How To Make Indie Games Full Time (Before Finishing Your Game)

I had the privilege of chatting with Julian ball the creator of lens Island a full-time game developer that has over 3,000 very positive reviews on Steam and it's not even fully released I asked Julian about how he went full-time Indie and how you can potentially do it too stick around because you're going to hear from an actual indie game developer in the trenches funding his own game studio right now first off I want to know how did you fund Flo Studio cuz a lot of people listening right now are thinking how can I go fulltime and how can I make an indie game full time um so do you mind if I ask where the money came from and how you're how you're funding a team I mean my goodness that's very expensive you know yeah I'm pretty transparent so any questions you got I'll answer okay yeah let's do it um but yes so I guess there's multiple stages uh in the sort of the funding and the journey and some of those stages are sort of quite unique to my position or just like a YouTuber's position but I guess becoming less unique nowadays um so yeah initially I had a YouTube

channel that was relatively successful I think completely prior to gamedev and lens Island I had I don't know a couple hundred thousand subscribers and it sort of made me like a equal on Australian salaries like a low-end sort of salary maybe like 40 Grand a year or something so when I quit my job like that helped support me a little bit and then we um we launched a Kickstarter for like the very first iteration of like Early Access lens Island um we raised around $60,000 so that money basically got us to so from like me quitting my job to launching Early Access and it took around like a year and a half 2 years um that's what sort of filled in that void and then like the launch was like successful like um I think we sold I'm probably going to misquote the numbers now uh we sold like 30,000 copies in the first week or something like that and like that's like a good amount of money um and then at at this stage now we've sold like 200,000 copies um um so like

you know I think it's like $3 million gross so like that spread over you know x amount of years of like three or four years is what keeps the studio alive um but I quite literally did grow from just sort of like the money in my account was just paying rent and food and that's that was like the running cost of the business to at one stage like we're burning like 100 Grand a month you know and that was the running cost of the business so I've sort of gone through the whole pipeline my um but just honestly just having a successful game is what is what is like the main thing that has funded the whole thing like the initial creation was just my savings my YouTube and then a Kickstarter to get it over the line and then since then it's just selling the game and trying to keep it growing and um making sure there's just enough left in the tank to get to 1.0 wow that's um it's a big gamble dude like it's a lot of it's I mean I'm sure you're saving money and and I don't know maybe you are uh or maybe you're not

saving money but it seems like a big gamble to just spend that much money uh on a game for 5 years you know do you feel like it was a big gamble um no like for me it's just well like in the lens of someone outside of my shoes it probably is a big gamble um but for me it is just like inevitable it's just like it's just like the necessity of the situation it's like I want to make a big game I'm inexperienced and I don't have a big game Studio behind me that's made several games before therefore there's literally only one way to go ahead it's like um you know if if I want to do it this way and self-publish and not have any external funding it is just put everything into that game um which just means like we've got raise a thin margins I you know my savings are just the game the businesses savings account you know if there's ever um any money that needs to come from somewhere that sales don't cover it's always my personal money and um and my like my

sort of saving up for a house longevity all of those sort of personal um financial decisions just don't really exist to me right now all that exists is like pushing the vehicle of the business of the game forward because all that stuff could just come as like a as just like an inevitable outcome if the game if the sort of the game Studio reaches the point that I wanted to reach um but I can't like can't sort of play it safe keep a really small team keep a bunch of the money myself as well as sort of be successful and launch a game quickly and do I sort of kind have my cake and E it too so for me it's not really risky I'm fine with it it's what I signed up for it's fine so when you did you mention YouTube as a source of income for you prior to Early Access yeah yeah okay how are you making money from YouTube if I'm if you don't mind me asking it's like AdSense and sponsorships like I literally you know I sponsorship you like you sponsored me to

a couple videos that's right yeah I did yeah but uh yeah really just that and then I also like I worked as a graphic designer prior to YouTube um but then I also sold like graphic design packs and like some other stuff like that yeah but mainly just like AdSense and sponsorships mhm sweet that's great so people listening right now if you want to start a YouTube channel that's focused on your game per Julian's history you can sell assets you can also do sponsorship gigs and for me in my experience it's like 200 bucks to like three grand depending on what you do um for a video that gets like 10,000 views which it's a pretty good it's pretty good rate for me I used to do it and and then I eventually just started sponsoring myself like you said with with uh resources you know selling resources and stuff um by the way if you're like me and you always dreamt of making an indie game as a full-time job I have a free webinar below that goes into exactly how to make six figures with just a demo I was just like you for years I thought I had to make a game in

its entirety before getting a paycheck but there's actually three ways to make six figures before even finishing your game I've done this multiple times so check it out below if you do want to go fulltime Indie and thanks for watching