I am going to create a mobile game. I already have friend who is a graphic designer (and a gamer). We are pretty excited about some ideas and mechanics we've been exploring. I don't want to create "yet another RPG" that no one will play, but a "simple", entertaining game with a well defined business model and a well defined market target that hopefully will have enough traction to generate income. HN readers. I ask for advice! Some info you may find useful
- Country: Spain - Runaway $: (Just for me, for living) 12 - 18 months - Skills: Software engineer, programming mainly for Android and iOS, with a little of JS (Vue and friends) and a little of Spring + Big Data DBs.
Please share similar experiences, any advice regarding the project (still have not decided if Unity or Unreal Engine for instance) or just some encouraging words because I will need them.
Thanks!
Building a mobile game that is profitable is a bit like the lottery. You need to build something great to have a chance of winning, but building something great is not a guarantee that you will win. I realize that goes for most business ventures, but I think it is more true for mobile games than most.
What captures the imagination of an audience is in large part a guessing game and a matter of luck. You can look at past successes as a demonstration of that. Flappy Bird was a hit for a bit but it wasn't exactly clear what was so different about it than so many before. Angry Birds started an insane franchise, but I'm not sure if the same game were launched today whether it would capture the same share of the market. It is just really really ephemeral.
But making games is fun, like really fun! I had more fun in those years than I have at any other point in my career. We were banging out a game a month and having a blast doing it. This was very early so we knew there was audience enough for each of those to pay the bills, but I wouldn't count on that these days.
So all of that to say, do it! But don't expect to pay the bills doing it. Maybe you will, maybe you won't, but it is very much either rags or riches with very little predictability on where you arrive.
If I can offer any advice it is to focus on simple mechanics and keep production costs way down. Don't spend more than three months on launching your first title.
I'm wondering if indie teams should more or less do the same if they are not eyeing big hits, which few managed to pull off. Two months might be too stingy, but with the engine and tools built it might not be impossible to pull off a by quarter subscription?
Big studios solve this by publishing games by the hundreds.
If you target a specific group people initially, and make something 'for them'. As one of them. You place yourself in a much greater position to succeed than if you had simply made a game in the abstract in the terms of who it is for.
A great example of this is the FIFA franchise. And most of the football related franchises for that matter. It seems like if you meet the criteria of making a great game, as the OP has stated, failing within these categories is in some ways, harder than succeeding.
Cash is king. Nothing is more important than cash flow. A runway is not a development budget -- it is a loan in the form of opportunity cost. Always look for income at all times. And never, ever borrow money for the project.
Regarding people, keep active contacts with other people. Do not shelter behind closed doors. The world moves quickly, and if your team withdraws into its own bubble for 12 months, when you emerge you will find the world to be very different.
Regarding tech, Unity will work better than Unreal because a small team needs to reduce technical overhead as much as possible.
Regarding gameplay, favor simplicity over complexity.
Regarding art, maintain a cohesive and unique style across all elements of design.
Regarding players, start looking for them from day 1. It takes a long time and a lot of work to build a following. And remember, the players are not your customers -- they are your new boss.
It's quite hard to pick each color from color picker wheel and ending up with something decent. Much better approach is to use pre-assembled palettes like ones on lospec.com/palette-list collection. My favorite versatile palette is edg32, but others will work better for certain moods. Working with more than 30-is colors requires experience and patience.
These guidelines can help to build something that catches attention, and assets tend to be simpler and easier to iterate on.
Regarding your profile, when I read it I feel like I am already in the middle of a game.
What not to do: spend a year coding a game in your basement, then "release" it and hope it grows from word of mouth. Those days are long gone.
I think most artists want an audience, and that requires skills on the business side. Having a successful business also pays to create more art. I can't help you there!
If you look at the app store top 100, there aren't that many "fun" or original games up there. There's even a tonne of idle click games! I think one thing that's important to recognize is that most people playing mobile games don't see the experience as a 'game'. It's more of a passive ride to distract themselves for a few minutes. Idle click games aren't fun in a traditional sense, but they have isolated a reward feedback loop in your brain and serve some function to make its users enjoy the experience.
I didn't work at Zynga on game design, so I'm not here to defend corporate mobile game design. However, I don't want to knock the business side of things too much either. I learned there's a ton of creativity in creating new hooks and game modes to increase engagement/spending. Games constantly riff off each others game loops and it's a very quickly evolving field. There's also lots of room for creativity in making successful advertising campaigns.
Good luck! You have a great runway if you’re able to avoid common pitfalls. And even if you never make enough money you (probably) can get another software job easily.
