I don’t include all the time I spent on making the game as virtual money spent, mainly because that’s called an opportunity cost, and I really hate when people argue that they actually lost $60k on a game because their salary for the year would have been $45k in corporate America, etc. I budgeted about $6k for the game and only spent a little bit over: in the end, I spent $5,500 on art and music, with an additional $2,500 on equipment needed to bridge to other platforms, such as an iPad and Macbook Air, as well as a GM Studio license and iOS developer licenses. I used the same artist and composer ( Sara Gross and Jonathan Geer) as I had for the Oil Blue, as they both had excellent work in the past and delivered right on schedule. I didn’t mind as I knew Game Maker inside and out, and as a result I could focus directly on the game making process. I know very little code and Game Maker lets me make any game I really want, so I was in a sense tied to that platform. I decided to use Game Maker 8.1 in the meantime and release it on PC first, with a port to Mac and iOS once GM Studio got out of beta. I had always planned for the game to be on multiple platforms thanks to Game Maker Studio, but at the time of development the engine was still in a beta state. You can click these Youtube pics to check out the videos. I was hoping to make a big splash on launch day, and I was shooting for at least $2k in sales on the first few days. What I was hoping for also with these weekly blog posts was a buildup of interest so that people could get hyped for the release. I’m actually quite proud that I managed to do that, since I hardly ever stick to deadlines or able to stick to a regime for all that long, so woo! I was also going to challenge myself in making a weekly blog post that detailed how the game was progressing, my game design strategies, and so on. The goal was to have the game hit during the summer so I could take advantage of the slow game news/releases. Work began in March 2012 and the game was formally announced on April 20 th. What I really was asking myself was: is it a good enough concept to pin my final attempt at making a good/profitable game? I knew there was a good concept in that game, and with some polish it could turn out to be quite good. This time, I had the money, and I was going to give it a final go. A few years later I was always trying to get a sequel back off the ground, but it never seemed to come together for various reasons, mainly due to the fact that I had no money to invest in the game. The combination of cooking dishes while trying to keep customers from leaving was a fun, chaotic challenge. Back in 2004 I made a free fan game based on ONR that was filled to the brim with awful hand drawn sprites and ripped music from the Sims, and yet somehow it really took off with people. I decided to finally make the game a lot of people had requested I make since 2004: a cooking game that was influenced by the old Japanese PS1 game, Ore no Ryouri. I was making less than a hundred dollars per month on the games I had available, and had most of my income supplemented by my part time job at a coffee shop. I had already given it a go for years now, but had no real income aside from pockets of sales when the Oil Blue would get some attention here and there. I knew, with a sinking feeling, that this was likely going to be the last game I was going to make if it wasn’t successful. I had previously sold the Oil Blue in the Indie Royale bundle and had about $10k left to fund my next game (after burning through around 5k on the game I had just shelved). Let’s get to it !Īfter going through some development hell with a game that just wasn’t coming together for me, despite the terrific art and music that had already been created for the game, I decided to shelve the project altogether and work on something else in the meantime. This is less of a post-mortem in game design and more of what I learned in selling not only my biggest PC game to date, but my first Mac and iOS release as well. Today I’d like to share my sales and how I got there, where I go from here, the strategies I used in selling the game and what I would and wouldn’t do again. Since then I’ve worked on two projects, one that was cancelled after more than a half a year’s work, and the second released last October called “ Cook, Serve, Delicious!”, a management game where you buy equipment and foods to fill your restaurant’s menu and cook for people during the business hours of 9am to 10pm. Over a year ago I wrote about my experiences selling the Oil Blue ( Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3), an indie game that was released on the PC back in 2010 and garnered some critical acclaim but less than stellar sales. It’s kind of incredible how much the gaming landscape has changed in just less than two years.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |