The Still of the Night Causes a Storm in the Mind

So the summer is here again (almost). It’s been a busy couple of months. My last post was about Crash for Cash getting popular and boy has it ever gotten popular. In 2 months the game has been played 2 million times. Furthermore my estimates for daily profits were accurate. The first week that advertising kicked in I started kicking myself for not adding it sooner. Beyond getting played 2 million times, Crash for Cash also took the #1 spot in the racing category for about 3-4 days in April. The day it occurred was truly magical. My wife and I were in San Francisco on her Spring Break vacation. During the day we visited Alcatraz, walked from Fisherman’s Wharf to Crissy Beach, checked out the Exploratorium, and then finally walked the entire length of the Golden Gate Bridge to and fro. After crossing the Golden Gate Bridge on the way back was the first time I noticed Crash for Cash in the #1 spot. That was a good day!

Of course Crash for Cash isn’t the only cool thing going on. I also completed the new book iPhone 3D Game Programming All in One, which is currently being printed. This great new 400 page book is published by Cengage and should hit your local Barnes and Noble sometime during the first week of July. In the book I show new iPhone developers how to create a casual flight simulator for the iPhone using Unity. A pre-release version of the game accidentally went out onto the App Store (I forgot to pull it once I uploaded it for book screen shots, that Apple wouldn’t give me permission to use anyway). Long story short though the game actually pushed the book into Amazon’s Top 100 Game Development, 3D, and Apple books in various countries (US included). I ended up leaving the rough cut of the game up for a while since it was promoting sales. I now have a slightly more user friendly version coming out to coincide with the release of the book. A big goal of mine is not to change the game much from what the book covers. Originally, I was looking for 1 : 1 parity but I’ve since decided that a few more play tests and minor minor tweaks aren’t a crime so long as I stay within the realm of the book’s lessons any user should be able to replicate my minor tweaks in a few minutes. In due time I would like to release a fully polished product using the engine from this book. The flight model is really pretty cool and allows for loops and barrel rolls using a fairly accurate and sophisticated method of force and friction applications to the body of the aircraft. It’s not a dead ringer for X-Plane but it’s pretty close in my opinion.

Still in other news I began working at L3 Communications doing some serious games work in February. The work I’m doing there has been very fulfilling. I work with a fantastic team of individuals who love this stuff as much as I do (and GASP … I didn’t have to move to the West coast to find them, although one of them is from San Francisco). Through this job I’ve gotten to attend some really great conferences I might otherwise not have gone to and I’ve gotten to polish my skills even further all while working on projects that have a real world impact (something that I often find hollow in the traditional games industry). At some point I hope I can share more about my work in serious games but for now I’m just happy for the opportunity to apply my skills and communicate with a slew of talented people in this new (to me) arena.

There will be some more game information soon. I haven’t actually released a new game for the iPhone since last year. The funny thing is that by focusing on marketing I’ve been able to increase income from the App Store tremendously without releasing anything new. I plan to reinvest all that I’ve earned through the App Store although it may not be in the traditional sense. Keep reading to find out how all of this will grow (hopefully) into part of a larger plan

I’ve always wanted to create a hit video game, something that a lot of people would experience and enjoy. This past week it finally happened. Though I’ve created many games and have experienced minor successes from time to time, I’ve never experienced something quite like the phenomenon Crash For Cash is seeing right now.

I originally released Crash For Cash as a paid app at $1.99. It experienced some success and maintained decent sales with a fair run in the Top 100 Racing titles. Around the same time I made a change to all my app store descriptions by adding “Also Try” text with a list of all my other games. I noticed an increase in sales of all my games and attributed this to the cross-promotion between all the apps’ individual descriptions. In turn I decided to do more lite versions of my titles to increase the cross promotion. It didn’t help.

