests to recover: it’s not really an option when you have people depend on you. I’m still observing how I feel and what (if anything) should be done about this.

ADHD

I got my ADHD diagnosis in March, 2022. It’s almost impossible to do so in Latvia: adults don’t get it and one of the two psychiatrists I’ve been to told me “it’s a made up thing so that wallstreet bankers can get meth”. I got lucky for finding a neurologist that took my issues seriously. I remember being moody / easily upset / anxious most of life, but treated it as a given and learned to suppress it over the years in order to fit in better.

Getting evaluated and having prescribed stabilizing medicine makes a difference. I’ve been able to regulate my emotions better and my quality of life has improved. I’m able to concentrate on my work and handle the business much better, I attended a first few concerts in my life, can form deeper connections with people because I can concentrate on the conversations (well, most of the time), I can actually stay in galleries and observe the paintings patiently and I can deal with anxiety being around people and in the loud events now. I can take more risks because making a mistake does not drive your guilt level to “I’m committing the worst crime ever” when you don’t even do something bad. My sleep has greatly improved. Overall, it happened with a lot of pain and grief from understanding what I’ve missed in my previous years of life, but also with a lot of hope to what comes next (maybe I should make a game about it ?).

You can read more about ADHD here. This book is pretty useful if you want to understand whether this is an issue for you and whether you should get serious about being diagnosed.

If anything: treat your mental health seriously.

What is Coldwild Games about?

Some time ago, I’ve read this piece by Douglas Rushkoff. It resonated with me and it explains something that I’ve been wondering about since my early twenties:

“More than anything, they have succumbed to a mindset where “winning” means earning enough money to insulate themselves from the damage they are creating by earning money in that way.”

This is why Coldwild Games gives 30%+ game profits to creators and employees who worked on our games. If the year was profitable, I take out roughly 5-10% as dividends. If we ever make a mega hit, I don’t think it would make sense to get the money for me alone: it’s not a huge corporation, every member of the team made it possible for the game to succeed. Why should I be the only one who reaps benefits of success?

To me, owning a company means building a sense of home. I think this is what many people do not fully comprehend: to make something feel like home, you need to invest in it. It makes sense to support the society and environment around you. This is your long-term investment into building a place you call home. It does not make sense to become rich when hardworking people around you are struggling to make ends meet.

Due to Russian aggression in Ukraine and both internal and external issues appearing: whether Latvia is going to be that home and whether this model is sustainable – only time will tell. I know I’ll be happy making games alone, but ultimately it’s very rewarding to do it among insanely talented and caring individuals.

Till next year.

Lessons and statistics after six years as an indie developer

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On January 26th, 2022, my sixth year of running the indie game development studio, Coldwild Games, is over. The company expanded from 3 to 7 people, published one game in full release and one – in early access and is expecting a year of growth ahead.

Since there has been quite a number of things happening, I don’t expect you to know / remember anything. I’ve added links for context.

Peaceful Games

After the release of Merchant of the Skies in 2020, we wanted to keep working on peaceful games. We’ve made Luna’s Fishing Garden by collaborating with illufinch and other contractors.

Merchant of the Skies sold close to 70000 copies across all platforms and is doing well. Luna’s fishing garden has sold around 16000 copies across all platforms and has not broken even yet, but it’s going to within the next six more months, by my conservative estimates. In the end, I’m just happy that we managed to make a game with 95%+ overwhelmingly positive rating.

While we are not working on peaceful/wholesome games currently, we still have them in mind when planning for our future.

Other games

Lazy Galaxy 2 is one of the games scheduled for release in Q1 2022. With roughly 3000 copies sold, it is currently a net loss, but it’s been gathering wishlists during its early access phase and we are planning to do extra marketing effort for full release. The team is still super enthusiastic about it and we are nearing the final sprint towards the release.

Coldwild Games is also publishing Crown of Pain, an attempt to enter the gamedev scene by a local Latvian developer, Jagit Games. It’s an experimental match 3 RPG game in darker atmosphere. The development took longer than expected, but I’m OK with it and I am happy with what we are getting as the result.

Both of the games are relatively small, but have a lot of heart in it and made me ponder what am I looking for when publishing games.

Data

Yearly income/expense ratio below. Overall, the income has not been as high as before, but still higher than expenses. A significant part of the expenses is related to royalties. This is going to be the case will most of the projects that go beyond breakeven.

Realistically, the chart puts us in a danger zone for this year, but there are still enough savings and passive income, even if we make zero games, which is not going to be the case (hopefully).

Being a head of the studio

Running a 7 people team + contractors is not the same as running a 3 people team. I’m filling more of a producer / business developer role now, but my feelings are mixed on this.

I love the team and every person on it. Honestly, we all work from home, but occasionally meeting every one of them is like a small celebration to me. I love spending time and talking to them. They are all skilled and driven, and I consider this to be the biggest treasure of expanding Coldwild Games.

I am closely monitoring how I feel and if I don’t adapt to the CEO role well enough – I’ll probably be looking for a different head of the company while focusing on the art. Honestly, I’m fairly sure that the company is going to reach the yearly revenue of $1m eventually, but I don’t think this matters since I’ve been doing this for my own satisfaction / feeling. If someone would say “Vladimir, let me buy the company for $1m” – I’d say no to this just a year ago, but now I’d think hard on this offer.

