DizzyDoo

Oh, I absolutely agree! I'm definitely an early morning sort of person, and when you're a self-employed, self-directed programmer, that feeling in the day of 'getting going', digging into a good chunk of work with free hours stretching ahead of you, that can't really be beaten.

So I do get up earlier, and start work earlier than most, but I don't start the day with news sites, or emails, or twitter or anything like that. At best, it distracts from getting the work-day going, and at worst, it introduces an awful lot of negativity. Took me a while to figure out, perhaps it's more obvious to others, but a truly 'quiet' first few hours in a day is very beneficial to me.

I started my business with less than $1000. I worked a full-time job and built my first video game product (http://store.steampowered.com/app/386900/The_Cat_Machine/) by waking up earlier in the morning to get an hour or two in before my 'real' job, and working Saturdays, and doing that for a year. I found customers by putting an enormous about of effort into marketing, and finding only some of it paid off (but what did, really worked). Obviously, having a comfortable day job and not having familial responsibilities lowers many of the risks of starting a business, I'm not sure how I would have approached it had I a family or less secure employment.

The biggest expenses were commissioning a composer friend of mine to produce an excellent soundtrack, and licensing a couple of pieces of development software, but that was <$1000. That product has funded my current product, so it's still early days for my business, I'm only a few years into this.

I feel like product one taught me so, so much, and product number two has been a similar learning experience. I'll probably know what I'm doing by my sixth or seventh game!

Voronoi diagrams are used a lot in game development too, in creating and recalculating navmeshes in games where the navigation graph changes often. I have a game project underway right now where the player can build fences, lampposts and other obstacles, and the hundred plus AI actors need to be able to navigate it in real-time. Recalculating the Delauney Triangulation and the Voronoi tessleation is expensive, so I just sent it to a thread, it's worthwhile to do all that work because A* pathfinding on anything other than a navmesh would be, for my project, incredibly slow. This sort of algorithm is a great thing to know that it exists and have in your backpocket.

EDIT: I have a little devlog about the game I'm developing full-time, back in October 2015 I made a video where I talked through the first pass of my Voronoi/Navmesh implementation. Might be worth watching if anyone wants to see the tesselation overlaid onto a game world, for a real-life usage of the algorithms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPD3HqI6HDE I should assure everyone that the game looks _very_ different now thought! No more checkerboard textures...

Hah, well, thank you. My academic training is all in Computer Science, but I've enjoyed drawing since I was a kid. Still feel like such a beginner in that whole realm, been teaching myself animation and design and 3D modelling in the last five years, I think it'll take another five years to really get anywhere!

Audio is the only thing I don't do myself! I do the programming, art, writing and game design (and marketing/business stuff) but the audio side of things would be severely detrimental if I had to do that bit too.

The music is done by Peter Nickalls (http://peternickalls.com), a friend of mine that I've known for years and years. Too talented a composer to be working on my little projects, but I'm thankful for his work. The music he's worked on for my current, somewhat more ambitious project is absolutely incredible though.

Honestly, not very much. I'm incorporated in the UK, which involves a 15 minute filling in of a web form to accomplish. I have an accountant who really helped me in the early days walk through some things I needed to know (normal stuff like save my receipts) and handles the VAT filings. The biggest time killer for me is the quarterly MOSS filings (registering European VAT) but that's a couple of hours of work four times a year.

Supporting my customers ought to be the biggest time sink, but actually, I never needed to patch the game.

Organising discounts and Steam sales and things like that takes thought, but I actually really love that side of my business.

For my current project, marketing is going to be a big deal for me, but I learned a lot doing that for The Cat Machine, and for me it's as important as anything that goes on inside my Git repository.

I finished my side project a couple of years ago, released it, and then found I was able to quit my Python webdev job and go full time making video games.

The key difference is that my project was a video game (this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwXl8lDrxn8) and that takes a lot of temptation to do what the OP is writing about, rewriting stuff in Haskell for example. The interesting bit when it comes to side projects (and now my full time projects) for me isn't actually the tools or the methodology or anything like that, but the end result. I spent my teenage years building games that I never finished, and it made me quite miserable, because I so just wanted to finish something. Anything.

I remember the first game I ever finished was a clone of Snake. There was nothing remotely interesting in the implementation or in the design, but I was so flipping pleased with myself, I had finished something! And that let me slowly build my projects up to more interesting endeavours, and eventually to one that could be sold. Starting small was the key for me, as I learned two things: 1 - what was 'too much' for me to try and tackle at the time and 2 - self-discipline, not chucking the project the moment I got bored, or had a 'better idea'.

Sure, I totally understand that! My advice is just to work on a really, really small project. Something that you could finish in a couple weeks, then you can bounce to the next thing with no guilt.

Thanks! Yeah, it's easier than ever to get started, and easier than ever to sell your work online, so now's a great time to get involved.

I got started writing video games at University in England, when there was a thriving marketplace for games written in Flash, and websites would buy licenses (sometimes exclusive ones) to have your game on their site, this is back in '09. From a student's perspective some would pay really well, a few thousand dollars for a project that would take a few months.