I realized afterward that it was actually Crash For Cash, which was responsible for the other games’ sales increases. First of all Crash For Cash is more polished than any other title Midnight Status has produced. Second, Crash For Cash is hooked up with Twitter and a “More Games” button so it’s a great tool for promotion. I decided that it would be best to just release it for free as a flagship game and advertisement for other Midnight Status titles. Forget doing lite versions, just put my best foot forward and hope that it trickles down.

After a single week as a free game Crash For Cash has risen to the #4 Top Racing spot, the #8 Top Arcade Spot, and the #34 Top Overall Game. It has been played 170,000 times and it experienced 23,000 downloads yesterday alone. Sales of the paid version have actually increased even though it is identical to the free game and sales of all other Midnight Status titles have increased as well. Now an update is waiting in the wings that introduces advertising, which should pull in anywhere from a few hundred dollars a day to an upward of a grand a day and will also offer a real incentive to purchase the paid version since the ads occlude part of the screen.

This is a great opportunity from a business perspective but the best part is just the fact that the game is being enjoyed by people. The game was literally played over 100,000 times before anyone gave it a bad review (app store reviewers are notoriously critical). People dig this game. It’s not the best game and it probably won’t even register with people enough to be remembered. None of that matters though. For the time being people are having fun with it, competing on the leaderboards (I finally got knocked off yesterday), and even tweeting about it. People are using all aspects of the game fluidly and in all likelihood I’ll be able to claim a game that’s been played over 1 million times before too long. I think anyone would consider that a bonafide hit whether it’s free or not.

Thanks for reading and most of all thanks for playing!

I wrote a post earlier which was pretty critical of the iPad. I wrote about all the differing opinions and the pros and cons, etc, etc. That post was erased as I went to publish it.

I took that as a sign. My initial take on the iPad is that it’s nothing but a large iPod Touch and that I won’t get one because I already have access to everything that I need by carrying an iPhone and an iPod Touch simultaneously (which still takes up less space than an iPad). Truth be told though, this is a short sighted attitude. Granted I think everyone knew that the iPhone/iPod Touch would be grand slams (I did for sure) and the iPad’s future isn’t as certain.

I for one will offer some support for the device and test the waters at least. As it stands iPhone development is so easy that it’s almost trivial compared to PC development and the iPad will be no different. I have had modest success on the iPhone but have been unable to create a must have game. Perhaps I will find more success with the iPad which lends itself better to in-person social experiences. With the barrier to entry so low there’s no reason not to give it a try.

In 1997 I came up with a game concept. That concept was a fun and simple 2D building demolition game where players would plant charges and try to level a cityscape. I developed this concept about a year after learning some BASIC programming on my TI-85 calculator and before I entered college. At the time it’s safe to say I didn’t really have the skills to do the concept justice.

Fast forward to 2006. I sit down at my computer one evening and I finally prototype this concept now calling it Debris. I develop a working sim with blocks, bombs, and a caution tape line. The premise is simple, plant the bombs in such a way that upon detonation all the blocks fit below the caution tape line.

I work on this prototype for a few months (mainly tweaking the physics) and eventually show the concept to a company who’d published my earlier work. They write me back and tell me they don’t see any promise in this concept. They tell me they can’t suggest even a single bit of advice in order to make the concept more fun for them.

Their feedback of course stood in stark contrast with my vision as well as the feedback I’d received from several other people who I’d actually gotten to show the game in person. As with anything communication is key when unleashing a brand new game concept. I’m sure something was lost without myself involved to fill in the blanks as someone played this game for the first time. Such is the potential fate of any unfinished prototype.

In October 2007 I attempted once again to show off this concept.  This time at the Indie Games Con. Again, it’s turned down for publication by this company that had worked so closely with me in the past.  To add insult to injury, I’m told by someone I’d once considered a mentor that it “sucked”.  I went home dejected and dropped the development of Debris to work on Full Contact Debate another idea I’d had banging around my brain for years.

