How to Survive in Gamedev for Eleven Years Without a Hit

[Music] all right thanks Matthew hopefully this thing's working okay good uh so you're not special nor is your game and you'll never ship a [Applause] hit that's the uncomfortable reality for most of us and the sooner you can come to terms with that the sooner you can start figuring out just how to survive as an indie and of course the longer you survive the greater the chance that one day your game will be special and you will ship a hit so I'm Jake Burkett and I love making games I love designing games I love coding and I love shipping games as well so I went Indian 2005 and I've made a whole bunch of commercial games most recently Regency solid a I also love

doing game jams and one game a month and I've made a bunch of sort of free mini games and I also co-founded full Indie in Vancouver which has got over 3,000 members it's a pretty awesome meetup group and I run the UK version so if you're in the UK look up for l.o. so I'm a no hit wonder um plenty of talks are out there about uh hits or maybe abject failures and you know there's the failure Workshop down there um but there aren't many stories about people who survived for a long time and I've survived for over a decade now and that's what I'm going to talk about today I've shipped over 10 games all of them have sort of made some kind of profit ranging from very poor to okay and I've meticulously collected a lot of data which I'm going to share with you today I'm a firm believer that you should focus on your own games instead of working for other people and I'm to

explain with in detail why um I also think that having a long tail is extremely important is vital to your success and having a back catalog is is really powerful effect also you need to be adaptable and determined these are traits that you need to develop over time I want to change your mindset from I've made a hit game Sorry I want to make a hit game to uh I want to build a sustainable business now that's not as glamorous sounding uh but I do believe it's more realistic so the legendary Jeff Fogle he said nobody knows anything and uh there basically aren't any Magic Bullets uh you know you hear about big hits and so on but we've got this problem where if you only hear about the successful games you're sort of ignoring all of the the failures and I don't think it's painting a realistic picture um one example is indie game the movie I like that movie a lot um but it sort of could lead you to

believe that if you wreck yourself physically and emotionally for several years uh and then you ship on Xbox everything will magically be okay um which you know obviously I don't agree with that so for years I've been searching for the magic formula for Game Dev success and I've asked people why they think their games are hit some are honest and they say I got lucky I don't really know why I was successful and uh good good for them others think it was PR and uh you know marketing that got them successful and going to shows others you know say it was YouTubers and twitchers who uh you know made them famous but you know there isn't really any clear-cut answer and you know you might wish to be like John Blow maybe um but the thing is you weren't him from birth you didn't grow up in the same place you didn't learn the same things as him you didn't ship the same game at the same time as him so in order to be um authentic in the games

that you create you need to connect to Something in yourself and let that come out through your work and you can't do that if you're trying to be someone else so how do you define success well I asked this question to the dev community on Twitter and got lots of answers some people define success as uh shipping any game at all and yeah that's a really good good starter others thought it was um if players enjoyed their game or if they innovated and made something new some people have got loftier Ambitions and want to retire comfortably or own a Tesla um that's not happened to me yet uh and others you know most people really said to be successful is to be able to continue making games uh for a long time and that's that's what this talk is about so we all know what the sort of Indie dream is but the reality is quite different it is very hard work have you ever watched your basement dwelling um

noodle eating single Indie friends get rich while you struggle to feed your family and pay the mortgage I have um and maintaining motivation uh in those sort of times is quite tricky um you know there are far easier things we could be doing as Indies but why do we do it we do it because we love it because we want to make games so how can we keep making games for a long time um in the face of things like the Indie apocalypse is there such a thing probably I think this sort of thing has happened many times before in different platforms and it will happen again but uh if you're fast the market is fast moving and if you adapt and you plan for sustainability then hopefully you'll be more resilient so we're going back through the mist of time to 1984 that was my first computer and it came with a a manual that taught me how to program basic and I started making

games and then I got a Comm of 64 and an Amiga and they were some of the most fun Computing times I've ever had and I've played a lot of games over the years you might remember when games came in massive boxes like this I'm glad they you can download them now uh so for some reason I ended up in my 20s making business software and uh we made stock control and accounting systems which sounds kind of boring but I learned a lot from that process and in my spare time I was working on a Kung Fu platform game called Iron Fist that I was very passionate about and I was staying up every evening till 4:00 a.m. and all weekend programming this thing and I soon realized that I couldn't go on like this because I felt like a zombie and I had a sort of early midlife crisis and decided to quit my job and go full-time now at the time I had no savings uh we just moved to a bigger house we'd had a second child and my wife was a full-time