Ideally I see Coldwild Games as a collective of artists who do what they like, but I’m not sure how realistic this is. I would rather think of myself as one of the employees, rather than the boss, but it’s not entirely possible in the environment when I have to take responsibility for the business income and further plans. Larger part of the latest game income ownership is still held by employees, but in order to create new games, a common vision is necessary. People are often interested in making different things which puts these two statements in conflict. I’ve still not given up on this and looking into ways of making this work.

Existential Crisis

I think realization that I’m in my thirties only hit me in 2021. As a way of coping with this, I’ve published my own short interactive story called Late Bird. It’s an experimental piece about birds, movies, suicidal thoughts and not growing up in time where I tried to process my own feelings and the search for the meaning of life.

I don’t really consider myself as an artist, but if I ever made something close to an art by myself – it is this.

What’s Next

Right now I’m trying to establish a routine that I enjoy. I thought that I can handle running two projects at the same time, but 2021 proved me wrong 🙂 After an internal studio discussion, we’ve decided to consolidate our efforts and work on one, bigger thing. Sure, it is riskier. But it also allows us to make something bigger and focus on one thing. What is that thing? The time will tell.
Till we meet again in a year.

Why am I doing this

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When I started developing games, I thought that it’s going to be fun and I’m going to enjoy it. Well, the last two weeks of February have been anything but fun. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that these weeks have been the worst weeks of my professional life.

It all started when I posted the ad for the writing position on Feb 11. The conditions were simple:

We need a writer for Luna’s Fishing Garden, our next game
Someone with a published game
We’ll do a paid test for the writers that we like
I’m going to respond to everyone who applied via email twice: once to acknowledge the application (unless they applied really close to deadline) and once to let them know about the final choice

I knew we’d get some traction and I certainly wanted to have some choice. I knew I’d have to turn down people eventually. I did not expect that many. I counted the applications and we got over 70 over the course of two weeks.

Well, I realized that picking a candidate is anything but fun. I mean I do love the final result, but the process has been agonizing. It showed me that:

I have very little idea about good video game writing. Imagine you had to pick a nuclear scientist for your project while knowing only basics about nuclear science. “Can you create a nuclear thingy that works great please?” Yes, I know the monomyth and three act structure. No, I don’t know what makes dialogues good and how much control a writer should exercise over the game plot.
Paid tasks are a double-edged sword
I might not have the right mindset to turning people down

What’s wrong?

Imagine that you need to determine whether a person is a good fit for a project. If you spend quarter of an hour for that (I think a very moderate amount of time) – that would be almost 18 hours for 70 people. I quickly realized that I can’t do it this way.

Choice paralysis is a thing: what if I am missing a candidate that is a great fit because I’m only giving a brief overview? Can I reject someone because of a poorly written resume? What if I am judging a book by its cover and missing the ideal person for the job?

It took me roughly 40 hours to go through all the candidates and more than 6 hours to write replies. This does not include the correspondence with shortlisted candidates. I am confident that we ultimately picked the best person for the job, but even if we did not: it’s not a pass/fail thing, it’s more of a spectrum and someone can still be capable of doing the job despite not being an objectively best candidate.

Paid Tests

While I think that assignments should be paid and this is how things are going to happen in Coldwild Games while I’m in charge, I realize that it does make the whole thing quite complicated.

I have a very limited budget to pick ~4 people for a paid test. I think this inherently favors more experienced writers: if someone has a strong track record, I am more inclined to pay for the test. At the same time, it would feel wrong to ask the beginner to do a test for free.

But what if, hypothetically, I am missing the best candidate again? I can see why some richer companies ask people do the tests for free (even though they can probably pay every person who applies). With huge influx of candidates, you might miss some eager writer without a solid track record, who’d still do a great job. No way you’d pay them for the test as this seems too risky.

Another part of the process is contracting/bureaucracy: signing the paid test contract for small amounts of money just seems like an overkill (that still need to happen for accounting purposes).

All in all, this is not an open-and-shut case so I can understand the companies that might be asking everyone to submit a few pages of work for free, even though I do not condone it personally.

The “Why”

More than anything, it made me think why am I going through this sort of discomfort. My office job was quite cozy and paid more. So why am I willingly going? It seriously triggered an existential crisis and the question that I’ve been trying to answer myself over two weeks.

Ultimately, I know the answer: I just want to make good games. I know Luna’s Fishing Garden would be passable with as-is writing. But the whole point why I’m in this is that I don’t want to have just passable works in the studio portfolio.

Thanks to everyone who applied and I’m sorry I had to turn most of you down.

Lessons and statistics after five years as an indie developer

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My fifth year of running the indie game development studio is behind me. On January 26^th 2021, Coldwild Games has turned five. Did I hope I’d get this far? Yes. Did I think we’d get this far? At times, if I am being realistic and honest, no. In this post, I am going to share this year’s personal discoveries and lessons learned.

If you want to compare it to previous year, here’s my fourth year summary

Finding Your Niche

Merchant of the Skies, art by Elena Nazarenko

Our biggest event of 2020 was out-of-early-access release of our game, Merchant of the Skies. Up until now, we’ve sold around 50000 copies on all platforms. I think 2020 encouraged me to keep working on peaceful games. I am not going to avoid games with combat entirely, but for now I really enjoy coming up with ways to make non-violent games fun. If anything, 2019 and 2020 has proven to me that there definitely are audiences who are OK with the lack of combat.

I think Merchant of the Skies has been a success mostly because of the amazing art by Elena Nazarenko ( https://twitter.com/ElenaNazaire ). That made me prioritize aesthetics-first approach for some of our next games.

Data

Here are some stats from previous years.

The income in 2020 was greater than 4 previous years combined. The same goes for expenses.