Of course there was one redeeming event which took place at IGC that year. The morning after I was told the game sucked I walked in an there was a group of 6 other developers standing around a computer laughing. As I walked up I realized they were playing Debris and they’d just realized you could take the helicopter out if you planted the bombs correctly. In the PC/Mac version of Debris the helicopter would go spastic and bounce around the screen taking everything out in its path. As they left a few of the guys told me it was a great game concept. Seeing their reaction to the title renewed my belief that eventually this would be a hit game.

Now we move on to October 2008. At this point I’d long given up the idea of pitching ideas to publishers with lesser vision than myself. Throughout the years I’d pitched concepts to a plethora of publishers and I was always disappointed with the results. Finally though, the iPhone and the App Store had arrived and there would no longer be a difference of creative opinions to stop the publication of any title. I jumped onto the iPhone development wagon as quickly as possible and I knew exactly what my first title would be.

Debris appeared on the App Store by December 5th 2008 and to my knowledge was the first 2D casual building demolition game created. When I originally developed the prototype I searched for other controlled demolition games and the only thing I found was an obscure PS2 game released in Europe but it was a more serious 3D simulation instead of a casual physics game. My prediction circa 2006 was that the most popular casual games were going to be physics based as opposed to the match-3 titles that dominated the early-mid part of the decade. Looking at the iPhone market today I was absolutely correct and I’m proud to say that I not only made an accurate prediction but I took part in the market with a handful of causal physics sims which I developed.

Now it’s the end of 2009 and it’s been the roughest year of my life. It hasn’t all been bad but it has been a roller coaster. As most people who read this blog know, I lost my dear mother to suicide on March 23rd. I have been depressed since then although certain events have been overwhelmingly positive this year, the loss of my mother casts a shadow over those events. To further add to my pain this year a title called Implode! landed on the App Store about a week ago and since then has risen up the charts into the top 5 best selling iPhone games. Implode! is Debris, it’s a casual 2D controlled demolition game and it arrived almost exactly 1 year after Debris on the iPhone.

Considering that I developed this concept sooo long ago I’m heart broken that I wasn’t the one to fully capitalize on the concept. When I developed it in 2006 I knew it had the potential to rise straight to the top. Unfortunately, being first isn’t always best and in fact some people would say it’s detrimental. This is one of those cases.

I rushed Debris out on the iPhone trying to take advantage of the devices unique abilities such as pinch/zoom, swipe momentum, and the accelerometer tilt. Unfortunately, using these special capabilities of the iPhone was ultimately a distraction from the core experience. Implode! for the iPhone is actually much closer to what Debris was originally for the PC/Mac. Plant bombs, detonate, and try to get the blocks below a line. The version of Debris I ended up putting out for the iPhone wasn’t received particularly well because the core was watered down in an attempt to make it iPhone-centric. Granted, some components of Debris are great fun but overall I let the core suffer in favor of design diversions such as tilt, zoom, and killing aliens with the blocks.

Still, I’m not jaded or angry (OK, just a little). Debris was after all the title that allowed me to develop my own concepts as my sole source of income. Without Debris I wouldn’t be where I am today. Furthermore, there’s no law against sequels and while Debris may not ultimately get recognized as the title that brought the casual controlled demolition genre into the limelight perhaps its sequel can utilize the success Implode! is currently enjoying to be an even bigger success.

Hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving!

NEW - play it online now at www.iCrashForCash.com

Last year I created this mini-game for a bonus when players completed Debris. It was called Debris Drop and it involved the simple premise of physics-enabled boxes falling from space with players tilting their device in order to match the various colors. Instantly, I knew I had created something cool. The initial mini-game only took about 4 hours to make but it was readily apparent that this core was actually the most fun part about Debris.

After realizing that I’d stumbled onto something my sophomore effort on the iPhone was a pretty easy choice. I took that mini-game and ramped it up a few notches by adding new shapes, online leaderboards, and backgrounds. Poof! Cosmosis was born. The title didn’t take off and I eventually made it free. For a while it accumulated a decent number of downloads but the game had really terrible production values so even as a freebie it wasn’t too enticing. I still thought it was the best core experience I’d created.

