Since then I’ve managed to get a Creative England GamesLab grant for my latest game, which is almost complete, and things are looking up. Running out of money is a pretty good motivator though and I quickly made Spooky Bonus, which launched in time for Halloween 2013 and turned out to be my most successful game yet. Spooky Bonus - my most successful game yet Moving continent costs an absolute fortune and we ended up back in debt seven years after I first went indie. I also dabbled in mobile ports of my games but they didn’t really make any money (a subject for another article). I made a game called Spring Bonus that did pretty well, but not well enough to support my family, so once again I ended up doing some contract work and some casual game design consultancy. So in early 2011 I quit my job although this time I had some savings (woo), but they only lasted a few months (doh!). Nevertheless, this was a very tough time period for us and when the Big Fish Games contract work cash started to arrive we just used it to pay off debts to get our finances back to zero.īig Fish Games offered me a job in Vancouver in late 2008 and we moved there because we thought it would be an adventure, and it was, but I eventually got the urge to go indie again. We even made use of government tax credits for low income families, which helped pay for some of our childcare so that we could get some work done. I also did some IT consultancy during the first 18 months to help make ends meet and my wife got a part-time job lecturing about science journalism at a university. Someone at Big Fish Games spotted one of those games and asked me if I wanted to do some contract work for them and because I was in a desperate financial situation I agreed – that game was the original Fairway Solitaire for PC/Mac, which was a big hit back in 2007/2008. Jake Birkettĭuring the summer of 2006 I changed programming language/engine to one that allowed me to add more graphical polish and I put that to good use in a couple of match-3 games that had professional art and music. I really had no other choice but to make it work. I didn’t see any decent cash for 18 monthsīasically it was about 18 months before I actually saw any kind of decent cash and that came from two sources: a couple of moderately successful games and some contract work. That game didn't make much money either: $2,900 to date. However, the fact that it sold even one copy spurred me on and so I spent the next three months making another game using the same engine whilst getting further into debt. It didn’t cost much to make and it shows.Ī game that generated 200 dollars per yearĪs a result it didn't make much money: $1,750 over the last eight and a half years. My first game used stock art and music (yuk), and I even used some of my own programmer art (OMG). Then I spent about six months making my first game and we juggled our finances by getting some bank loans and living off credit cards, and I think we even took a mortgage payment holiday for a couple of months. To get a game to state where you can release it on the Internet as a complete product is not easy. This is when I learned that making the game part is relatively easy and what takes time is all the GUI stuff, menu system, polish etc. The first thing I did was to make a couple of complete mini-games so that I could begin to build an engine for subsequent commercial games. Also my wife wasn't working due to being a full-time mum/mom.įurthermore, I’d never actually shipped a completed game I’d just fiddled about with various game ideas over the years. However, I had no savings because my family had just moved to a bigger house (with bigger living costs) so that we had room for our second son. So I quit the business software job and went “full indie!” I’d also been making games for over 20 years as a hobby and finally decided that I wanted to do it full time. Want a slice of honesty? I'm a games developer who has done pretty much everything wrong, but I’m still here nine years later.īack in 2005 I had a good stable job making business software and I’d been doing that for nine years.
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