> Sounds like messed up economics. This reminds me of the economic environment of Second Life. I doubt if anybody has made enough money in there working with Prims to even buy a cup of coffee in the morning.
To be frank, (and I know that Mike the guy who hired me to program it might read this, but I think he knows my opinion already), the business strategy of the whole thing was just short of the mark.
The first hurdle is the concept itself. It's really uncomfortable to play, surreal, and just plain creepy. This was intentional and what drew me to the project in the first place. But marketing a thing like this has to be done right. It has to frame it right, get you into it. The marketing had to make it more than what it was.
The game was completed more-or-less on schedule, however, it was only a few notches above the bare minimum of what we laid out in the design document and this was due to just unforeseen difficulties - not all of which even had to do with coding itself - sometimes it was just burnout and personal issues. If I had it my way, we should have put another month into it. Mike didn't want to risk it. I was at the limit of the extra time I put in for basically free, and he didn't want to spend any more, which I think might have made all the difference. He got antsy. I don't blame him.
It's also a really short game - an hour for an average player. And not much replay value. It's priced accordingly: $3 a pop. Given that, we actually haven't done too bad. We actually made a little money from crowdfunding before the game was released, and those people got copies. Many games don't sell at all or never make enough to get a payout from their distributor. Mike probably thought thousands of people would buy it just because it looks different.
Yet another thing holding sales back is the limited platform spread. Just Win7 + Win8. It really should be Mac and Linux at least. Vista too, maybe. I can't port it myself because of lack of funds and knowledge and time. I'm trying to get some help to do it. I'd pay them.
> If that is what you can bank with a video-game, I'd have to reconsider my options. I mean, maybe it's possible to make some money writing games these days, but I'm not sure how. I remember back in the good old days when half of the planet wasn't irradiated, when a couple of hippies working in their garage could make a game for an 8 bit computer, put it onto cassette tape, sell it, and then make enough money to buy a car and then go on a road trip with the rest of the cash.
I think making and selling games is still viable, but people just aren't making stuff that stands out. I think that for a first project The Lady is doing okay, considering. And I think it's selling at all mostly because it stands out and because Mike did a LOT of promo... but some of that veered realllly close to spamming.
In the end I wish the game could have just been made a little better before release. Mike cut the ending down to a slap in the player's face - it's comedic, if you get the joke. But not very satisfying.
> If I was going to make a game, I'd need to look at what indie video-games are selling well, which have been written by a few guys rather than by a large team of people, and see if I could figure out what makes that success tick.
You can't. You just need a good idea, good execution (the hardest part), and a smart marketing/business strategy (tricky but not that hard if you put yourself in the audience's shoes). A surprising number of people get one or more of those wrong. There's no recipe of steps to follow to do it right. It all depends on the game, you just need to have the things I just mentioned, one way or another. It takes a kind of intuition from years of experience. I have made 6 games professionally and I'm just starting to learn about all the challenges and pitfalls.
> Maybe you can do it, but you would need to find the right angle. What about a straight 2D action arcade game? Something like Rastan? What about something that networks over the net? What about something that people can contribute to and write levels for? I do have some ideas, but I'm not sure if the amount of time which would needed to implement them would justify the effort.
Space Beatz is a 2D action arcade game. It's too risky to work on it right now in Forth without knowing if or when I'll be able to compile to Android at least since it's meant for touch screens. I might port it to Unity. The game design doc has some gaps that need to be filled too.
I would definitely be up for doing something more marketable in Forth. Believe me with a good idea and solid execution (I've got the second part covered) it is well worth it. If it's an idea that could thrive on PC's it could work.
> Or you could get really lucky and come up with a brand new original idea that ends up selling a million copies, like Angry Birds.
Fuck Angry Birds. Anyone trying to be all tooty frooty and "quirky" like that game is gonna have a hard time standing out. There is a real lack of diversity in style and theme in the game market these days. Everything is the same bright, cheerful, safe crap - or otherwise really bland ("fantasy"), or dark in a really ineffectual way. And people expect it to all be FREE or priced really, really low because their expectations are so low their idea of a game worth playing is one that has the addiction factor. People don't know what they want so they need to be surprised.
Forth is so great for iteration and experimentation. It can be so much more fluid than anything else available. It has annoyances and problems like anything else but they are just different. If those could be solved then it'd be a hell of a secret weapon. I love working in it.