Ask HN: I'm quitting my job, will create a game – any advice?

As a just average Joe gamer, art style makes or breaks a game. If you pick a style, stay with it. Indie games like stardew, skullgirls, don't starve, papers please, punch club, and darkest dungeon all proved graphics don't sell games, especially on mobile. If anything word of mouth has probably helped most of those. But mostly, the art style is visually appealing and doesn't look like lazy garbage.

So, I am one of the cofounders of Kidoteca, where we got some family members to invest and we released a bunch of games.

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...

I did this, twice. Shit financial decision. Thought it would be fun but it just burned me out more with millions of little cuts. Thinking about doing it again.

Where in spain? Shout out from Valencia!

I would highly recommend you not quit but perhaps see if there are any more flexible working arrangements you can come to with your current employer.

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".

Decide what your monetisation strategy is. Lots of people say they don't want to "pump money" from customers, bit you do need a way of making money, and if most of your customers will give you very little / no money, some customers are going to have to give you a lot.

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.