Ludumdare October challenge: Finish a game — Take it to market — Earn $1 | Hacker News Reader

Ludumdare October challenge: Finish a game — Take it to market — Earn $1

ludumdare.com

81 pointsImpossible16 comments

I have a webgame I wrote in a couple hours. It needs some polish, but with ads and maybe a donation button, $1 should be attainable. It'll be the first money I've ever made from game dev, so it's a start!

Or we could finish http://000fff.org/uploads/Map_Template_Layout.png :)

I like that art style. I don't know if you could convince me to buy a schmup, but the art goes a long way towards that.

It's actually not a shoot em up per se but more of a Gravity Force game. So you need to keep the ship floating by using thrust which makes the control quite interesting IMHO.

But yeah I don't know if it could sell, I have designed a pretty big universe for it though.

We could do that as well! Especially if we go the web route and go SVG and use the native vectors... :)

I did this last year. Finally released my game in March. I have earned around £20 from it so far, not a lot but it was a very good experience. It turned out to be a really good thing to show potential employers and I managed to get a great new job in app dev from having it on my CV, so it definitely paid off.

The game is Kaptilo, for Android phones, http://kaptilo.com for anyone who's interested.

Nice game, looks like its well polished. I'm curious how much time did you spent on the game? I assume you wrote it on your spare time and this challenge is just for educational purposes.

I guess my real question is do you think taking the challenge was worth it?

Start to finish was about 6 months; actual hours, I would estimate 400-500 hours. I spent a good 2-3 months probably working 30-40 hours a week on it, I took a couple of months off pretty much completely in that time too.

The challenge itself, I thought was a good starting point, it motivated me for the first month. I had a playable game at the end of the first month but it was very amateur and I really wanted it to have that polish of a 'real' game, which I am proud of, I think I managed to achieve quite a high level of quality.

It was mostly an educational thing, I did have some small hopes that I might make some proper money from it but it was never the expectation. I'm glad I did it but I don't think I would do it this year. I'd rather work on something that I don't expect to sell, the dollar signs at the back of my mind did guide my design a bit. I'd prefer to work on something I could be more proud of as a game in itself rather than as a failed product.

As an aside I recently got a really nice review from a customer who wasn't a friend of mine. It seriously made my day and was much nicer than the small amount of money I made.

I did this last year, and made around 500-600. I don't know how long I spent on it and if it was really worth it or not. I certainly made a bunch of progress on my understanding of code, and what it takes to make a good release. I have another thing that I may bash together for this year if I can get to it.

I really am not a fan of these "timed" challenges.

Try this instead: create an awesome "polished" game and try to make your first $100 in November, instead of $1 in October.

Also, if you release an unpolished game in October, you will maybe make $1, but you'll also get a bunch of 1 star negative reviews which are going to make it REALLY hard to make that $100 in November ;)

For anyone interested in making an iPhone game, I highly recommend Cocos2d-iPhone as a framework. I used it to make Twiddle (find in app store) a couple of years ago really quickly and had a very good experience with it. It has come a long way since then.

If you are not familiar with Obj-C, I would recommend Monkey or CoronaSDK instead. You'll be off and writing games in no time. Monkey has export to Flash AND HTML5 capabilities, as well as Android and iOS http://www.monkeycoder.co.nz/

Corona SDK let me go from no real coding experience in the past 10 years to making a convincing prototype iOS game within a month. But to make it App Store ready (content and polish) has taken several more months and I'm still not there. I sure would like to earn at least $1 in October though.

I get frustrated over Corona's limitations such as no way to add GameCenter support without adding OpenFeint (which more than doubles my app's file size and bloats it past the 20MB 3G download limit).

With Monkey, when you build, it actually creates the native code for you right on your own computer, so if you want to add Game Center, or something to that affect, you could actually open the code in XCode and do what you need to do, no limitations - which is why I've become a fan actually.

I can open the code in Eclipse and add AdMob ads if I want to after I've created the game in Monkey.

The cool thing about Corona is how popular it's becoming, and how they are developing new features at lightning speed. As a subscriber, the daily builds are really impressive.

Some of are limited to a little bit of spare time... http://www.barricane.com/2011/09/30/ludum-dare-anastom.html

that is madness. I can't imagine how someone can only have 3 hours a week. Are you working 3 jobs? Also thinking that a game to market will take 150 hours. I have gotten games to market in 13 hours. And they have sold.

Good luck though, I hope it works out.

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