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What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project

dylanwilson.net

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Re: What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project

#101

Post by dpcan »

cutemonster wrote: post #87
dpcan wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a game reach about $600 per day in revenue for a few months way back in 2010. Overall I think it made around $100K, and another game made about $30K. So, even though I was making money, I still wanted out. The reasons came down to those listed below: 1) Taxes. I wonder if it's easier now, but back then, I had to manually pay individual counties in my state, I had to pay individual states, and and then there wer…

> some of them are crazy. I received death threats for removing a small feature Wow, literally crazy About how many customers did you have, when those things happened? If I may ask. I wonder how large a group of people tends to be, when such crazies start appearing (I wonder how those things made you feel and think)

Hard to say. Being one of the first games of its kind, the free version got to about a million downloads really fast. I didn’t get many emails even with that many players because I was really careful to make it bug free and work on most devices, but I’d say the real hate mail started rolling in as soon as the nice new Samsung phones were rolled out and my game didn’t look as good on those, and also, Android finally had some mass market appeal and it was more than just the geeks who had android phones.... it was everybody.

My game was originally designed to work on the G1 phone. Which was an awesome little phone.

Re: What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project

#102

Post by dpcan »

looping__lui wrote: post #80
dpcan wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a game reach about $600 per day in revenue for a few months way back in 2010. Overall I think it made around $100K, and another game made about $30K. So, even though I was making money, I still wanted out. The reasons came down to those listed below: 1) Taxes. I wonder if it's easier now, but back then, I had to manually pay individual counties in my state, I had to pay individual states, and and then there wer…

Thanks for sharing! Regarding 1): I can recommend the combination “Fastspring” for order processing and taxes (nothing to worry about and super easy setup) and LimeLM for software protection; dynamic license key generation is super easy in conjunction w/ Fastspring :-)

I’m looking at Fastspring because of the tax remittances they do.

I don’t think a lot of developers know their actual tax requirements when selling software. A good accountant will surprise a lot of devs :/

Re: What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project

#103

Post by dpcan »

imhoguy wrote: post #76
dpcan wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a game reach about $600 per day in revenue for a few months way back in 2010. Overall I think it made around $100K, and another game made about $30K. So, even though I was making money, I still wanted out. The reasons came down to those listed below: 1) Taxes. I wonder if it's easier now, but back then, I had to manually pay individual counties in my state, I had to pay individual states, and and then there wer…

> 1) Taxes That was nightmare. Best to outsource it completely with: Merchant of Record, an app marketplace or resellers.

I think Apple makes it easy, but we were only on Android at the time, and it took months to finally pay all our taxes. I was sending pennies to counties. It was awful.

Re: What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project

#104

Post by zarfius »

hhas01 wrote: post #32
skizm wrote: post #23

Does the article ever actually mention what he failed at? He developed an open source game engine and... what? Did he expect people to donate to him or something? What was the monetization plan?

“What was the monetization plan?” From reading the article author’s failure was failing to ask that question of himself. With no clear objective or milestones, the project ate a huge amount of manpower for no material gain and left him thoroughly burnt out. It doesn’t matter if your project is for-profit or Free. Identify your deliverables, identify your schedule, and never turn a blind-eye to your failures to meet b…

Thanks for reading.

You pretty much nailed it. I went into the project without a clear monetization plan and when I got around to trying to figure it out I didn't know how.

Re: What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project

#105

Post by marktangotango »

dpcan wrote: post #99
qes wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my universe, I make that (net even, not gross) in half a year with essentially zero responsibility for marketing, taxes, customer support, etc. - nobody can realistically steal my work and cut into my wages with it - far less stress - and I keep making that over and over again every 6 months without having to do anything really that new or different. In comparison, a game that grossed $100k, which I have to pay se…

Do you have a game or other kind of app?

I think GP is referring to a w2 job or consulting gig.

