A Dark Room: From Sabbatical Year to $800k • Hacker News Board

Re: A Dark Room: From Sabbatical Year to $800k

#221

Post by wccrawford » Wed, Dec 27, 2017, 12:20 PM UTC

jng wrote: post #148

anigbrowl wrote: post #135

Then. A Dark Room went viral. I suspect the author's lack of subsequent success with his other games stems from his apparent lack of curiosity about exactly how his first and only lucky break took place.

It's not about lack of understanding. The viral success of a "one-off" type of game like ADR is nearly impossible to reproduce. Sometimes people take a liking to something because you hit exactly the right notes without even knowing what notes they are (not that they do themselves even!), and it is impossible to hit them again. ADR looks like that kind of success. Repeating the success of GTA Vice City is very hard,…

Actually, if the original creator of A Dark Room wrote another game that was nearly identical, people would lap it up. Especially the ones that loved it the first time.

The problem is that the OP here didn't write it. They ported it to mobile.

So they haven't yet actually created a game like this, they've just made some changes to an existing one that was already insanely popular and reaped the rewards for it.

Story-based incrementals are still incredibly popular in the incremental games community, and another good one will do quite well. It's very, very hard to charge for them, though, because nobody trusts them to be any good until after they've played it to the end.

So you basically have to make a free one and hope it takes off, and then charge for the mobile port of it.

Re: A Dark Room: From Sabbatical Year to $800k

#222

Post by mlashcorp » Wed, Dec 27, 2017, 12:44 PM UTC

dwaltrip wrote: post #195

andrepd wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's your claim. What evidence do you have for that? What if it is just (or majorly, like 95%) just getting lucky?

Luck plays a big role, but there are also other important dynamics. Domain expertise, creativity, intelligence, education, insights from other fields, financial resources, connections to other impactful individuals, personality, etc. Such things significantly affect how events unfold.

I believe resilience is the big one

Re: A Dark Room: From Sabbatical Year to $800k

#223

Post by infinite8s » Wed, Dec 27, 2017, 12:57 PM UTC

baby wrote: post #214

ajkjk wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those numbers are ridiculous. I saved up about $100k in 3 years at a tech job and I haven't worked in the last two years on that, no problem (living in a not-inexpensive US city with a car, also).

What do you do with 100k of savings? What's next?

Keep saving. You probably plan on living to an old age?

Re: A Dark Room: From Sabbatical Year to $800k

#224

Post by infinite8s » Wed, Dec 27, 2017, 1:05 PM UTC

briandear wrote: post #219

midnightclubbed wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but then you need more than the $750k to buy a house outright AND retire. And you certainly can't buy in the areas where you were earning that $140k. Owning outright makes things easier but there's always property taxes to pay, along with maintenance and upkeep.

With $500k, you could put 25% down on a 50 unit apartment complex, clear $12500 per month profit — tax free due to building depreciation — and that’s after the rest of the collected rent pays for property management, property taxes, a repair budget and the debt service — all while building equity in the building that you can then leverage to buy another property. With $500k cash you can turn that into real wealth rat…

Where do you find a 50 unit complex that only costs $2 million?

Re: A Dark Room: From Sabbatical Year to $800k

#225

Post by infinite8s » Wed, Dec 27, 2017, 1:24 PM UTC

imesh wrote: post #198

His math for what it takes to roll dice once doesn't make any sense. If you can live off $15k a year, than can't he just work one year for $30k and roll the dice? It seems unnecessary to ever take the other jobs after his first year of working.

Once you live off $30k/yr it's difficult to go back down to $15k/yr (especially if someone else like a significant other is involved).

Re: A Dark Room: From Sabbatical Year to $800k

#226

Post by mgkimsal » Wed, Dec 27, 2017, 1:26 PM UTC

sooheon wrote: post #193

mgkimsal wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I'm sure Apple made a complex assessment to determine 30% as 'optimal'." Given that they've never actually run any large scale tests of the effect of different rates, it's probably safer to say this is a number that just 'feels right' - it doesn't look 'too greedy' up front, but isn't too low that shareholders might think they're leaving money on the table. Dropping it to 22 or 25% for a couple of years would give s…

The game theoretic problem is that they cannot explore other rates without giving away the fact. The 30% suddenly looks a lot less set in stone (and less initially justified), and cue incessant deluge of pushback.

> "and cue incessant deluge of pushback."

But really, where else are people going to go?

Re: A Dark Room: From Sabbatical Year to $800k

#227

Post by infinite8s » Wed, Dec 27, 2017, 1:32 PM UTC

amirrajan wrote: post #175

anigbrowl wrote: post #135

Then. A Dark Room went viral. I suspect the author's lack of subsequent success with his other games stems from his apparent lack of curiosity about exactly how his first and only lucky break took place.

>his apparent lack of curiosity about exactly how his first and only lucky break took place I completely agree. It's not like he wrote a 300 page book on the whole ordeal or anything. He didn't spend those 300 pages trying desperately to dissect every single day, tweet, email, news post, and website write up between 11/17/2013 and 04/13/2014. Nor did he try to analyze his other assets/how they correlated back to A Da…

You can't criticize people for not having information you have. None of that was in your original post. Also the sarcastic 3rd person tone of most of your responses is off-putting. This comment would have been much better if you just stated how you did try to analyze the success of ADR in great depth.

Re: A Dark Room: From Sabbatical Year to $800k

#228

Post by taway_1212 » Wed, Dec 27, 2017, 1:45 PM UTC

jblow wrote: post #132

Yes, the game market is often hard. But I find this author's attitude fatalistic and weird. (Also I agree that the numbers do not add up). He seems to think that "rolling the dice" is the primary thing going on, and that he can't influence this substantially by any amount of development skill, proper tactics, and so forth. I wonder if this kind of mindset is a side-effect of modern-day political correctness -- that i…

Even if you do your best, you won't know if it's enough until you actually try. That's why, from a practical standpoint, it's indistinguishable from a gamble.

Re: A Dark Room: From Sabbatical Year to $800k

#229

Post by crummy » Wed, Dec 27, 2017, 2:03 PM UTC

krutzger wrote: post #121

amirrajan wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It works great on the devices I’ve tested on. Which is like 4 out of the 15,000 possible OS+Device+Carrier combinations.

If it looks like a half-loaded web page on a nexus (which is the reference device for the platform) then something is wrong. Please don't take offence, I'm just trying to explain why it did so bad on android. edit: you don't need to test your app on 1500 devices. They are all the same, if you plan for it only two devices (big/small screen) should suffice. Source: former app developer.

Are you sure that's not just what the game is supposed to look like?

Re: A Dark Room: From Sabbatical Year to $800k

#230

Post by ccallebs » Wed, Dec 27, 2017, 2:28 PM UTC

fragsworth wrote: post #5

This is incredibly depressing. It hits home for me because I'm in a very similar situation. I and one other guy almost went broke making Clicker Heroes, but it turned out to be a great success. But so far since then every project has not been worth doing. > I didn't do ads, I didn't do micro-transactions, scummy energy bars, and all those other bullshit monetization tactics. We did this in Clicker Heroes, and I don't…

FWIW, I don't feel like Clicker Heroes handles micro-transactions in a scummy way. It's not pay to win/play because it's literally impossible to win and you offer an alternate way to obtain the in-game currency (rubies, I think?).