mother um and I said to her oh I want to make games for a living and she uh thank goodness for her she said um well she trusted me and had faith in me to do that because I believed in it so that was great although I just wondered if she was sleep deprived and she'd have agreed to me being a professional juggler or something um so I I worked on Iron Fist fulltime for kuad and was enjoying it but I soon realized that I'd really the scope was just too too big and it was going to take forever to finish and also at the time there was no market for it there was no steam there was no Xbox Live arcade um and all sort of games were sold via download.com or the Casual portals and I just didn't think that I could make a go of this type of game I probably could now but not then so I decided to abandon the game and uh start on a smaller project so the point is I wanted to ship again

and get experience in shipping a game and see what that whole whole thing was like and then improve upon that and around that time I saw bjed this is the the first one and I liked it a lot and I thought hey I could make a game like that but a different theme and uh some levels and kind of new mechanics now I know to most of you making a match ree Probably sounds horrific but I actually you know like that genre and uh had fun making games in that genre 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 sand font there we go um so this game it actually played pretty well I still believe um but it looked like ass and as a result it sold uh $1,800 worth that's net not gross that's what I've received uh and that is over 120 months okay so 10 10 years um

what's interesting though is over on the right you can see it's still selling a few units even now even today and we'll come back to that later so I know kind of how long it took to make and worked out that it was it earned me about $650 an hour so I would definitely call that a fail However the fact it sold even a single copy made me think okay well let's try this again and I thought I know what to do I will reuse the engine and make an Easter Theme Match 3 game and instead of using stock art I'll pay a friend of mine to make some pixel art because I'm sure that's what casual game was will love pixel art right um obviously looking back I realized what an idiot I was um because the game didn't do very well either this has made nearly $3,000 over 10 years so that's not done very well um another fail so around this time and in fact for the next two games I didn't make any money at all for 18 months we just didn't make

any money from games and I had to do it consultancy to make ends meet so I had to sort of set up networks and uh get rid of viruses and my wife she um she did science writing and got a part-time job by the university to make ends meet we also got out loans we told them it was for Home Improvements but it wasn't and uh we we shuffled money around on credit cards using 0% deals so i' buy all my food on credit cards and Shuffle the money around uh we also got low-income tax credits from the government and we use that to pay child minders so we could keep working so we lived very frugally we didn't do anything fun and it was kind of not not a great time of course I'm not advising this I'm just saying this is what I did uh and it's very much possible to survive you know if you if you want to find a way and I sort of did so yeah if if you're starting out clearly you need some kind of Runway don't do what I did even if you're making your 10th game you

still need some kind of Runway You' got to make sure you can reach the end of it without um you know selling your soul so the only thing is that a lot of people procrastinate so maybe sometimes there is something to be said for just getting started and figur figuring out things as you go along uh once you start something and it's difficult to go back your brain starts working on Solutions as to how to sort of move forward and that's something I found anyway so after Easter bonus and it's sort of flop I got contacted by a guy an American at the time who I've still never met to this day who said uh that the wizard of ours book IP was going to expire in uh a 100 years so it would become public domain and we could use the book IP uh and make a match three game and he said he would pay for the art and a musician and I just had to code it for free uh and we would share the revenue at the end again that's not something i' advised but he seemed to know what he was talking about

um and he had some good contacts and I thought okay let's give it a go and the game actually did turn out very well um and I also had to switch to a new technology and make a new engine which I I sold on the blitzmax forums and I sold 200 copies of this engine for $50 each and those people paid me for the privilege to fix my engine and tell me how how to improve it so that was pretty neat one of the things this opened my eyes to was the fact that it's definitely worth spending money on Art and audio okay um I do really believe that if you if you if you make your game look good it will sell better that's not always the case but it really is kind of obvious and I see a lot of games come out and I'm like that just won't sell people won't equate it with value because it doesn't look good so how did The Wizard of ours do well you may not see this sort of lowlevel stuff but 7 years after it sold I did a mobile deal with a publisher and got a big sort of Advance on sales so anything can happen