Regarding income: Merchant of the Skies had a good early access graduation and console launch only strengthened it further.

Regarding expenses: first, the studio expanded a bit. But also the current company policy is to give creators / long-term contractors a profit share of the game they are working on. The usual % that someone gets now is at least 10% of the game profits, in addition to the salaries / contractor payment. Of course, as studio expands, this ratio is probably going to go lower, but I share around 30% of every project’s profits with people who helped to create it.

This approach does have drawbacks: since studio savings grow in a notably slower manner, each project is way riskier.

2020 was the first year where we could stop freelancing entirely and just work on our own stuff. Trust me, it feels good and I am very lucky to be here. But it adds a new level of challenge: once you reach a status quo, you get extra stress from trying to maintain it.

The studio has grown in size. As of now, we are currently working with 4 contractors and three full-time employees (that number includes me). The plan right now is to not go crazy with expansion, but rather take it slow and ramp up the development progressively.

The GDC Talk

Despite GDC on-site event being cancelled, I managed to give a talk remotely. Not as cool as being in San Francisco, but still a personal milestone in my book 🙂

My talk, “Choosing Your Art Before Making a Game” is a summary of my aesthetic-driven development approach. It shows what I’ve learned and how we approached the development on Merchant of the Skies by putting the art first and marketing as early as possible.

We got lucky?

Merchant of the Skies leaving early access resulted in higher income than the early access launch itself (quite a rare occurrence, judging from what I’ve heard from other developments).

Nonetheless, each one of our games except for the first one essentially broke even at the very least. Make no mistake: this is mostly because of low expenses running a studio. My current net studio salary is under $1200/month (still a very decent amount for Latvia, but way less than usual sofware engineering jobs are paying way more). I am far from being a millionaire, even with a relatively successful game.

As it stands now, we have a chance to make two more games at the very least. Why am I not running around and pitching the studio everywhere? Because I want to make sure that we can consistently create good games that can comfortably sustain us.

Lazy Galaxy: Rebel Story, one of our previous games

What’s Next

I want to have a studio that works on 2 projects at the same time to reduce the risks. As I distance myself from programming and going more towards the management / planning role, I began to understand that I want to have a studio that is centered on the people, their personalities and individual growth. I can make games, but I also like seeing people grow creatively and take responsibility for their work. I want to have a crunch-free place (maybe except for one week of paid crunch before and during the _actual_ release because it’s impossible to work 8 hours only when you constantly need to reply to player feedback and adjust stuff). Work-life balance has been a priority of late 2020 and early 2021 and we plan to continue being that way.

Luna’s Fishing Garden, our next peaceful game

Ideally, I’d like Coldwild Games to be an alliance of small in-house studios and creators, each working on their own unique ideas, rather than the studio that works something big. I’d rather support talented people working on what they like rather than force my own views all the time. I can’t completely do this yet, but I might be able to later. If you are running an indie operation and like developing games, but want to meet someone who could potentially handle your production process / marketing and publishing help – drop me an email, I’d love to talk. I don’t just want to publish games and bail, I want to follow the people along their way, with both successes and failures.

These 5 years have been a real adventure. I still enjoy making games very much and I hope that I will get to continue doing it. Thanks to amazing people who worked on our games with us and our community of friends, who supported us along the way. I hope for many more years of working together.

Lessons and statistics after four years as an indie developer

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On January 26th, my company became exactly 4 years old. As a brewing tradition, I’m publishing my yearly reports and experiences about being an indie game developer. Last year’s post is here. I’m going to go through the year’s event and just summarize the things that I’ve learned.

“Aesthetics first” approach

We started development of “Merchant of the Skies” by figuring out the graphic style and it worked out really well for us. I think aesthetics help to sell games, but good gameplay makes people stay. You can probably make a decently-successful game with only one of these two, but the real trouble will be to keep traction.

For the next games that we make, we are going to try finding out the style first and tuning the gameplay later. Basically the process would go:

Theme → Style → Gameplay

Game designer Adam Mayes visited the Latvian Gamedev Conference in (I think) 2017 and he said something like “You wouldn’t start filming a movie by throwing a bunch of explosions in and then asking to write a script.” At that point it did not resonate with me as I was very gameplay-first type of person, but as time goes I tend to agree with this more and more. You don’t have to sacrifice good gameplay if you go with art and theme first. Rather, you are just building strong game design and marketing foundation right from the start by working on a theme and art of the game.

Predicting the success of the upcoming game

Last year, I was 100% sure that success of one game does not guarantee the success of the next one. I still am. But I’m fairly confident that you can predict if your game is going to work out or not. It does involve a good bit of self-criticism.

Wishlists is the #1 stat for me now before launch. If I had access to Kickstarter – I’d run it for most of my games. Financing is secondary, the primary function is to measure interest / gather response from the audience that you have already gathered.

I don’t think high amount of wishlists matters by itself, you still need to have a decent quality game on launch to maximize the effect. Player feedback at conventions can help, but this is not an ultimate indicator. You also have a hunch, but you really need to be honest with yourself here. If it is not turning out to be amazing – it’s hard to admit it to yourself. You can still release an OK game, just don’t ramp your hopes up.

Statistics and Data

Despite paying for plane tickets / partial stay at the GDC, year 2019 expenses are lower than 2018. This surprised me, but it has an explanation: we had one more worker for 4 months of 2018.

I guess the overall lesson is “employees are expensive”. In Latvia, I (roughly) have to pay 0,66-0,7 EUR in taxes for every 1 EUR of salary that workers get paid to their bank accounts. This was not a surprise for me by itself, but it reinforced my tendency to be extra careful when I consider expanding the studio.