Re: What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project

#106

Post by PinkMilkshake »

imtringued wrote: post #84
zanny wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Godot. You know, the 15 year old totally free engine of 30,000 commits 2.5 million LOCs that also does pretty much everything.

What I noticed is that it's actually much harder to use Godot than expected. Yes it does significantly reduce the amount of code you have to write for your game but it opens up questions of how to structure your project because the scene editor doesn't actually match how I would make my own games if all I had was SDL2. For example if you just straight up write code to add nodes to the scene graph it will create a dis…

> What I noticed is that it's actually much harder to use Godot than expected. Yes it does significantly reduce the amount of code you have to write for your game but it opens up questions of how to structure your project because the scene editor doesn't actually match how I would make my own games if all I had was SDL2.

I agree. But what I've learned in my short time using Godot is embracing Godot's scene system and not fighting it seems to help.

This area in the documentation is helpful: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/getting_started/workf...

You can also bypass the scene system. The scene system is a optional abstraction on top of a seemingly more data-oriented core where everything is just a RID (Resource ID).

More here: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/optimizatio...

> For example if you just straight up write code to add nodes to the scene graph it will create a disconnect between what is displayed in the editor and the actual game

You can solve this to some degree by putting "tool" at the top of your scripts. See https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/misc/runnin...

Re: What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project

#107

Post by dpcan »

dpcan wrote: post #96
bdowling wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1) Taxes. What taxes are you talking about? You mentioned that you were selling through app stores, which I assume handled sales taxes for you in the few cases when they may be required. Your business income taxes would be the same as any business in your city/county/state/country. What else is there?

Google Play is starting to remit taxes by state, but they haven’t always done this. It was/is up to the seller. And if you sell with PayPal or something on your own site, check all the laws of where your product is being downloaded, you’ll be surprised. My accountant ruined my year that year.

I'm not still selling on Google Play, and haven't for a while, but if you're interested in seeing where Google currently remits taxes by state and country, the link is below:

https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...

Re: What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project

#108

Post by dpcan »

marktangotango wrote: post #105
dpcan wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a game or other kind of app?

I think GP is referring to a w2 job or consulting gig.

LOL, yep, it's tongue in cheek, did not catch that.

He has a point. But as an entrepreneur, I'll probably go through all of this again and again and again. Can't help myself.

Re: What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project

#109

Post by cutemonster »

dpcan wrote: post #101
cutemonster wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> some of them are crazy. I received death threats for removing a small feature Wow, literally crazy About how many customers did you have, when those things happened? If I may ask. I wonder how large a group of people tends to be, when such crazies start appearing (I wonder how those things made you feel and think)

Hard to say. Being one of the first games of its kind, the free version got to about a million downloads really fast. I didn’t get many emails even with that many players because I was really careful to make it bug free and work on most devices, but I’d say the real hate mail started rolling in as soon as the nice new Samsung phones were rolled out and my game didn’t look as good on those, and also, Android finally h…

Interesting to hear. A million, that's more downloads / people than what I'd guessed

Maybe you'd find this article interesting, about crazy people when the group I'd large enough:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/tim.blog/2020/02/02/reasons-to-...

(What! That became a Google amp link. The real link is: https://tim.blog/2020/02/02/reasons-to-not-become-famous/ )

It got posted here at HN some months ago

Re: What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project

#110

Post by IggleSniggle »

pdfernhout wrote: post #24
barrenko wrote: post #10

Failing is hard. I'd definitely try to get my kid into sports so he can learn to lose early and often.

It is true that helping a child learn about resiliency is important. As Carol Dweck says, the brain is like a muscle and effort can eventually be rewarded with skill. So it is good to praise effort and persistence. And failure is part of life and needs to be dealt with. That said, consider Alfie Kohn's writing, such as "No Contest: The Case Against Competition": https://www.alfiekohn.org/contest/ "No Contest, which h…

Wow, this is fantastic. Thank you for sharing. I wish for an easily accessible, pithy version of this...this idea in viral form.
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