I've worked on eight titles professionally working for game companies that never made the money spent developing them. It's a hit driven industry and there's no guarantees, unless you hit on an untapped market with a lot of pent up demand for something (like Natsume had been dropping the ball and releasing garbage Harvest Moon sequels for over a decade at that point, Stardew Valley came along and showed them what the fans actually wanted). Even then it's still not a guarantee.
I'm out of the video game industry now, but still work on my own games, but it's only a few hours a week here and there. I've had some success over the years, but not enough to justify asking my wife to let me quit my job and do it full time.
At some point you’re just draining yourself of every spare hour, you’re underperforming at your day job, and you’re not really moving forward.
It’s ok to do for a month or so as a litmus test, but after that I fully support diving in full time (in full knowledge that there’s a 95% chance you’ll fail).
You can always get another job.
- Validate the idea. Try building a prototype and verifying your idea before comitting to it. You'll learn a lot about whether your game idea is fun/can be made fun, and learn the ropes of your new dev environment in a way that'll let you throw away your early code with no regrets.
- Pick Unity if you don't have experience with either. You'll get to results faster, and at solo dev scale, the quality Unreal offers won't matter.
- If you've decided on a mobile game, do some research on how effective monetization on mobile works, come to terms with how bad the options are and decide if you're still into it
- Runway seems OK for what you're doing, but word of advice: it is mentally taxing to some people to be in financial "freefall". I know this hit me hard when I made a similar decision to yours.
That said, there are a lot of good parts as well. Seeing people play and enjoy your brainchild is definitely more rewarding than working somebody else's startup or company, and as a venue for creativity, game development is hard to beat for somebody with a programmer skillset.
B. Cashflow coming in immediately is super rare. However you distribute or make a deal, it easily takes 1 month to actually see the real, usable money. I've had a lot of deals that were "ready to go" and still took about 2 to 3 months to finalize.
C. Your mental health is your most prized, valuable possession. Avoid burnout. Sleep regularly and well. Stay to a schedule. Eat healthy. Exercise. Do not work more than 10 hours a day, no matter how badly you want to. That 18 hour sprint means you'll work 40% efficiency the next day. Plus you risk burnout. One day off a week minimum devoted 100% to fun and/or relaxing.
D. Organize and learn you will be juggling short, mid and long term goals. Dont sacrifice one too much for the others. Find balance.
E. Dont bite off more than you can chew or be too ambitious. Yes, ambition is good, but you're juggling high risk. If you make an easier game 1 to do that extends your dev time by another year in cash flow, game 2 could be grander than your current vision. Plus you have experience to help you. You might be better off build 2 to 4 smaller games that help you build cash flow and experience that all give you the skills to tackle your dream project with precision.
F. Theres a lot of shitty advice on the internet. In the end, trust your hard earned experiences over someone else's "never did it" bullshit.
Good luck.
Perhaps you can go part time or take 3 or 6 month (unpaid) leave?
I wish you all the best whatever you choose to do. Make sure you post an update when you have something to show.
Also maybe go the 'devlog' route and document the process on YouTube and Twitch as those are pretty popular right now and is a good way to gauge interest and feedback for "free".
From the look of it, the landscape of mobile gaming is pretty competetive nowadays. I'm not sure which genre you are targeting, but from what you are describing I think it's a casual game? I strongly recommend Deconstructor of Fun to you as it covers mobile gaming pretty extensively and we have been using it for industry information from day zero. Subscribe to the newsletter and try to figure out the landscape for your genre, and see where you can find an edge.
That said, unless you have been going through a full scale mobile gaming dev from begining to end, you might overlook some aspects. For example, you didn't mention method of marketing (but do have a market target), but that's one of the key areas that contribute to the success of a mobile game (and pretty much every indie game), and could be pretty expensive if you go through some channels.
Another thing to think is how easy it is for others to copy your game. It's almost fair practice that companies start copying other games, not only the gameplay flow, but even the look and style of it. Big companies do that as well, so be careful.
Your financial looks good, 12-18 months should be good (I'd target for 2 years though), and about the engine, we are using Unity, but I guess it depends on the project and your experience. If you think the gae won't have top graphics and you don't have a solid C++ background, maybe Unity is easier?
As for engine, Unity if you know C#, Unreal if you prefer C. Unity if you like documentation, Unreal if the lack of documentation doesn't deter you. Unreal has a better networking stack.
i wasted 18 months on creating a game. it was an awful time with millions of boring-but-necessary tasks and sales on mac+linux+windows were basically zero.
if i had a time-machine, this would be the one decision i'd reverse.