Income sources by year: freelancing vs from our own games

I think this is the first year where our games could effectively sustain us, even if we skipped freelancing altogether. Let’s hope this is not the last.

Merchant of the Skies early access launch ramped up the resources a bit, but essentially that only means that we can self-publish the next game comfortably. Don’t get me wrong, this is still a good result for us. The final release and console ports are a bit further down the line, which could boost the income quite a bit for 2020, but I don’t expect the same peak as in 2019.

Continuing to work on Merchant of the Skies made little sense financially roughly around November 2019, but making the game as good as possible (at least within our abilities/deadlines) has been our #1 focus right from the start. The plan right now is to release a final patch in April, take a break in May and port the game to consoles in June/July. I think the part that “we would be earning the same passive income if we were not doing anything” gets to me a bit (especially since we are trying hard to come up with cool content and campaigns), but ultimately I just want to have a good game in my portfolio that I’m proud of.

My personal regular income would be at least 4 times higher had I stayed at my Software Engineering job

I still take different types of freelance jobs occasionally, albeit much rarer now. It still remains mostly a passion-driven career choice. Quitting my job was 100% worth it, as I enjoy this type of journey with insane ups and downs much more than I enjoyed office work. Always have a backup option though. Always.

The Pressure

I thought that I was ready for anything, but I’m not sure now. As soon as I posted the game, I did not feel like it belongs to me anymore (but that was the plan since the purpose of Early Access is exactly to get player feedback). I think what got me is the constant need and pressure to deliver meaningful updates every month. I don’t mind the work, but the constant anxiety whether I’m doing it enough made me question every life choice that I made. It extends far beyond just games. I took a step back to maintain better work/life balance now and I think this is helping. Drink more water, take more walks, etc.

I’m giving a talk at the GDC

My talk about aesthetic driven development got accepted to GDC this year. I’m going to be talking about how we picked the graphics before we actually started developing Merchant of the Skies and how everyone (with access to art) can do something similar. Don’t be shy and come say hi if you visit GDC this year.

Summary

I think persistence pays off, since financially 2019 has been our most successful year so far. I still see posts on gamedev reddit saying how someone has spent 3+ years on a game and it did not work out and I feel really bad about it, especially since my first game took 2 years (after-work hours) and it turned out bad. Do not think that you are entitled to grants/publishers/sales just because you worked on the game for too long, otherwise you’re setting yourself up for disappointment, it is easy to fall into that trap.

I think we managed to get where we are now by making games with a smaller scopefirst and then ramping up gradually as our skills grew. We are not successful, but we are sustainable so far. I still have major doubts every time we ship something; I acknowledge the issues with the games but I am just very strict with my own deadlines. Occasionally, I am starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Aesthetic-Driven Development: creating Merchant of the Skies from announcement to Early Access launch

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Despite developing games full-time for three and a half years already, I am still discovering the best approach that I want to take while developing games. I run my studio together with my partner Helen, who makes the art for our games.

In October 2018, I’ve told her, Helen, to just draw whatever she wants and put it on twitter. Ten months later, we have published our game, Merchant of the Skies, into early access. It is a direct result of that decision. I’m going to tell you how this helped us make the most successful of our games so far.

How It Started

October, 2018. I’m finalizing our previous game, Rebel Story, port to consoles which mostly requires code changes and not much art assets. Helen does not want to idle so we decided why not, let her just draw things she likes and just put it to her twitter / portfolio in case it helps her to land some contract work later.

So she drew Octobit and Pixel Dailies images. The results have been varying.

Some pictures were well received. It made me think: what if we can use them as a style/concept for a new game?

Not all images are drawn equal though. If we try to put them in the game – we need to make sure that we can effectively create the assets of the same style. The temple on the left has distinguishable art style that is reproducible. The tweet with the ruins to the right got way more likes, but it is super-detailed, so it means that we’ll need way more time to draw similarly-styled sprites.

Side-note: for every game we decide to work on, there are 6 prototypes on average that did not work.

Market(ing) Research

As soon as we agreed that “we can do something with that temple”, the mockup / concept / mini gif production process started. There was no game at that point.

Example of a gif that we made. Took roughly 4 hours for me to program in Unity.

via Gfycat

In the end, we made three tweets to see if the style resonates well.

All three tweets were well-received (based on our own standards). That made me think that “self-marketable” style could be a great asset. I suck at marketing so if the images make people want to reshare them, then we are on to something.

Gameplay

This is how Merchant of the Skies really started. I’ve had an idea of the sky-faring strategy game before, but I could never come up with a proper gameplay. This aesthetic style had its own constraints and actually enhanced my creative process. Essentially, this style gives following limitations:

2d-only space. Can only scroll left and right, not much options to put buildings above or below.
If we want it to be strategic, how do we actually establish multiple buildings / production chains effectively? If we place too many, then scrolling and finding the right one becomes an exhausting task
How do we enforce variety? That’s when the idea of “global” map with smaller islands comes in.

In the end, we decided to have a world map and different island hubs (each <6 different buildings/tiles) that player can visit. Each of those hubs either offers a base / company that player builds or some world event / quest.

Sounds easy in hindsight, but it took me quite some time to figure out how I want it to play. To me, gameplay should always win over style/aesthetics. If the game is not fun to me, then I scrap it.