This summer I created several iPhone games that still haven’t seen the light of day. After having some success with Skyline Blade I was able to ramp up the production values of Midnight Status titles and invest some money in better assets and tools. Thus instead of making games with a budget of $0 I was able to jump it up. After fighting with myself on which game to “really” make next I chose to iterate again on the physics box dropping concept.

The first game to reflect the new production values ended up being Ragduck Hunt. Of course in truth Ragduck Hunt was actually started in the middle of development on Crash For Cash. I knew Ragduck Hunt was going to be somewhat gimmicky but also fun for a while. Crash For Cash on the other hand had potential to be a really good game so more time was spent on it. I’m probably one of the few people who will drop one project for 2 weeks just to push another idea out there that I think can be done better with less time … but maybe not. The point is if I get a wild hair up my butt I’m going to act on it. In this case Ragduck Hunt was that wild hair.

Anyway, Crash For Cash represents the current pinnacle of iteration for me. I took what was a neat mini-game and evolved it into Cosmosis. Then I took that evolution and completely trumped it in terms of production values, theme, social networking, and gameplay. Cosmosis was still very limited in terms of playability. There were 6 colors to match and the only thing that got harder was the speed. Crash For Cash goes way beyond this.

The differences in gameplay may seem subtle but they are quite effective. First of all as players earn cash they unlock more expensive cars. More expensive cars in turn earn them more money. Of course as the number of various car models increases it also becomes more difficult to make a match. This is where the brand new tap-bomb feature comes in. Players can now tap on a car to blow it up. This adds an element of strategy that wasn’t really present before. Now players have to think on the fly which cars on-screen will help them capitalize the most once things get really intense. Top the new gameplay off with leaderboards, twitter integration, and high quality production values and I think you’ve got a winner.

Anyway, I like it and I hope other people do too. Here’s a video!

Back in March Christian Nutt of Gamasutra posed the question “Can The Industry Make a B-game?”

I think I’ve done just that with a little stupid ass title called Kube Killer.  I initially created this game out of frustration.  I was frustrated and angry over my mother’s death (hence this being one of the few violent games I’ve made) and I was also but to a much lesser degree frustrated over the apparent lack of logic within the App Store eco system.

My last post was about making easy games.  I purposely created Kube Killer to be challenge-less and a time waster that would roll as many ads as possible on the business end.  I was analyzing some of the popular games on the iPhone that my younger cousin was playing and they all had something in common, ZERO challenge but plenty of time consumption. When I released Kube Killer I put it out at $0.99 (no ads) at my wife’s request.  In truth though the game was always supposed to be free.  I thought people might play it and actually get caught up challenging each other to see who could in fact kill the most kubes which would be optimal for an ad based title.  It was also created to be somewhat of a satirical poke at the App Store in general, dumb games getting attention they don’t deserve was part of the inspiration for Kube Killer.

At $0.99 the game was mostly ignored.  It sold a few copies but never made any real impact.  Fast forward to this past Friday when I changed the game to free.  Somehow, the game started climbing the charts regardless of the terrible graphics, poor description, and even worse reviews.  Nearly everything about this game signaled people to avoid it at all costs (the icon is even black like the plague) and yet in true App Store fashion the title started climbing the charts extending its figurative middle finger to logic the whole way.

As of right now the game has been downloaded nearly 10,000 times since Friday.  Some of the players have even taken to competing for the most kills via the online leaderboards.  The title is hovering in the Top 30 Adventure games and the Top 20 RPG games and with each iTunes update the rank climbs while the reviews get worse and yet people even started a thread to talk about this waste of time on Touch Arcade!

As I watched this all unfold I was initially ashamed.  If any game was supposed to do well this weekend it was supposed to be my new title Ragduck Hunt which was logically created to appeal to the App Store crowd while actually being a pretty good game with solid production values.  Kube Killer, the red headed step child of my portfolio though is now the most “popular” iPhone game I’ve made.  This game is terrible both purposefully and accidentally (simultaneously) and for some reason people are downloading the crap out of it … stranger still some people are playing the crap out of it.  I think that constitutes a legitimate B-game.