All the best engineering, art, audio, marketing, and polish in the world won't make a game more fun. Stickiness comes from game design and game design comes from iteration.
The biggest mistake that people make is waiting too long before showing people what they are doing, and after they put in months of effort they are disappointed that nobody seems to care about their stuff.
If you can't find someone who will play your really rough first proof of concept, then you probably won't find people who will play the finished game either.
(Also, just because someone will try one version of the game, doesn't mean they'll be your beta tester for ever. You'll need to find new people to try your game all the time. If your game is good it should get easier.)
1. Kidoteca never turned a profit, mind you over time the revenue is not terrible, but investors lost their money basically, games are still for sale and still generating revenue but too slowly to be useful.
2. Many bigger investors are wary of supporting such business, because they got scammed (games in general have some fraud here and there, mobile game industry, has rampant fraud, IP theft, actual physical stuff theft, and a bunch of other crimes, corruption, government espionage... it is just nuts).
3. If you still want to try anyway, knowing all that... there is a whole industry named "hypercasual" games, where you create a simple game, and publish through some platforms, and if the game is successful, they help you spread it further and share the revenue with you.
4. DO NOT attempt to make PC/console-style games on mobile, you will lose money, people that want "real" games do it on a Switch or PC or a Dingoo (a cheap mobile console from Korea) and so on.
5. As much as I wish selling games directly were a good business model on mobile, it isn't, people just want free stuff, so you have to rely on freemium or ads, sadly for Kidoteca case both of these models are terrible considering our target market (kids below 6). One of our competitors that had success, did so by having the game be the advertising in first place, ie: the game purpose is make the brand known, and then they get money selling cartoons, toys, t-shirts, etc...
We've spend a year and a half building a game that made us just over $1000. You increase your odds by having a name in the industry: known game designer, known franchise, known publisher, something that will put you in the front page of gaming websites for a few hours, but even that is just a push, no guarantees. You can also go for a quantitative strategy: build lot of small simple games. This last strategy worked better for us.
Make sure you take this decision knowing that failing is by far the most likely outcome. That's the hard truth about the game industry.
Sorry if those are not the encouraging words you hoped.
Don't plan to do any work in the first month.
I ended up doing a ton of cleaning / organizing my apartment. Straightened out finances. Started journaling. Tried things like taking freakishly long walks.
After a month I not only felt ready to work, but also that I had prepped a lot of useful habits!
As for games on mobile platforms, be prepared if you will create something new and unique - it will have dozen of clones on day three after launch.
Even if you do succeed, expect growth to take 1000x more energy/focus/time than you realize. How will you get your game to stand out? Organic growth is like planting a seed. It grows slowly. But within a couple of years you'll have a tree.
When I launched my side project I had this dream of hundreds of people signing up within the first days/weeks. In reality, 1 person did. Who cancelled a few days later. However I'm now 3+ years into it and it provides for me and my loved ones.
Also... be prepared for a lot of mental games. Thoughts like "what am I doing?", "you're going to fail", etc. Being on your own takes a mental toughness I never imagined.
I would personally recommend ruthless simplicity. Particularly on mobile (other than gatcha), most of the most popular games are fairly simple, but polished to a shine. Extra features won't help attract players, and anything that puts people off in the first 5 minutes of play is a disaster. No-one likes a 10 minute intro, that explains 20 different things to them.
The 1 hardest thing about making games is making a game that's so good and fun that people will not only look at it, but also download, play and keep playing it. The other 1 hardest thing is getting people to even look at that, even if you give it away for free without ads.
- Do not fall in love with any ideas. Once you have a couple of people play-test something, if it doesn't appear to be fun, be ready to discard it. A lot of things sound good in theory but generally don't work in practice. Some things will work with some changes but you should always be ready to let go of something and move on.
- For gameplay, keep the implementation as simple as possible. It might be tempting to implement a "generic/abstract" idea of something to get a clever implementation which works for many cases (which do not yet exist). Please think about the kind of bugs the resulting complexity could cause and whether they would be a pain to debug. Simplicity of implementation also makes it easy to refactor it later if you feel that it needs to be changed.
- Do not underestimate the work that goes into "finishing" the product. Once you have the basic concepts of the game working, you'll need stuff like UI, save/load/replay, high scores etc. This is not overly complicated but it's not trivial either. If you want to implement save/load/replay features, you may want to think about it in advance.
- I do not at all like Unity and love Unreal (no connection except unhappy and happy user respectively). However, just pick the one with which you will be more comfortable developing.
Again, I wish you luck and hope you have a lot of fun and learn a lot from your efforts.