Seven years later I find myself running a business making video games in the more traditional pay-to-download format, like this one, called The Cat Machine - http://store.steampowered.com/app/386900. I'm sure compared to other online businesses, or even other indie game developers, comprised of one person it's not mind-blowingly successful, but my games have paid my modest (single guy) living costs while I work on my next project.

My games are multi-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) and I sell on my website, Steam, Humble Bundle, the Apple Mac Store and a few other places, and they write me cheques every month. Every project has a long tail with regards to revenue, and occasionally there are spikes, like the Steam Holiday sale a few days ago, and just this morning I woke up to The Cat Machine being on the main page of Apple's Mac Store in a 'Popular Puzzlers' section. Each of these bump my budget for my next projects up another month or so. The initial sales spike when a game is released is bit crazy, suddenly having your salary for the next one and a half years dropped into your bank account all in one go.

The reason I can do this as a one-man band is that I can program, but I also have some artistic skill, so I can draw and digital paint and animate. To speed up development as much as I can, I write within the Unity engine with C#, which has a great pipeline for art assets, which I create in Photoshop and Spine for 2D characters and textures, and The Foundry's excellent Modo software for 3D assets. The only things I don't do for my games are the music, I have an excellent composer friend who works for TV and Film, and I'd be silly not to contract him to do that. But apart from that, I do all the design, writing, programming, marketing, etc, which is part of the fun, wearing lots of different hats.

If you're _really_ interested in how I work, I actually do a series of high-level development videos on my current project: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsg018B0PK60ZoaNqw_in...

Also happy to answer any questions, within reason, about making a living making games about cats riding around on trains.

Thanks! I certainly have considered translating it, but at this stage I believe it's too late to be worth it. Not only is there the cost of translators, but in this instance there is an engineering cost as I made the classic mistake of baking the text all over the place, in binary level files, in json files, and hardcoded. Slicing it up and moving all the text into one place would take a while, especially as I'd want to guarantee not reducing stability.

If I could make a bet that adding, let's say, French, German and Chinese would cause... 700 more sales, I would probably bother, but I don't think this sort of feature 10 months after release would generate that.

I'm treating this more as a 'lesson learned', and approaching my next project with localisation in mind. Translating to a bunch of languages is one of my main goals.

A final thought; I love that in 2016 a lone developer can make a silly puzzle game about cats and sell it in 80+ countries. The internet!

The easy way is to write it at a higher level, and let the abstraction handle the meat of it for you. The easiest way is just to use an engine, an existing array of tools and frameworks that manages the abstraction in such a manner that (for the most part) you just have to select the build target.

In this specific case, I used the Unity engine. I write in C#, and with Mono/OpenGL, Unity can build executables to various platforms, on (mostly) the same code.

I do, I run a small video games company, making games that one person can make, like this one: http://store.steampowered.com/app/386900. I've posted about it here once before, but my 'thing' (if I have a thing) is that I do both the programming, but also the art side. Computer Science is my training, so I can do the software development, what is less common is that I also have some skill in painting, design, animation, so unlike many games developers it is actually quite sensible to be a one-man unit. The actual number of copies that I need to sell is very low even compared to the numbers of friends of mine who have a team or two or three. Even <10,000 copies can be successful for me. I do contract with a couple of audio people, who are just better at that side than I am.

As I sell mainly on Steam, Steam handles the updating, it works out the diff and updates the files that have changed.

Oh man, Spine is amazing. The latest 3.0 release has some great new scale features, and the fact that you can browse all the runtimes on github and submit patches is just the best. And the community is great too, lots of support on the forums, and bugs I've reported were fixed in days. So yes, Spine is absolutely worth the investment.

That's exactly how I do things. I'm very glad that by distributing digitally, it's incredibly easy to roll out small fixes that are applied as incremental patches, so I don't tend to 'save up' for major updates. A benefit that comes with a stable engine is that it's already been tested on a wide variety of hardware, so most of the issues I fix are very rare gameplay bugs.

Not at all. Unity is the engine I use, these engines are immensely valuable to developers like me, I can't invest years into building my own stable core right now, and although it has its rough edges and problems, it suits my projects very well. Builds to all sorts of targets, too. For my latest project I'm using the FMOD middleware for positional 3D audio. On the graphical asset side of things, I paint everything in Photoshop, and animate it in the amazing animation software Spine (which has an open source Unity runtime).

I'm making video games for PC, Mac and Linux (like this one - http://store.steampowered.com/app/386900), it's a very traditional release cycle, I work on a project for x months, and then I release it, moving onto the next game after a few weeks of post-launch support. PC games are generally seen as more valuable than mobile games, so I don't need to sell a terribly large volume in order for me, a single developer, to make a living.