10 years ago yesterday I was a college student enrolled in a computer science program.  I spent most of my time programming games on my TI-85 calculator during class but still managed to take something away from the experience.  I was also a gamer and September 9th, 1999 was a big day.  Anticipation grew throughout the day as I waited for classes to end.  The afternoon and evening couldn’t fly by quick enough. The moment I was waiting for was midnight, when I could finally wrap my arms around my very own Dreamcast at the local EB.

Finally, the night was getting long in the tooth.  At around 10PM a friend and I headed out to Lynnhaven Mall stopping at Wendy’s for some late night spicy chicken sandwiches (a favorite during the college years). Then we finally landed in line for the hotly anticipated Dreamcast.  The line was long but people were stoked.  Everyone and their brother wanted to support Sega after the dismal failure of the Saturn.  There was a hint of nostalgia in the air.  Older gamers didn’t want Sony to put Sega out of commission even if they liked the Playstation.  Thus, the calvary lined up at the stroke of midnight to put Sega back on the map.

The line was exciting initially but it was nothing in comparison to the first time they pulled out a working Dreamcast running Soul Calibur for everyone to try.  The next thing you knew there was a line embedded within the first line as people tried their hand at this new game with the most amazing graphics ever witnessed on a home console.  Remarkably, Soul Calibur played as good as it looked.

The crew at EB was extremely cool and efficient that night.  Dreamcast systems, games and accessories had all been bundled up according to customer pre-orders prior to the big launch.  As such we really didn’t have to wait too long.  After finally getting our systems we returned to my place and continued playing all our new games into the wee hours of the morning.  It’s hard to believe it was a decade ago!

Last night I had to do it, I had to pull the Dreamcast and co out of their bin and hook it up alongside my 360 and PS3.  Much to my surprise Soul Calibur has held up really well.  It’s still graphically impressive and the control and collision is super tight.  I never understood why Sega gave up. In my idealists eyes the Dreamcast could be a competitor today.  After reading the Gamasutra article with interviews of all the major executives involved I think the demise of the Dreamcast was pretty fishy.  But what’s done is done.  At least we got to enjoy the system for a while.

Of course I can’t just recap that launch night without explaining how it had some profound effect on me. Back then I was a college student who had programmed a few games on his calculator.  Now it’s a decade later and I’ve become the game developer I had dreamed of.  The largest effect that night had on me was a new found love for midnight launches and the excitement involved.  The studio title Midnight Status is a direct result of that launch night (which as far as I can remember was the first midnight video game launch I took part in).  Midnight Status is the excitement people feel for their entertainment.  It’s what happens when people wait in line in the middle of the night with strangers who share a passion.  It’s what runs through your mind when you didn’t pre-order an XBox and you’re running from store to store in the middle of the night trying to find a location with a short enough line to guarantee you a system.  Midnight Status came from a seed that was planted in my mind 10 years ago when the Dreamcast arrived.  It seems the name was quite suitable now doesn’t it?

Well, summer’s over and it is time to go back to work full time.  This year has been a wild roller coaster of ups and downs.  It kicked off with me having just turned 30 and finally getting to become a full time game developer thanks to the iPhone.  This was just about my biggest dream come true … finally after years and years of work.  Not all has been well though, during the month of March I lost my dear mother who I loved very much.  Losing a parent has been, up to this point, one of if not my biggest nightmares.  As such the year suddenly seemed to come right back to neutral if not go completely negative for me.  In the months after that though friends and family gathered around me to help me through the toughest thing I’ve ever faced in my life and they helped me stay on track.  Also, my wife and I got a new golden retriever puppy named Maeby which didn’t hurt (so long as she wasn’t peeing inside).