Building the audience

So we’ve decided on the gameplay, but the game is not yet announced. We are in the process of making playable prototype with minimal asset amount to make a store page. Some people advise _not_ to post anything on twitter until you announce the game. We are a smaller team without large reach, so I’ve decided against this approach and essentially started putting most of the things that we were coming up with. Helen’s twitter audience grew from ~500 people in October to 1200+ people in February. Coldwild Games twitter account also started to see gradual organic increase in audience. It’s not a huge amount (we were under 2k) at that time, but some people who followed the progress closely started to appear.

Announcing the game

On Mar 7, we were ready. Steam page has been published, we’ve made two separate tweets at different times, sent press-releases (mostly ignored) and made reddit / imgur posts that got minor traction.

Helen’s tweet got more attention than mine so I’m still jealous about it, but it became clear that twitter should be our main source of announcements at that point. Everywhere else there was not much traction.

Gifs work much better than images.

Wishlists

Now, another curious thing is the Wishlist graph. We got a bit more wishlists that we wanted before the launch (slightly over 5k). It did not look like it would work out until our second trailer announcement and things also got better after summer sale and right before launch. Anyway, the chart and spikes:

To make it short:

Announcement
Second trailer (with relevant tweet), see this:
Brief Rock Paper Shotgun mention
Devlog / Imgur post about resource gathering / Reddit post with the same content
Summer sale. Meh. Period of depression
Carrot tweet
Third trailer announcement. Yes I made three trailers.

Basically no secret formula here. Hard work at making content pays off. But it does take a lot of time. Roughly 30% of development time went into preparing social media posts / addressing the audience / spreading the news.

Mentorship

Extra shout-out goes to Weather Factory studio for taking me under their wing 🙂

To make it short: you already need to know what you are doing and have a vision of your own. I had the work of my studio planned beforehand, but I needed (and still need) sanity checks when it comes to the details. I.e. handling the marketing / press / pricing / working on game design. Lottie, Alexis and Claire has been able to selflessly help me out with that.

Apart from that, all of them provided informational support (such as retweets / mentions), even though they did not have to. It has been a substantial help over our own marketing efforts.

In any case, I can highly recommend finding yourself a mentor (after you are sure you want to go pro and actually finished a few smaller games to at least understand what you need from the mentor).

In case you want to learn more about Weather Factory mentorship, you can read about this on their website.

Release Prep

Two weeks before the release, things get hectic, so I always have a checkbox of things that I want to do. This release was no different. The timeline for me this time:

Two weeks before launch:

The game should be ready with no major changes planned. This is for your own sanity.
Start sending game to youtubers
Add game entry to Giantbomb website so that Twitch streamers / youtubers can select it if they want
Reddit / imgur posts / awareness post anywhere you can
Write a roadmap what to expect after development. It allows you to arrange things in your head, understand your priorities better and actually be a reference for your players.

One week before launch:

Start a countdown on twitter (post daily image)
Arrange front-page broadcast with a streamer (in our case the folks from Rocknight Studios were extremely kind to help)
Write articles explaining game mechanics, you can use them for both promo and to quickly give answers to new players
Schedule reddit facebook ads
Schedule other game discounts on Steam
Arrange cross-promotion (David Stark from Airships: Conquer the Skies was very kind to reach out and offer to do a cross-promo campaign with referencing each other games).
Schedule twitter / facebook / mailchimp posts in advance
MAKE SURE TO KEEP PRESSKIT UP TO DATE – youtubers actually use those for thumbnails. If you are lucky to be noticed by press, you will 100% need it so don’t be late and just set it up in advance.
Buy a keymailer subscription and check key requests daily

Overall, I’ve sent >150 keys to youtubers and streamers and set an embargo on Release Date, 30th of July. 4 people broke it, but I reached out and asked to unlist the videos until the date and we actually resolved things peacefully.

Release Day

The stream started a bit earlier than we’ve pressed the release button. Helen was there to talk to players (and Jānis and Matējs from Rocknight studios). I’ve been keeping tracks in other social media and responding to them.

As soon as I pressed that green release button, I’ve made imgur / 9gag / reddit / facebook posts. Reddit post got a lot of traction but got removed due to self-promo rules (I comment a lot, just don’t post much apart from my own games). imgur post was pretty much unnoticed.

The ads went in for 1-2 days. I mostly posted them for my facebook followers and their friends to see and to a small related subreddit. Ads are not very effective by themselves for lower-priced games (or so I think), but they can help with the traffic burst at first.

All in all, HAVE THE CHECKLIST, you will be panicking / stressing out too much and the to-do list absolutely helps.

Also, ask your friends do the reddit posts.

Sales / Results

We did not get into trending. I don’t think the results / coverage was enough. Over the first week, we sold ~2.5k copies. Not great, but enough to keep us going to actually finish the game while paying ourselves minimal salaries and not worrying about taking up freelance tasks just to sustain ourselves while making our dream game.

In short (and to a surprise of noone), the youtubers / twitch streamers remain a driving force of sales. The bumps on the graph match the US workdays (most of our audience), but are also noticeable we had our game covered by a larger youtubers (this could be an article by itself). I’ve used Keymailer to accept the request and also wrote personalized email to the ones I like (or just to a bigger ones).

Rock-Paper Shotgun mentioned our game twice (the review is actually well-written and mentions the games flaws without actually fixating on them too much). We had a small bump of sales because of it, but youtubers affect it much more. In any case, for us it was not about the sales but about the principle: it was an honor to be mentioned in a famous gaming magazine. Something that seemed unreachable for us before that.