As far as the framework, my advice is Unity or Unreal for 3D or console, Godot for 2D, but Unreal only if you have a studio and a budget otherwise it's overkill. But in the end the framework itself matters less than the license, which matters less than the game itself and the platform(s) you intend to publish to. Remember the guy who made Flappy Bird crapped it out in a weekend and made so much money on it that it actually scared him.
It's also important to remember that the code is the least important part of a game's success. The code just makes it work, it's the plumbing, not the architecture. The days when clever programming could make a game are long, long gone - now, code is only notable when it breaks. What makes a game successful is design, artwork, production, the things the player engages with and cares about.
No, sorry.. what makes a game successful is mostly luck, but a game won't have a chance to be lucky without the rest of it.
- Do not gamble money that you are not prepared to lose.
- Do not gamble all your money at once.
- Know when to cut your loses and quit.
- Luck does not last forever.
You also don't seem to have any game dev experience. You could easily spend the entire 18 months just learning how to write games. The transition from CRUD apps to games is brutal.
I put my time working on my game on my resume, and it did help me get good jobs in gaming and VR, that I probably wouldn’t have landed otherwise.
My suggestion: don't create a game. Create a gamified tool for a specific niche. To make a high-quality one, do something related to a domain/hobby your are passionate about. For example, if you enjoy cooking, create a gamified educational cooking app, where you actually learn how to hook. Do you like playing the drums? Create a Music School simulator (eg. you are the teacher, get students, you teach them, something like Game Dev Tycoon).
That being said, actually earning money with a game is REALLY hard UNLESS you go for a specific niche, which makes it a lot easier to market your game or ask money for the game.
Unfortunately luck plays a big role in the mobile games market. Some simpler games (like flappy bird) make a ton of money, but most indie games often get only short bursts of cash flow.
Because you did not indicate that you have worked on a game before, I'd strongly urge you to not burn the bridges with your current job. Perhaps go for a 50:50 for work:game.
It's great that you have a long runway. Most games only take 4-5 months to develop. Try to get the product out as early as possible.
You might need to invest a significant amount of money on advertising. They are relatively cheap in CPC, but it will be a significant cost early on nonetheless.
I eventually needed to take a job since it wasn't profitable for long (2-3 months) and my plan now is to build other games and quit the boring corporate job once for all.
The only advice I have: launch as early as you can. On my second game I waited unnecessary months, and I realized I could've prioritize a lot better.
If you become even a mediocre game developer-promoter in 10 months I'd say you are really gifted or got really lucky and got all the opportunities to learn fast. When you start running out of money and only have three or four more months or runway you will need like rock-solid mental and physical health to not go crazy.
I have this old idea around a turn based RPG game that simulates the political scenario of a developing country in an elections year. Main individual goal: to be elected for either a city, state or federal mandate. The more turns you play, the more your chances increase of climbing the political ladder up to the presidency. Corruption, ethics and media layers add the complexity to the game.
Hey, congrats for your decision to leave the startup and starting your own thing. That's the most important aspect here.
18 months is optimistic in terms of runway. Try to raise the same again in angel/friends & family funding. It's much easier to do that now, at the beginning, than it is later on, when suddenly everything seems bleak. Very best of luck, P.
Games ending .io are generally fun, simple, multiplayer, and browser-based
Where in spain? Shout out from Valencia!
If you have that, though, you have avoided the biggest source of failure.
People think games are like startups, but with games you don't get to iterate after a failed release. People don't take a second look at games.
There’s so much competition and things can really unravel due to missteps early on in the piece.
I guess the flipside is the market is both huge and very willing to spend money. So swings and roundabouts.
Instead of doing it yourself. I think you can start by hire some developers from 3rd countries to get the job done. There are not short of talent developers from there.
When you hire a good developers, you can focus your time on tweaking gameplay, design, marketing, and build a community around your game.
Like others have said it is a brutal industry with most games making no money, but there is a formula to follow if you want a chance of success.
Would recommend reading Jordan Mechner's Journal on the Making of Prince of Persia
https://jordanmechner.com/store/the-making-of-prince-of-pers...
You will have roadblocks, but enjoy the journey. There are many creative ways to sustain, write about your progress.
Why not just work on it as a side project. Like is there a hard deadline where you have to meet that requires this rush to release?
The framework might actually turn out to be more popular than the game.
If you can create a low code framework, with a nice UI for would be developers, that is a much less crowded space than yet another (sorry) mobile game with 30% off the top just to be put into the IOS or Google Play stores.
It's not as sexy to non developers, but from a problem solvers standpoint, it sounds hard and from a UI developer stand point, it sounds difficult.
Or you could do it just for portfolio building.