Not coincidentally, the puppy was our 1st year anniversary gift to each other.  Again, things were looking somewhat positive … even if a bit of depression was lingering from my mother’s passing.  Of course what goes up must come down as I found out that a friend of mine lost his wife.  Again, I felt that negativity.  Life is short and sometimes it’s very painful for you and those around you.  It’s all we can do sometimes just to hold each other up.

Of course that was the beginning of the summer and I knew that better things (like the beach) were just on the horizon.  Since my mother passed I haven’t done too much work.  I hit a deadline for the book I’m writing, created Disco Pool, and also put out a little game called Kube Killer.  All in all it was really nice to live off the work I had done earlier in the year with Skyline Blade which has been my most successful game.  As I’ve written before, it’s not a crazy amount of money but it does pay the rent and when you don’t have to worry about that it helps … a lot.  I got to do a lot of swimming, sunning, and puppy watching which has been therapeutic.  I can now swim a kilometer (~0.6 of a mile) which is pretty cool considering that a month ago I could barely swim 50 meters or 1 lap in an Olympic size swimming pool.

Anyway, now that September’s here I’m back to work and I’m thinking ambitious again.  Over the summer I put something secret together but realized it was too ambitious.  I then proceeded to put that project on hold for a short while longer to pursue another project.  As it turns out I don’t do simple.  It just doesn’t happen, at least not well.  My new project which started out simple has now become a mini-epic.  It’s still not as ambitious as my secret project so that’s good but it’s going to take longer than the few weeks I had hoped to invest.

This brings me to what’s really been on my mind lately.  Is it wise to really invest myself in a game again? In 2002 and 2003 I created 2 large games which took about a year each to complete.  Aerial Antics is the game I’m probably still most well known for although my iPhone games have sold many more copies.  Ever since Aerial Antics flopped I cannot will myself to develop something with a lot of care.  That’s not to say I haven’t worked hard.  I have worked hard this past year and I really pushed myself on Full Contact Debate as well but I haven’t committed myself to a project like I did with Aerial Antics.  At least it doesn’t feel that way.  It’s very hard to fully commit yourself when every time you do your project flops.  Then it gets to the point where you start going for the quick and easy project instead of something you’re truly proud of.

I feel like I’m making myself sound really lazy here.  Anyone who knows me also knows this isn’t true.  The point is though, if you push yourself will anyone really notice or care?  Well, I think they well.  The iPhone games I’ve developed actually seem to sell in direct proportion to how much time and money I invested in them and of course money is really just tangible condensed time.  In the end I suppose I’m answering my own question.  If you make it they will come and they will notice that you worked your ass off.  However, if you waiver even for a split second people will identify the chinks in your armor.  Don’t waiver, be obsessive, create something you think is perfect and even if someone thinks they’ve found a weakness you’ll be able to deflect them because you’ll know in your own heart that you did absolutely all you can.

So here I am after years of time, a better coder, a better artist, with better tools ready to commit myself to a truly ambitious (yet not overly so like FCD) project once again.  Wish me luck!

A big dream of mine has always been to appear on late night TV with a host like Jay Leno because I created the next great video game. To me, this sort of accomplishment would signify the real rise of video games as a cultural phenomenon. Writers, actors, musicians, and animal trainers appear on these type of shows all the time, but you never see anyone promoting a video game unless they’re Tiger Woods which just doesn’t count. I wanted to see an actual game developer on late night TV, not someone else who just happened to have a video game made after them because they were good at something else.

Last night we finally hit the big time as Kudo Tsunoda took the stage to showcase Project Natal on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. I had some mixed feelings about Project Natal as a gamer but I do think it will revolutionize gaming with regard to the mass market. The Wii showed everyone the door but I think Natal has the potential to really welcome everyone through it. However you feel about Natal though it was totally rad to see an actual game developer up on late night TV with Hollywood and all the rockers.

The funny thing was that I made a joke to my friend 2 days ago that Kudo looked like a Bono wannabe during his E3 presentation. What the heck though, if that’s what it takes to legitimize game development as an art form so be it. People like interesting people and Kudo definitely had that going for him at E3 and on Jimmy last night.