Post-Release

The release has shown that players are expecting more content, but I’m happy with the level of polish that we had on launch. My own principle is to make the game feel as good as possible for Early Access and expand horizontally afterwards. Basically it’s better to have one polished level rather than two unpolished ones.

Right now I’m mostly working on content updates, but first games were different: catching and addressing bugs as soon as they pop up and answering community (>50% time).

Even after two weeks post-release, handling community discussions / answering the feedback still takes 25% of the work day. It is a hard work, but it’s very rewarding to get the bug reports and improvement suggestions. We are very grateful that people give us chance to make the game better.

What next?

I think I’ve already surpassed the proper word limit, so all I’m going to say is that we will continue working on Merchant of the Skies and make sure players are going to get the best possible experience on full launch. Thanks to all that made it possible and I hope you’ll enjoy the game even more when it’s done.

Stay tuned for a full-release post-mortem after the game is done and shipped fully 🙂

GDC Impressions, Eastern European style

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Me, July 2018: I should apply for GDC scholarship so that I can complain to my friends because I never get chosen for things.
Game Industry Conference, September 2018: You are accepted for GDC Scholarship
Me: Oh. Cool.

So yes, I went to GDC this year. Thanks to the organisation by “Fundacja Indie Games Polska”, sponsorship from Google for Startups and co-organizing from Game Industry Conference, I was able to stay in a hostel in San-Francisco and get a GDC Conference + Summits pass, entirely for free. It would be unthinkable for me to go otherwise, but alleviating these costs really helped me to go.

In this post, I’ll try to go through the highlights of the trip and my first experience at the GDC and things that a lot of smaller developers can relate / look at the conferences.

The City of San Francisco

The first day in the city felt like paradise. I went to see the Fisherman’s wharf through Chinatown and then to the Golden Gate bridge. The sun was blazing hot (I left a feet of snow back home!), the city is located on a lot of hills and the architecture is rather unique. The parks are beautiful and the animals you meet is not something that I could encounter in the Northern/Eastern Europe. I saw the parrots on the tree! During one of the days I went to the Aquarium: without a doubt, it was a life-changing experience since I’ve never seen something like that. Schools of fish / crabs / medusas / sharks / rays swimming freely and you can observe how they behave.

Next days was more of a wake-up call because I ended up exploring a city center. There are a lot of homeless / mentally ill people. Sometimes it felt like a boring dystopia. Some citizens of San Francisco actually crowd-funded the campaign to avoid building the homeless shelter in their area. I have been warned about the homeless problem before going, but I’ve thought that I’ve seen it all, after travelling through Eastern Europe and living in a country that survived the collapse of Soviet Union and went through relatively noticeable economic decline at one point afterwards. Boy, was I wrong. There are homeless people at almost every corner of the business district; you can’t walk a block without encountering a homeless person. I’ve seen open drug use near the Moscone Center and a lot of syringe needles on some streets. The highlight was the poster of a robotics conference with a bunch of homeless people sleeping near it.

In the end, I think the city is full of contrasts: there are both really good and really bad places to be at. Despite the issues, I’d recommend visiting the city at least once. The variety of food is also not something to be missed due to the multiculturalism of San-Francisco.

The GDC itself

So the whole event is not as hectic as it might seem. The first two days, the expo hall is closed, so you mostly go to the talks or roam around and try to get to know people. The expo opens up on Wednesday and you get one more venue to explore, full of different publisher / engine / game booths. It’s an interesting experience by itself because you can meet like-minded people, see the games that you already know and say hi to the people you’ve seen before. On Friday, the expo is open only for half a day, but talks occur until the evening. Tuesday and Wednesday felt like the busiest days, while Friday felt like “we’re all tired day.” Still, every day was really cool.

The talks

I went to a few talks, but not many. Mostly to the ones whose authors I admire and want to know better (so I can catch them post-talk). Other than that, you can actually watch everything at GDC Vault afterwards so it’s better to spend time talking to people.

Nonetheless, some cool talks that I enjoyed in no particular order (look them up in the vault):

2014 vs 2018: The Shape of Financial Success Before and After the Indiepocalypse by Jason Rohrer
The Zero Marketing Experiment on Steam: Launching a Game Without Telling Anyone by Patrick Seibert
‘Cultist Simulator’: Designing an Experimental Game for Commercial Success by Alexis Kennedy
1,500 Slot Machines walk into a bar by Alex Schwartz and Ziba Scott

The parties

A lot of socializing actually happens after Moscone Center closes. Every evening, there are multiple parties going on. Without suggesting anything specific: don’t go to the big ones with open entry and no limit. Loud music is also a hard pass for me. I wanted to socialize with the peers and get to know people better. There are also daily events that are targeted at a specific gamedev professions. Without disclosing too much: I went to 5 private events and every one of them has been worth it. The public meeting (Marketer coffee) was also very good because these types of meetups define the roles and expectations of people you want to see there.

To find the relevant parties:

Use the GDC party list.
Write a letter to your partners / platforms / tools that you use and ask if they are planning something. You might not get invited, but you’ll establish a closer personal contact which seems like a win to me.
Join GDC discord and watch what people are saying, there are some sudden meetups happening in Yerba Buena gardens all the time.

The socializing itself and is the event worth it?

First of all, I don’t think that you are going to die / be unsuccessful if you don’t go. There were discussions whether hosting the event in SF promotes accessibility (due to high prices / US entry visa), but if the organizers actually live there, it makes sense: you wouldn’t go to another city just to host something. Or you would, but it’s much more inconvenient.