in the lifetime of a game that's seven years later we can look at that in Aggregate and you can see that the Last 5 Years had a whole new Boost of of Revenue and I'll talk about how I did that in a moment so it's made about $90,000 net about 250,000 gross it didn't cost me anything to make because somebody else uh paid for the art and so on and it's maybe about $100 an hour but it's taken 9 years to get that much money right at the time in the first year it only made $20,000 and and we thought it was a flop okay so it's a success now but it was a very long success I also thought okay well I can improve upon this and make another Christmas bas Match 3 uh but this time we better graphics so I paid well actually I had to persuade my wife to let me spend $2,000 on Art the 3D shapes are actually made by the guy who made the robots in Rise of the robots if any of you remember that game um and 3D rended backgrounds um and I had to make

it very quickly because Christmas was looming and I think was seasonal deadlines well the thing with seasonal deadlines is you can't move them you can't phone up the pope and say hey man can you move Christmas to February cuz my Milestone is delayed it's not it's not going to happen but that game overall has done pretty well each of those spikes is Christmas and um every year and if we look at it in aggregate we can see that the most recent five years again have done better than the first 5 years and that's because well the romotion each year was I went back to the Casual portals and said just emailed them and said will you romote my game and they did if you don't ask you won't get promotions you've got to try and some portals that wouldn't take the game early on changed their standards they probably dropped them and then took my game uh so that was good

and I also got the game localized which gave us new opportunities and I also double the amount of levels in the game and slapped a Gold label on the game um because everybody loves gold stuff and that did very well and gave the game a new lease of life so keep your game alive there are many different ways you can keep your game alive way after you've shipped it and obviously only do that as long as it makes sense to there may be a time where you just need to let it die and move on to something else so it's made nearly $100,000 it really didn't take me long to to make and it's made about $200 an hour now which was pretty good I think but it took a long time to get there so in the first year it only sold 1,000 units so just let that sink in only 6% of the total revenue in the first year so that's why it is essential that um you think longtale about your games and hopefully that will uh give you an idea that you shouldn't really be heavily

discounting your game or bundling it in the first year or or maybe ever okay so around this time um as I said I was totally desperate for cash uh because these games hadn't made any money and Big Fish Games they contacted me and said would I do some contract work for them and uh I signed a deal and they B me gave me some money and I paid off my debts and it was like how in a firstperson shooter game you when you get shot up to and you have to go and hide behind a wall and heal that's what this was like for me uh so I worked on that game um for nearly a year and I worked with a great designer at Big Fish Called John cutter and it turned out to be a casual game Hit and it's been uh cloned many times and is a very popular game that people still play today uh but I can't share the sales figure sorry because that's owned by big fish and they probably sick a lawyer on

my ass or something so um then after that game we they asked me to make uh another couple of games and I agreed I made this game unwell M about a dude who's got kind of all kinds of food and bugs in his gut and you have to go in and explode them uh the theme wasn't really everyone's uh cup of tea and really any game you make the theme is not going to appeal to everyone unless it's about candy so so because these games went well they said to me hey why don't you move to Vancouver and uh join the studio that we're just starting up and you can work there so I talked to my wife about this and and we thought it would be a great opportunity for us and uh our kids and so so we moved over there uh the overall experience was was good uh for sure in Vancouver so oh I'm on the wrong slide sorry guys that was the thing about contract work obviously I chose good contract

work there and I've had lots of offers of terrible contract work over the years and you really got to know which ones are right for you and within your skill set but I moved to Vancouver and um one thing that I that I made sure happened was I was allowed to keep my company so I made sure the contract said I could keep grey alien games whilst I worked for them because I didn't see it as like a long-term you know thing that I would do forever so I learned to say yes to opportunities early on I became manager of the business software company I also ended up running an iido club and I moved to Vancouver to work for this studio all of these things have been growth experiences and and I'm glad I said yes to them that's my dad he's the guy who bought me the Spectrum in 1984 and um sadly he passed away when I was working at Big Fish Games and it was a big big shock for me um and I like to think he you know can see what I've uh

the successes I've had up to now and that he would be proud of me but unfortunately I'm an atheist so I don't think that's [Applause] happening that his passing was that uh I re-evaluated what was important to me in life and that was things like my family um you know how I spend my spare time and what I'm working on and what the long-term goals were so that is when I really began to learn to say no to things okay so you know if you ship on mobile you get all these ridiculous emails through about ad monetization platforms if you ship on Steam you get all these emails through about um key giveaways this is a great opportunity for you to give away 10,000 copies of your game uh no no it's not um so you get this sort of thing but you also get some deals maybe do sound quite juicy