- You're biting off quite a bit of tech you've never used, it sounds like. If you want cross platform mobile + web support, Unity is probably your best bet in terms of ease-of-use vs. portability
- I'm not sure a graphic designer is going to be able to help you with the more game-specific aspects of game graphics, but I could be wrong. Animations that work well with your game engine of choice can be a big pain
- I would buy a book or a course on some kind on mobile game monetization and marketing. It was very different from what I was used to in the SaaS space. Paid user acquisition seemed like a strange concept. Running paid UA campaigns with different install price bids based on quality of player was also a strange concept. If you want the game to make money this stuff will come up.
- Try to use services as much as you can. You're a startup, after all, you want to spend your time building the things that make your product unique. Playfab is okay but lacks decent analytics features + crash reporting IIRC. Firebase is good for mobile apps stuff but the analytics aren't great and they name stuff horribly. Regardless, pick one and try to lean on it heavily - only build the stuff you absolutely have to. Lots of tools have free trials and free tiers, use them.
- If you've never worked in games before, I would look up normal game development process. A simple version is to prototype things aggressively, then throw the bad parts out, then repeat until you're ready to do what's called a Game Vertical Slice, which usually just means to build all the "essential" parts in a way that lets you use them together. You want to flex your core loop in GVS, so you'll need each relevant piece in a usable state. When you make your GVS build, play it a lot, share it with friends, maybe try to get some friends of friends or parents involved. You want honest feedback. Is it fun? Are there parts of it that aren't? Are there things in the core loop that don't make sense? Are there gaps in the core loop? The data you'll get out of GVS is going to very aggressively scope your actual launch + success.
I say look into game development processes because I think it's important to timebox your curiousity and perfectionism. If it were a side project, I would say kind of follow your curiosity and build things exactly as you want them. Because you're trying to actually launch something, I would follow a hard structure such that you know you need to move on when you're spinning your wheels.
I'll try to think of more to write back. If you have questions I'm happy to answer them. Games are great, and making them is also great.
But.
If you want to make this successful, first you're going to need to understand the risks here, as well as define explicitly what you're looking to get out of this. Are you looking to just make money, or execute a creative vision? What will you decide to do if those two things come into conflict?
Second, of all the potential business models out there, making a game is probably one of the riskiest ones you can possibly work on. You're going to need to come into this knowing what you're doing.
At minimum, you should be able to answer the question - "Why does the world need this game?" Why would someone play this game, and more importantly, pay for it?
If you were an experienced game developer who had released some number of small indie titles and looking to spend some time on a title you know can have an impact, thats one thing. But making a good game that people want to play is very difficult, time consuming, and requires a lot of experience. It takes years to build the skillsets needed to be successful in this industry, and thats even with a programming background. The fact that you don't have an idea yet of what game you want to make, nor have a familiarity with an engine yet, tells me you're a couple years away from being able to quit your job. Also, the fact that you say you're motivated to do this because you're bored of your job and want some self-actualization, tells me you're doing this for the wrong reasons. You should only quit your job and make the jump if you're already progressing on a game you know can be successful and just need time to develop and publish it.
So here is my advice. Keep your job for now, or if you don't like it, find a new one. Join a game jam on itch.io, timebox yourself and your partner for some short amount of time, like a week or a month, to create several small "throwaway" games to build skills and the understanding of how much you can accomplish. If you don't have many obligations outside your job (kids, family, etc.) you should be able to accomplish a small complete game in a month in your spare time. Do this for a year or two, and if eventually you find yourself making a really great game you just need more time to work on, then you have your answer. But by choosing to quit your job before you have even started exercising these skills you're setting yourself up for failure.
I sincerely hope you succeed and find your vision. But in order to succeed, you need to have a good understanding of the risks involved, and the skills and experience to know how to overcome them in concrete terms.
As someone who's just completed a game jam with a small game, this is a fantastic hobby at minimum and I hope you're not deterred from being creative. I only advise caution when talking about turning this into a job. Who knows, by doing this just as a hobby at first you may even find that this gives you the right outlet you need to enjoy your day job more! That was more or less the case for me, since my present job means I'm not building things as much and deal more with a lot of team dynamics and bureaucracy.
Edit: This video was pretty enlightening to me in terms of pitching game design - if he won't accept your pitch, why should you? Theres a lot of other good videos on the GDC channel as well:
Just commented to say thanks for the quality post :)
Start a twitter account. Document your progress. Build a following. Gain an audience to sell your dreams to. Then launch it.
And give it away for free. Sell some life saving gems. The “whales” are going to be your biggest spenders.
Good luck!
