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• How to Survive in Gamedev for Eleven Years Without a Hit
  
  • 1:30 - He has a cat.
  • 4:55 - "Have you ever watched your basement-dwelling, noodle-eating single indie friends get rich while you struggle to feed your family and pay the mortgage? I have, and maintaining motivation on those times is quite tricky."
  • 6:30 - "In my spare time I was working on a kung-fu platform game called Iron Fist that I was very passionate about." [NW: A classic mistake - Picking projects to work on based solely on whether you're passionate about them rather than also considering how likely they are to be successful.]
  • 6:45 - He decided to quit his job when he'd just had a second child, he and his wife had moved to a bigger house, and they had no savings.
  • 7:30 - He abandoned Iron Fist because 1) it was going to take too long, and 2) there was no market for it.
  • 8:06 - He saw 'Bejewelled' and thought, "I could do that", and released a copycat.
  • 7:50 - "So I decided to abondon the game and start on a smaller project. So, the point is, I wanted to ship a game and get experience in shipping a game and see what that whole thing was like, and improve upon that. And around that time I saw Bejewlled. This is the first one. And I liked it a lot, and I thought, "Hey I could make a game like that, but with a different theme, and some levels and new mechanics."
    So I made a Christmas-themed match-3 game. And to save money, I used stock art, stock photos, stock music, and I even used the Comic Sans font. So this game, it actually played pretty well, I still believe, but it looked like ass, and as a result it sold $1800-worth, that's net, not gross. And that's over 120 months.
  • 10:50 - Start with a runway. On the other hand, people procrastinate. Once you start something such that it's difficult to go back, your brain starts to figure
  • 12:30 - It's definitely worth spending money on art and audio. If you make your game look good, it will sell better.
  • 13:50 - He spent $2000 on the art for his next version of a Christmas match-3
  • 14:47 - What he did to get the good outcome from his new version of the Christmas game:
    
    • He emailed the portals every year and asked them to re-promote his game, and they did.
    • Some portals that didn't take his game at first dropped their standards and took his game.
    • They translated the game to other languages.
    • They doubled the number of levels and created a 'GOLD' version.
    • Lesson: Keep your game alive!
  • 15:50 - He only got $5455 or 6% of the total revenue in the first year.
  • 18:00 - He's gotten lots of offers for terrible contract over the years, and you need to know which ones you'll find cool and will be within your skillset.
  • 18:29 - Say 'Yes' to opportunities.
  • 19:35 - Learn to say 'No' to things.
  • 21:00 - He found it helpful to be around other indie developers.
  • 21:25 - Make friends. Being part of a likeminded group is really powerful.
  • 21:49 - Help people out. You'll get lots of tips and connections by doing this. 'The main reason survived as an indie is that other developers have helped me out.'
  • 23:00 - He used social media to recruit artists.
    
    • He crowd-sourced localisation.
    • He used metrics and testers.
  • 25:05 - Avoid unhealthy deadlines. Random problems will pop up.
  • 25:40 - He paid the artists up front and gave them some of the revenue on the backend.
  • 26:05 - Mobile is shit.
  • 27:50 - He shows a graph of how much he made at all of his various endeavors: working as a contractor, working full-time, working on his own games, and working in consultancy.
  • 29:10 - He isn't making any more money than he was eight years ago, but it's a lot more satisfying and his quality-of-life is a lot higher.
  • 31:25 - Don't make decisions out of desperation. You really need to explore your options very carefully before deciding what project to work on.
  • 36:35 - One thing to note is that it made 14% of its revenue on Steam, but it only got press when it came out on Steam.
  • 39:00 - Two heads are better than one. It was really helpful for him to work with his wife.
  • 39:05 - Having kids is 'indie hard mode'. He advises that you work hard and try to get rich before you have kids.
  • 41:40 - It makes sense to spend as little as possible when you're just starting out, so that you make mistakes as cheaply as possible, but once you know what you're doing it makes sense to spend larger amounts of money to make the game more likely to be successful.
  • 42:30 - Another tip is to get a cat and stroke it when you're feeling stressed.
  • 43:35 - He shows a graph of his total revenue over 10 years.
  • 44:20 - One step at a time, one punch at a time, one GAME at a time. - Game Dev Rocky
  • 45:20 - All of his games were premium games, so people would pay $9.99 or $6.99 if they were members of a club.
  • 45:50 - He launched a game where there was a 7-minute demo, after which you had to pay to get the rest of the levels.
  • 46:05 - Why he doesn't like free-to-play. He didn't like the tactics that these companies are using to extract money from people.
  • 46:50 - Why he made seven match-3s: For every game he made, he added in features that he didn't have time to do before.
  • 47:40 - Reskinning a game properly can take a few hundred hours.47:55 - He uses Excel to track his time. He categorizes tasks like 'coding', 'testing', 'working with contractors'. He finds that the coding portion is only ~25% of the total time. (Kevin Systrom said the same thing).
  • 49:00 - How do you sustain motivation through the failures? A: Having a family is both a blessing and a curse. You have to provide for them, and so you know you can't fail, you have to keep going. Another thing he did was to take his savings and pay off the mortgage, because he knew that when he got 'hungry' he'd be motivated to work harder. The 'one step at a time' tactic works well. And visualizing the end result helps.
  • 51:00 - Q: Is it a lot of work maintaining old games? A: I did spend time on these up until recently. It's more about maintaining a relationship with the distributors. Recently I've decided to retire those old games and put every thought into my new games.

Orson Welles

War of the Worlds

• The farmer who's interviewed references listening to the radio and hearing the Princeton professor being interviewed, which adds to the effect that this is really happening.
• They get a lot of details right that makes it sound like a real newscast. They refer to real towns, rivers, etc.
• I wasn't expecting that the way the aliens would kill the humans would be with gas ("black smoke").
• There's a disclaimer at minute 39 that this is a drama.
• The Welles monologue after the break at minute 39 is clearly a drama.

Nipper

• 2006.11.02 - Blogspot - GameCrush - Interview With A Custom Map Legend (NIPPER)
  
  • I had mapped for BUILD engine games like Duke Nukem 3d, NAM, and WWII GI before HL1.
  • My first ever map was a horrible attempt at a D-Day map for Day of Defeat beta 1.1. I didn't have much luck with DoD mapping so I figured I would try CS.
  • The first CS map I made was cspaintball, a simple arena deathmatch map. It seems pretty lame now but back then there were no fy_ or aim_ maps.
  • There was a little clan called $tL or something. I was asked to join that clan when I had first started mapping. That clan disappeared pretty quickly except for me and one other member. The two of us then jokingly formed the Cherryclan
  • The Cherryclan was originally just a small group of my first "fans" who would regularly join my listen server to play my maps with me and bots.
  • crazytank started as a thread in forums.joe.to where I asked people what I should put in my next map.
  • Originally I was making maps for me to play with bots. I would create a listen server and just play by myself. Occasionally someone would download the map from me while connecting to my server. I kept making more and more maps and I started to notice the same people would be back every time I was playing a new map.
  • My maps didn't get out much until I found a custom map server that let people upload their own maps directly to the server. They had a website with an upload map area so I uploaded the first version of playground and a few of my other first maps. The server was pretty popular so a lot of people ended up playing my maps from there.
  • Then joe from www.joe.to tracked me down and offered me my own forum. Then after the forum he offered me my own 24/7 nipper maps only server.
  • Do you have any advice for other map makers trying to get started? A: Don't decompile.

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