and you think oh maybe I'll do that you know this this crappy bundle or that crappy bundle um but you have to evaluate them all in terms of uh will they help me grow and will they meet my business's long-term goals and if they don't you know and they're some kind of fun distraction you have to ditch them and uh move on so whilst I was in Vancouver I co-founded a group called fullindie with Alex Vostro um any fullindie members in the house yeah all right but this happened because in 2007 I went to an indie Meetup in Birmingham in the UK and we met in Cliff Harris's hotel lobby and got very very drunk until about 4:00 a.m. in the morning but it was actually a revolutionary thing for me because I got to meet other developers and find out um you know what they're up to but it it was just the fact that somebody understood what I was doing sorry and the and the problems that I was going through and that for me was re revolutionary and that's why I wanted to set up fullindie uh in

Vancouver full Indie now has monthly meetups uh with over 3,000 members it's got they don't all turn up at once so it would be a nightmare um they also have game jams and an annual conference they've done three conferences so you know there probably hopefully be one next year go to Vancouver it should be awesome now most people tell you to do network but for me um networking is really it's about making friends um I don't have any co-workers or no HR department to support me so being part of a like-minded group um is very powerful a and really important to me so I've been to game jams shows meetups and I spend far too much time on social media but one of the things I've learned is it's really important to help people out to share information um and when you start sharing information and tips and and so on it comes back to you and over the years I've got consultancy gigs and

and found investors and just got loads of really useful tips um to help me sort of move forward uh in fact the main reason I would say I've survived as in India is because other successful developers have helped me out unlike business software where you have to basically keep everything secret from your competitors and they do the same with you Indies aren't competitive uh we're collaborative and you long may that continue so um after a while at Big Fish Games I decided that corporate life wasn't for me and I quit and I quit with um some experience I also had a big fish games pension which I immediately cashed in to make a runway for my next game so I made a game called Spring bonus I'm a bit soppy about the spring I like you know the flowers and and so on and I like the fact the sun is coming back so I enjoyed making this game and I used social media to recruit artists and I made a big list of them and tested them

and went through and picked the ones I needed and I crowdsourced localization that would probably make localization experts cringe but it totally worked for me and I learned about using metrics and doing extensive testing at Big Fish games so I was able to push the game out to a load of people get their uh stats back and then balance the game accordingly the best thing was uh I actually shipped the game 7 minutes after my non-compete with Big Fish Games expired so this is what the graph of someone panicking looks like um I log the out of hours I work on every game and I was cruising through January February you can see it there and then in March I was like oh my God Easter is a month away I need to actually finish this game and get it out the door now that highest peak of 84 hours or something on the day I was supposed to ship the game the night

before ID stayed up all night long and I tested all the levels had 1 hour sleep and was bu making the final build my wife came into the office and said she she didn't feel very well and I had to take her to hospital and when she was in hospital um they said she had a a rare form of cancer and um luckily it was a treatable form and because we lived in Canada who has a Health Care system which you any us guys have got to sort out I just can't believe it anyway um she got the treatment she needed and I'm very pleased to S say that she has the all clear now but that was an extremely tense launch Game launch and since then it was very harrowing for her but it was uh tough for me and the kids as well and I had a whole summer just very listless didn't really feel like doing anything considered quitting making games I actually sort of sort of took some medication and sort of managed to come out of that time period uh eventually

but it was very tough and it reminded me that unhealthy deadlines are just not good and to try to avoid those I'm not I still haven't perfected that but this is something we we need to treat ourselves with respect because you don't know when the proverbial will hit the fan you know when some kind of family thing will will crop up uh um and cause a problem anyway how did spring bonus do after all the agony it's uh that's 5 years of sales there are small months for spring and it's made pretty good money $80,000 net revenue it didn't cost me much to make because I paid the artists an upfront to sort of say I'm serious about this let's get started and I gave them revenue on the back end and that's worked very nicely for me um and I I recommend that approach it's obviously easier if you've shipped games before and they they trust you uh one of the things is it's made about $130 an hour total but it could have made way more if I hadn't wasted

hours and hours on stupid mobile ports because mobile is not very good I've tried mobile games for three of my games uh developers actually came to me and said hey would you uh let me Port your game to mobile and we do a revenue split and I've tried that and the thing is it's really boring and soulless they send you these builds and then they don't work very well and you have to send them back feedback and keep testing them and then you have to do all the iOS provisioning profile crap which is just horrible um and and at the end of the day they don't they don't make that much money that's what I found obviously people have had different success with them and so for spring bonus the green bit is what what it made from mobile it made $112,000 from mobile which I split with the dev and okay that's more than zero but it meant that I wasn't focusing on something else which is desktop games which is where my skill set lies so after spring bonus I worked with