Next, and I’m speaking for myself, in cases of events like these you never get a direct value back. Getting to know people is a long-time thing. Very few people in your life will e-mail you and ask: “I need this job done for me, I’m paying you X” or “you know what, I’ve randomly saw your game on twitter and I want to publish it” or “Can you suggest me someone who can do X?” – it takes time to know you and you can’t handle relationships as one-time business transactions.

So in a way, the event is a catalyst: if you are a successful developer, it’s easier for you to find like-minded people (or rather get meetings with them and get their replies) and meet with the platform holders. Your opportunities multiply. If you are not there yet – people will be polite but a lot of time you can see when they want to excuse themselves from the conversation, but the ones that stay can genuinely lead to meaningful connections. I felt like I’m on the line: from one side, I’m developing games for 3+ years already, on the other side I’ve never had a hit yet. Despite this, I could connect with people in equal situations and actually (hopefully) make this a beginning of future friendships.

Now, whether you need this particular catalyst is another question: in the end, I met some cool US developers and met with some platform holders which is a good time investment to me. I knew why I was going there and I tried to book the meetings I wanted 4 months in advance. But often you don’t necessarily need to afford to go to US for that: if you are starting out and are in Europe, Game Industry Conference in Poland is definitely a good start because it features both experienced and beginner developers while having a lower cost of entry (I might be biased here, but I was planning to go in any case before I was accepted for the scholarship; my other friends who went were really happy about it too). In a way it was easier for me to connect with people there because the pool of different people wasn’t as huge. Nordic in Sweden and GameOn in Lithuania could also be a good start. Basically, if you don’t have a hit or you don’t have a plan of what you are going to do there, look for the events closer to your home. Basically: KNOW WHY YOU ARE GOING THERE. Otherwise it will just be a cool vacation. YMMV.

Costs:
Plane Ticket to SF and back: ~$900, but I had to do a non-same-ticket transfer which was a huge stress
Expenses while staying (lunches, transport, a few small gifts for friends): ~$500
Travel Insurance: ~$70

In the end it was roughly around $1500. A very significant sum of money for me, but not life-altering.

In short: I’m going to do it again, but only after I make a successful game and can afford the full trip with the ticket. But with GDC (and all conferences in particular), every event is a step in the ladder towards the next one, you get to know people and enjoy their company, then your social circles expand and you meet more people and find new friends / gain more experience / become more aware of what’s going on in the industry. To me, going to conferences because of that is absolutely worth it.

Lessons and statistics after three years as an indie developer

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A year ago I’ve published an article about surviving two years as indie developer. On 26^th of January 2019, my company turned three years old. 2018 was a year of changes and new revelations, so I’ll try to outline them here. I hope these things will give you a perspective if you are only planning to go into indie / starting out.

My background and current situation: I am 29 years old and live in Riga, Latvia. After doing web development, I went to work as C++ dev for 4 years and then quit my job to start making games. The first year was all about libgdx, until eventually I moved to Unity. My studio has one other employee apart from me. In the end of 2017, we released a _relatively_ successful indie game Lazy Galaxy which combined incremental and RTS game mechanics.

I’m a bit conscious of writing these. If you are a seasoned indie developer – I think you might laugh at my advice/experiences. But if you are thinking about starting out professionally – I’m hoping this could save you some pain. Here goes.

Success of one game does not guarantee the success of the next one.
I guess this is obvious. Still, subpar launches will affect you in a way even if you rationally understand it. When I was launching Lazy Galaxy: Rebel Story, I was fairly confident that “same franchise, different genre, but I’m going to make it.” Yeah, it did not go great even though it’s my highest-quality game so far when it comes to production value.

Aim for niche. But not super-niche niche.
There are too many variables in why Lazy Galaxy release worked and Lazy Galaxy: Rebel Story did not. I think the incremental game PC market is underpopulated. I also I added a good twist (RTS battles).

For Rebel Story, I went for a SHMUP genre (there weren’t many popular shmups released in 2018 at that point, so I felt I had a chance). The niche might have demand, but it’s way smaller than incrementals.

Do your market research! If your gifs are getting 5-10 likes on Twitter during #screenshotsaturdays, it’s probably not the project you should be focusing on. Same goes for finding a publisher. If you want a publisher and everyone keeps rejecting you – maybe (but not necessarily) you have a risky project on your hands. YMMV.

Lazy Galaxy

Project Scope

Rebel Story took 4 months to make and 2 months to port to Consoles. So far it’s a loss, but it’s (hopefully!) going to be OK in 6 months if I combine the sales on all three platforms. It would not have been OK if the project was longer and if it required more manpower. This is just how it is.

For now I’m still sticking to 6 month projects. Lazy Galaxy was 10 months. But it was that way because it had traction at the release, and I could see that I could keep up with the development without going bankrupt. As soon as sales stopped, I did one more month of updates (adding features on a game that left early access) and moved on. I’d love to heave a project of my life, but it was not it.

I think it’s sensible to not spend more than 6 months on a game if you don’t have enough sales or funding to warrant it. No, that does not mean that you need to abandon your games. That means that you need to have a feature-complete game that could be made in six months. In addition to that, you need to have a plan for how you would update and expand it if it goes well. Be ready to embrace success, but budgeting for failure is also important. You don’t want to go broke if one of your projects failed 🙂

Early access launch is not necessarily “the main and only launch”
At least for small and mid-size indies. Back in 2016-17 I remember people telling me that the early access launch is the main thing that matters and you won’t have a second chance on “normal launch”. I don’t find it to be true, at least not anymore. In my case, Lazy Galaxy got more sales during the launch month than it did when it got to early access.