Of course I also think this breakthrough has a lot to do with the type of games we’re getting into these days. E3 was quite a bit different this year with all the human performances to go along with the games. Between the Wii and Rock Band we finally have games that appeal to people not just nerds. Before now the best the industry could muster was to mimmic Hollywood and make epic looking pre-rendered trailers.

At E3 this year the most boring presentations were old school gamer gamers like Modern Warfare 2 and God of War III … I almost fell asleep watching people play them. Second up was the epic trailers, which needless to say were also pretty boring. The best presentations were the Wii, Beatles Rock Band, Playstation Eye/Motion, and Natal demos where real live people were performing in sync with fine cinematic sequences in the backdrop along with real gameplay that the players were interacting with but in a way that was also entertaining for a crowd. By comparison the old school way of playing games seemed really archaic.

That’s not to say that I don’t like old school gameplay. I think it’s fine for 1-4 people to sit down and play together. However, it was never going to be an all consuming force like music or movies until you could simultaneously enjoy other people playing. The human element that music and movies contain was simply missing.

Anyway, congratulations Kudo and I hope to see many more game developers appear side by side with actors and rockers in the future!

I wrote a while back about The Craft, that desire to fully master the art of developing games. I’m proud to say that since I’ve gone full time as an iPhone developer it’s been getting easier and easier with each game to perfect that art. Debris was a prototype that I had sitting around for years and years. I could never quite get the concept implemented correctly but I had this feeling that I just had to get it out there. For some reason I’m always in a rush to get the “working idea” out as if that matters at all.

Pretty much everyone knows that execution is the key to success when it comes to making games but I have always felt that it’s a combination of timing and execution. With Debris iPhone I decided it needed to be the best game I could make in a month while simultaneously learning a new engine and platform. As it turns out, most people “Don’t get it”. The up side though is that I learned a lot and Debris was the first game to sell a reasonable number of copies for me. While it’s not the best game, it was the best game I could make at the time.

Sometimes the most important thing with game development is “shipping” the game. It might sell, it might not but I can guarantee you from experience that a title which sells well but receives poor reviews is a better motivating force than a title that gets good reviews and poor sales. In the case of Aerial Antics years ago I spent over a year developing a game to fit within a publisher’s lineup, I contracted an artist, and was late to my “real” job many times. The end result was a lot of pats on the back and no money which meant that I had to keep working a job that had nothing to do with games and I lost all motivation because I didn’t know what went wrong.

Fast forward to November 2008. I had almost no money, I experienced my worst year in business in 5 years, and I only spent 1 month developing my game. As it turns out this game made enough money during the month of January to convince me that it was worth pursuing full time. The early reviews were pretty good but then as time went on it was apparent that only a small percentage of the population understood the game. But … that was OK, because I didn’t spend that much time on it and it was making me enough money to think about this stuff FULL TIME. With a poorly reviewed but decent selling game you know what went wrong and you also get the opportunity to fix it.

Since the beginning of 2009 I have created 4 more iPhone games; Cosmosis, SkylineBlade, Disco Pool, and Kube Killer. Each game has become more and more polished and the reviews continually get better. There’s no substitute for time. When you get the chance to think about something like game development full time you have to jump at it no matter how risky it seems.

I read this Gamasutra Interview with Tim Sweeney and he outlined his career from the beginning. He knew that he was going to be doing it full time when his first game started brining in just $100 a day. He acknowledged that it wasn’t much but that it was an income, something you could technically live on. From that point on is when things began to take off for him in a seemingly exponential fashion.

Since I posted about my iSales I’ve gotten a few “concerned” sounding emails. No, I’m not making a lot of money … yet. The important thing though is that I can afford my bills and I can afford to spend all of my working hours on game development resulting in a better game every 2 months. Considering the fact that we work in a “hit driven” industry this is a great strategy.