Clay entertainment for a bit on eats Munchies in various roles and Jamie Chen is the CEO there and he helped us out at a time when we really appreciated his help um financially and so on and so I learned a lot from him he's an expert at business if you can ever accost him and get some tips do so he'll probably hate me for saying that because he's a busy guy um and I also did a lot of consultancy work around the time because i' built up a reputation as as knowing what to do in casual games and now it's time to talk about this uh graph which is the dollars per hour of all of the uh projects I've worked on the green one in the middle is when I was an employee at Big Fish games now that obviously had benefits like um uh medical and sick pay and holiday paying a pension But ultimately it's one of the lowest earning things I've done per hour even though it was a good job and the blue bars apart from the first

two failures which you saw um are my own titles and they've all made more money than being an employee and being a contractor so early on I said um there is a problem with contract work and the problem is that it's got a fixed ceiling whereas if you make your own games and play play the long game uh you should hopefully come out all right in the end also if you track your business like I've done you can find out which of those projects you working on you should do again if I didn't track things I might think contract work was great and keep doing it I mean I know there's a time and a place for it and maybe a lot of us need to do it at different times but just think very carefully about should you be doing that or your own games so this is a a breakdown of the revenue I've earned from games over 10 odd years and you can see they've come it's come from many sources but in 2011 I decided to switch Focus from working for other people to working on my own games and that's the blue part of the

graph so that's going up hopefully and I'm not even earning more money than I was eight years ago but it's a hell of a lot more satisfying uh and my quality of life is a lot better I've also got my eggs in many baskets so I earn uh income from multiple different revenue streams that's one month in in June last year the black is um that's a payment from the FBI for adding a back door into my games [Applause] um also on the on the right you can see all the different platforms I've used over the years and some of them have died some of them have been bought out and there will be new ones in the future it's an everchanging space and that's why you need to keep looking for these opportunities so in 2012 I decided to move back to England for many reasons uh I I missed a lot of my friends from Van couver but I learned a lot of stuff there I learned how to be a better

designer and producer I learned how to direct artists I think there's one in the audience who probably disagree with me um I think you can only really heard artists you know in the in the direction you want them to go I also learned the importance of metrics and testing we actually worked on a free-to-play game at Big Fish games but that was sort of enough to put me off forever um and I learned about networking and I joined Toast Masters which is a really good group if you want to improve your speaking skills and also in Canada everyone is obsessed by hockey they just talk about it all the freaking time so when I got back to the UK it cost a lot of money to move continents right and I had to equip our house with all the sort of appliances and buy a car and everything else and some of that debt is still on 0% credit cards today okay um and at the time A friend of mine cast Prince from puppy games he said will you port Titan attack my PC game to mobile and I was desperate and I said

okay yeah let's do that and I like the game a lot but it turned out to be a lot more challenging to do the port a lot more complex than I had originally thought so I had to sort of put it to one side and turn it into a side project while I did other things eventually it shipped in a in a Humble Bundle and made some money but it's one of the worst performing projects I've ever worked on so do not make decisions out of desperation uh it's really important to remember that every game project will take longer than you think it will take a game project is never quick uh and you really need to explore your op options very carefully before you decide what project to work on I know that's kind of obvious but just remember it so whilst I I should have been working on Titan attack I ran out of money so I needed to make another game and I made this game spooky bonus uh a lot of people thought spring bonus was for kids because of the Easter