Which brings me to the next point.

The game release is a sequence of decisions.

Don’t stress it. I can’t pinpoint that one decision that would make the game flop or bring it to the top. I see devs (myself included) worry about release dates, steam tag, twitter presence, handling early access or “you name it” all the time.

Right now I think that if you mess up in one of these points, things can still work out. There is luck factor involved. You can also do some things right and still fail. Doing things properly just gives you a higher chance to succeed.

Lazy Galaxy was getting 15-20 likes on good #screenshotsaturdays. But it still did OK on launch. Lazy Galaxy had 14th of December release date (bear in mind that it was easier in 2017), but it still did OK. You might luck out, but why risk it if you know better?

Mentorship

In the second half of 2018, I managed to get a help of a mentor! Lottie Bevan from Weather Factory kindly agreed to have short monthly calls or email consultations whenever I needed help. I want to say that this really helps to add perspective to whatever you are doing, even if you feel like you “have it figured out. It really helps to discuss your issues with someone, and getting honest feedback. It has been a tremendous help and I really appreciate it.

Statistics? Data?

First, the (seemingly) depressing graph. Company revenue ( from both freelance and our own games ) vs expenses.

As you can see, the 2017 revenue mostly went to cover our expenses in 2018. 🙂 I am still paying myself close to minimal salary, but it felt more stable this year (I had to skip a few months in 2017 and almost every month in 2016). There is a nitpick though.

Here’s the revenue from my games compared to the income from freelance activities:

2016-2018, Income from freelance vs income from games

2016-2018, Revenue from freelance vs revenue from games

Our own games made the company more money than freelance in 2018. Isn’t it cool? Still not enough to sustain 2 people, but I’m pretty excited about what’s to come in 2019. Seriously.

Bear in mind that I was working on my own games every year at least 50% of the time. 2016 was a terrible year money-wise. My games were subpar to say the best. 2017 was OK, because I could find side-jobs and get some game-related freelance gigs, which I consider to be a step forward. The release of the small arcade game, Frequent Flyer, helped as well.

At the end of 2017, I launched the early access of my game Lazy Galaxy, and released it in March 2018. This proved to be my most-successful game so far. It is fair to say that it broke even and is even bringing a small-ish profit now (my sales dropped by ~70% after October changes though, but maybe it’s not directly related? the game was rather old at that point).

Consoles are pretty cool.

Lazy Galaxy: Rebel Story did not do well on Steam, but consoles fared much better. Both Nintendo Switch and Xbox outsold Rebel Story on Steam. Even though it’s not a huge success story like late indies of 2017, the game did considerably better on consoles.

I still have no idea how consoles pick which developers they want to approve or deny. Even if I did – it would probably be under NDA. I think credibility and released games matter: some people I know could not get in even with better-looking games (compared to Rebel Story) because this was their first game.

In any case: if you can – diversify. If you can’t get to consoles, try to design your games to support phones. Every bit helps. Maybe not so much with phones, but it gives you extra exposure and mobile games are much easier to show at social events.

Lazy Galaxy: Rebel Story

GDC

I got a scholarship for GDC, covering the attendance ticket and accommodation in SF. Even though the plane tickets are not cheap, I’ll be able to go this year! I’m both excited and scared, but I am definitely looking forward to it.

If you are going too – drop me a message / email and I’ll be happy to meet up, talk about indie development and chill 🙂 I haven’t been to US before so I’m anticipating some great new experiences.

What I can conclude from 3 years:

Persistence pays off. If, in the midst of 2016, someone would have told me that my game will break even, I’d bitterly laugh. Even with “Indiepocalypse,” things are getting better.
Even if I am not exactly there yet, I believe that success takes patience. But you also have to look at growth. Dreaming about it is absolutely not enough. You have to be the biggest critic of your own games, even if you are super-proud of them. Lazy Galaxy: Rebel Story is my best game so far, but it’s not the most-successful one. Objectively speaking (and it pains me to say that), even though we wrote 40 full pages of text for character interactions, not many people pay attention to it and the game becomes really forgettable for most people. I am the one to blame for that.
I think the tools to make games improved a lot. If you are a hobbyist, you are going to have a time of your life. Just go for it! If you are planning to go full-time indie, remember to have a backup plan and (preferably) a potential side-income.
I absolutely don’t regret going indie, but there are some tough days. In essence, I changed security for excitement. My personal income has dropped 4x compared to before I went indie, but I am feeling as fulfilled as ever. I start most days with joy and pleasant anticipation. The financial instability is crazy, but it also motivates me to do as much as possible.

Goals for 2019

Double the revenue from my games. It isn’t huge to begin with, so it’s definitely doable if I make some cool stuff.
Related to previous one, release the biggest project I’ve ever done so far.
Drop my weight to 70kg. When I went indie, I was at a healthy 66kg. At the end of 2018, I hit 84kg (185lbs). My lifestyle choices were not exactly healthy, because I stayed at home so much.

I am fairly sure that not everyone who goes indie will make it. Maybe I’ll be one of those who won’t. Who knows. My days are often filled with worries about the future. But they are equally filled with exciting moments of anticipation and seeing the fruit of my labor. One thing I’m sure of is that things get better with time. If you are willing to face your mistakes and learn from them, you’ll eventually get better. It does not guarantee that you’ll make a hit game, but it gives stability over time. Our games suck less, even if they are not world-class just yet. I’m hoping to devote my 2019 to making games and I’m looking forward to what we’ll have to show for it in 2020. Peace and may you have a good 2019!