I released on Steam, and Steam's been great. Since I just developed the game by myself, I only needed to sell a couple thousand copies to break even, and that happened fairly quickly. Releasing on my site (http://cranktrain.com) and on other stores like the Humble Store, the Mac Store, that's all rather worthwhile too, it all adds up. My site is a small Django site with Stripe, so that gives me the biggest margins, though I then have to sort out things like European VAT payments, which is a pain, but hopefully I'll grow that for my next game and it'll become worthwhile.

The Cat Machine has done modestly well, but it's let me work on games full-time. And it all started with that one cat-owner in Peru.

I did indeed. Not the best process in the world, but I was only there a week.

I don't have a story about enterprise sales, but if you'll allow me I will just slip in the story of the first copy of software that I sold. I hope no one minds.

I wrote a silly computer game about cats (http://store.steampowered.com/app/386900), essentially making a puzzle game out of finite-state automata questions you get during the computation course of a Computer Science degree. Of course, the abstraction on the mechanics involve cats, because it's a good way to trick people into doing computer science.

Now, three weeks before I released the product, I stuck up a webpage where people could purchase the game for a higher price, but the twist was that they could send me a picture of their cat, and I'd put the cat in the game, in a level somewhere. I didn't really know if anyone would be interested, I didn't do any marketing, but since it didn't take long to hook Stripe up and the idea amused me, I went for it. The next day I received my first customer, someone from Peru, who in broken English described their cat 'Missy', and attached a dozen or so photos of her. So, I draw an in-game representation of the Peruvian cat, place her in the game, and add a feature where when the user mouses-over Missy, an overlay pops up with a photo inside. I still have no idea how this customer found me, but I do know who their cat is, what food it likes, what toys are its favourite. Over the course of the three weeks, a little more than a dozen people preordered and sent me (usually loads) of pictures of their cat(s), which was quite a personal subject for some. More than one had recently lost their pet, and wished me to memorialise the cat inside the game, either for them, or their wife/husband, as a gift or as a surprise when they played it through. I did not expect to be in some way apart of people's grieving. Some of them wrote me much later to express their thanks. What stuck with me most though was the feeling of making a personal connection with someone on the otherside of the globe, Peru, Singapore, Algeria, etc, and effectively being introduced to a member of their family. It was a surprisingly meaningful experience.

So no, not at all about big enterprise sales, instead a $10 game involving cats, but, there you go.

Full credit to my friend Peter Nickalls (http://www.peternickalls.com), who composes music for TV shows that are far more impressive than my little game. The soundtrack he did for the game is fantastic, I'm glad we put together the soundtrack DLC.

I made in just under 4 months of work, came from an idea I had at University when studying those classic finite state machine diagrams, where you effectively have to draw state machine diagrams that process a regex-like set of rules. I realised I was having fun solving these problems, and I reckoned with the right abstraction I could trick people into doing some basic Computer Science-y logic puzzles! Cats, it turns out, are really good for that!

All built on my own, with some music help from a friend of mine. Used Unity for ability to easily hit Windows, Mac and Linux. I'll probably get around to porting it to iOS and Android next year too, since feedback has been so strong on Steam, and there's a definite impulse-buy aspect to having lots of colourful cats riding around on trains.

I released a small computer puzzle game based on finite state automata called The Cat Machine[0] back in August, which still steadily sells copies, accompanied with bigger spikes when a Steam sale comes around. From what I hear, the 'long tail' after release goes on for some years, which I believe since back in 2009/2010 I wrote a number of Flash games and I still get a monthly Paypal of about $5 from them. Steam is a bit healthier than the Flash marketplace nowadays.

[0] http://store.steampowered.com/app/386900

For the game I have on Steam[1], a logical puzzle game, this just isn't the case. Mac sales are at about 10%, and Linux sales are at ~3%. However, the most outspoken fans of the game, and the ones from whom I get the most nice emails from, are mostly Linux users.

[1] - http://store.steampowered.com/app/386900

> As with all things, if it works for you, great. Just don't force it on anyone else.

Here's a question, because this is a phrase I've encountered a lot, but I have often wondered whether this is somewhat a self-defeating statement. "Don't you dare force your beliefs on anyone else" is in itself a belief, that you are forcing upon another, is it not? Just because it is a belief about beliefs, or how someone ought to believe, does not excuse it, I have wondered.

Another vote for Clickteam Fusion from me. I started writing games when I was eleven, with the predecessor The Games Factory (1.2) and that's what got me started down the road of software engineering.

There's some nice bindings for SDL that's rather well-maintained: https://github.com/AngryLawyer/rust-sdl2

I recently released my first self-published browser game (http://scarletsword.com) and used Stripe for the microtransactions. It's wonderful, and easy, and updates like this one make me excited for its future development. You know, as if it's not good enough already.

I agree, being new to web development a few years ago I struggled along with Django for a bit before trying Flask, which is a fantastic framework. It's easy to keep the entire thing in your head while coding. Today I've moved on from Flask to Django, because as my web apps began to grow I ended up writing features that Django gives out of the box, but I still value Flask hugely. I will probably use it in the future, for small web apps here and there.