Theme so I thought well okay let's make a darker game and after living in Vancouver I realized that North Americans are obsessed by Halloween we're nowhere near as obsessed by this in the UK and so I thought let's do a Halloween themed game I spent some money on Art and music and so on um I had to get a loan to spend that money and it's actually done very well indeed it was a casual game Hit and it's um made um it's actually our bestselling game to date the only problem a casual game hit is the portals take most of the money like 70% of it you get 30 it's the opposite of steam so even though it made them a lot of money it did me okay but it wasn't it wasn't my um golden ticket so why did it work out well well it was a very small scope it took me three months to make it definitely resonated with the audience um I spend money on Art made it made it look good I didn't do a mobile version I focused just on making the PC one as good as possible it was localized at the beginning and it

was my seventh match three game okay I don't know if I should be ashamed of that or or proud of that but it by that that point I knew what I was doing and and it turned out well we launched at a good time in the Casual Market which is sort of dying now and I launched on all the right portals and I even got an advance from one of them uh to to give them an exclusive deal which really helped with cash flow but the most important thing I learned was everyone loves exploding pumpkins so if you can fit one of those into your game somewhere um maybe make sh in the shower shower with a pumpkin simulator or something like that I think you'll be okay so while we were making spooky bonus uh my wife suggested we make a Regency themed Jane Austin romantic card game um and I said actually that sounds like a really good idea no one's done it before and so I asked her to work with me as uh researcher designer tester and

so on and she agreed and and we made the game but but at the beginning we heard about a grant for the southwest of England which is a sort of tech Wasteland that I live in um I think we've only had you know computers for a few few years mostly it's just tractors and stuff and we heard about this grant we pitched uh for the grant and we got it and I did all these things which you should do to get a grant AR but basically they're the foundation of a good business plan and you should do it for all of your games I think one of the things that helped is I had a track record and I said to them I said to them hey at the end of this funding you want to take a box which says you back some projects which actually you know made some money and were successful and if you want to tick that box back me and they did so that worked out pretty well nevertheless the game took longer than planned and uh I had to find other funding sources this is a recurring theme you may notice so I tried to get a

bank loan but that was just no good they just they're not interested in Indies because you don't have anything they can come and uh send round guys with baseball bats to collect if you don't pay the money back I actually ended up getting a loan from another Indie business which took like 30 minutes to set up and was that came about through making friends I also put my own personal savings into the game and we managed to get tax credits the game in the UK you may have some similar thing in your area our tax credits were tied into making a culturally British game which ours was and we actually were able to claim back 25% of our salaries which was pretty cool I got that in the lump sum at the beginning of this year I didn't do crowdfunding I'd rather convince one investor that the Milestone is delayed than 10,000 braing Kickstarter users your mileage may vary but that's just my sort of particular paranoia so there's apparently a Jason

deloa he's a very clever guy and he's doing a whole talk about funding so if you've got a full pass you might want to go and check that one out so how did Regency solitire do well uh it it turned out to do very well on the Casual portals and it got people love it they gave it great reviews it won a kind of few awardyoutube uh I'm not bitter or sour about that at all uh one thing to note is that it made 14% of its revenue on Steam okay so most of its Revenue was off of steam however it only got press once it came out on Steam and it's kind of a bit of a sad fact that games aren't really viewed as validated as games until they've come out on Steam I don't really like that really but that seems to be the way things are so as I mentioned I worked with my wife

on Regency solitire we did the whole thing like this for for a year um normally I'd advise against Hing employees because they're sort of can of worms in terms of finances and legal stuff but we'd been together uh for 15 years at that point and we sort of knew what we were getting into even though Helen's friends said you know it would drive me insane working with my husband but we we managed that by having different office spaces we come together for meetings and then we can go back and be introverts in our own spaces again but we discussed the design together the visual design the story all kind of aspects of the game um and we also shared PR and marketing duties which was great because I you know that sort of thing can be a bit of a drag um and we also indulged our passion in British history and went to sort of various locations for research which was nice but it was a learning curve Helen expected certain amounts of mentorship

and I had to balance that with the reality of shipping an indie game um she had to get used to using Photoshop to do all of the sort of art Direction and so on and we did do a lot of design by committee and as i' done a lot of design over the previous 10 years there were some arguments about that sort of thing also Helen had to make the story fit the game so she was used to sort of writing but we had to change the story many times to make it fit the game so that's something that was a learning curve for us and I had to be a project manager for not only the artists and the musicians but for my wife can you imagine being a project manager for your partner and telling them what they should work on and why I also had to give her timely feedback um when all I really wanted to do was hide in my room and code and we had different daily routine she's a morning person and I'm an evening person so we had to find one sort of part of the day that that worked But ultimately two heads were better than one it was really good to have an

invested team member and this is one of the best decisions I've made in the 10 years is to have someone else to bounce ideas off of to improve the game and it's like having a jogging partner you know you they turn up to work you turn up to work and you get stuff done together however a friend of mine is sitting over there actually um he wants described my life as Indie hard mode cuz when you when you've got kids the thing is your productivity will suffer uh but paradoxically you have to earn more money to survive so it's it's very tough so my advice is try to work hard and get rich before you have kids okay so after Regency solitire I pitched an idea to Cliff Harris of positech he's he sort of publishes Indie Games he actually rejected my first idea and I went back with another one which was Shadow hand which he accepted um so he's helping fund this game which is a sort

of big relief off my mind because I've spent most of the last 10 years trying to Scrabble around for money um and this game is a RPG card game which involves a sort of solitire style mechanic that drives these battles uh it said in 1717 you're a highway woman who uh is an aristocrat by day and a highway Woman by night and we've got our full sort of inventory system you can even wear a beard if you want there's a black one as well if you're you know into that sort of thing and we've got a full sort of visual novel aspect to it like we did with Regency solitire so that it should come out this summer hopefully and if there are any press here who want to talk about it I'm here for the week and we're showing off at res in London in April so a little while ago I asked on GMA Sutra uh Indies I asked them to give me their sustainability tips don't worry

if you can't read that it's on uh GMA Sutra Indie sustainab sustainability top tips you can look it up I got loads of them and they sort contradicted each other as well uh so most people were sort of saying stuff like spend as little as money as possible some of them said don't go to conferences so I guess they're not here now and uh others said do spend money on Art and Tech and go big I think the reason for the discrepancy is people are at different stages in their Indie adventure and I do believe it's sensible early on to control your costs figure out what you're doing learn you know the the from your mistakes and then um start to spend money on the right project whether it's your money or you've got Investments or grants even better spend right money on the on the right project later on so one key ke thing is to be able to weather flops so over the years I've had

a couple of really bad flops at the beginning I've had games that have only made money after like five or 10 years and I've had some hit games but somebody else took all the money uh and I've had a few you know spooky bonus was pretty good so I've had a few successes that have kept me going and Dan Cook he's a very clever man and he's written a blog post called minimum sustainable success which talks about making many many games and hopefully you know surviving by making sure that you can survive not one just one flop but multiple flops in a row my biggest and and perhaps most important tip is to get a cat um this is my cat Suki she is very fluffy and stroking her is just the best possible thing you can do for stress and and I must have come out with so many ideas sitting in that chair in the garden um another thing I need to give a know out to some old people will know this reference uh in 2004 I read cultivate

Burning Desire by Steve pavina and it it set me on a path of uh well that that's what made me go Indie when I read that article made me quit my job and everything I'm not sure if I should thank him or not um but I did follow a path of personal development and looking at what motivates me and how I can be more efficient and so on it's a whole separate topic but it really did um help me get where I am today and there's a lot more work to do so this is the graph of someone who didn't give in this is my revenue from my own games over the last 10 11 years um it's going pretty well now um but it's taken you know a long time to get here and there's no guarantee that the future will be bright either but one thing is that I'm kind of certain of is that I will find a way somehow I always sort of find a way to keep going and there's a lot of advice out there for uh how you can succeed um

and hopefully you've got some ideas from my story but what ultimately makes the biggest difference is you and what's in you and whether you've got the will to survive on the flight over here I watched the latest Rocky movie okay it's pretty good it's like Rocky 7 or something um and in it he says something like one step at a time one punch you the time one game at a time and that my friends is how you do it thank you so yeah if you have any questions uh please find a mic great thanks for the talk my name is Mark mikc I am also an indie game developer hi and I have three small questions that may have large

answers uh so the first one is spring bonus you said right was that a premium game or a free to-play game oh on mobile you mean okay well just in general like you said it's it's a casual game right okay well the all of my casual download games on PC were premium so people paid uh $9.99 or $6.99 if they're a member of a club some of the sites have a system where you can join up and play as many games as you want like Netflix or something and then I get paid per minute of play one of my games spooky bonus had 5 million minutes of play in the first month W which I think has wasted a huge amount of human time right um but we did launch spring bonus on mobile and it was a a demo like seven level demo and then at the end it said pay whatever to get all of the rest of the levels which some people just didn't understand they just didn't seem to get this idea so it wasn't technically free to play it was like gated content or something I guess demo

full version gotcha okay second question you inferred that you do not like freeto playay why do you not like freeo play premium why don't I like freeto play okay so when I worked at Big Fish Games I read and studied a lot of uh stuff about human psychology and all the tricks and tactics you can use to make people spend money and about whales and all this sort of stuff and after doing all of that I just felt dirty um and I decided that I didn't really want to employ those techniques ever again on human beings so that's why great and final question you said that you've made Seven match three games yeah why have you like how different were the match three were they still like is it just like a reskin or were there were the mechanics different like why did you sort of stick in that sort of Niche so why why did I make seven match 3es and were they different uh okay basically whenever you ship a game you never put in all the stuff you wanted to put in

and you have a big list of features you didn't complete so for every game one of those games that I made I changed the theme up uh and I added in some more features from before that I didn't have time to do before plus the theme always kind of changes what kind of powerups you can put in and uh and what kind of objects you can use uh so every game improved and the last game spooky bonus had a quite a large meta game about decorating your house with um very spooky objects and I use that same meta game in Regency solitire so there was always an improvement for me for each one even reskinning a game people talk about reskinning reskinning a game properly still can take a couple of hundred hours let alone making all the new levels and all the new features great perfect thank you so much thank you hi uh can you talk a little bit more about how you tracked your hours and if you Ed like special software for that or oh okay yeah no I'm I'm pretty old school I just used Excel and I just

basically typed in start and end times on particular tasks and then summarized it all one thing I did was uh and I still do is is I categorize tasks so they might be coding there might be testing they might be dealing with contractors so I'm able to look within a certain project on on the breakdown of tasks what I actually find is that making a game the the coding portion might only be a quarter of the entire time the a lot of time just dealing with assets and plugging those in and doing design and doing marketing and PR um yeah so that's how I do it just old school but it works did you do it like on a daily basis as a routine or like a weekly basis yeah no a daily basis every time I open up the compiler or do any work I just make a log entry okay I'm bit sort of yeah what they call ay retentive I think is the word that looked very useful thank you okay hello there uh I was curious if you had any tips on how to sustain motivation through the failures so

there's the financials but there's also the sort of emotional side of that so how did I sustain motivation through the failures um it just because well a couple of things I sometimes think having a family is both a blessing and a curse in the sense that I have had to provide for them and and when you have to provide for your family you you know that you can't sort of fail you've got to kind of find a way and keep going and so I've always had to keep finding a way and keep going so that's one sort of form of motivation I also stayed motivated by doing stuff like one time I had some money in my company and I took it out and paid a small chunk off the mortgage and I did that because I knew that when I got hungry I would start to be motivated and make the next game that's not healthy it's not healthy motivation uh but I knew that it sort of worked for me luckily I'm sort of beyond that now and I feel that I've made good games and I want to keep making good games and

improve that that sort of skill so I think my motivation has changed o over the years um but I don't know this it's such a wide topic there's a lot of stuff about figuring out what time of day you work best about having to-do lists where uh the easy tasks you know you can do here everything's broken down the whole one step at a time thing is is big for me uh um but also at the same time visualizing the end goal which is a successful game that you've launched I just love launching and shipping games and seeing how well they do and wanting to improve from one to the other uh so it's a it's a a culmination of things I guess thank you thanks right I think we are done L anyone's got any more oh one at the front I don't know if want to repeat it but uh maybe you better use the mic sorry yeah um now the now that you've kind of have all these games that have a long

tail um do you find that you spend much time maintaining games that you've already released from a long time ago or has that not that maintaining work not stacked up against you right so do I spend time maintaining games I released a long time ago um I did up until recently that's how come I got you know this whole new lease of life from these old games you know I would keep sort of maintaining them and it's more to be honest about um maintaining a relationship with the Distributors and getting them to romote the game but I did I was maintaining them but recently I've decided to sort of let these 10-year-old games go to the side now and just 100% focus on my new games because I want every hour every thought I've got to be for the new games and not to be distracted it'd be great if I had someone else in the team maybe who did De with all that stuff a Biz de person or or something um but it's not yeah it's not something I'm doing anymore okay I think we are done so

thank you very much