Sounds like my kind of game! I could probably do some project management if you like, since I don't have the mental manpower to do programming in spare time. All that organizational work that people usually hate, and some marketing stuff. Don't worry, I'll be redundant, so nobody has to wait up for me, but I'll be like a maid if needed.

I can hold my own in programming, but can't really devote time to that for now, and will have to learn Python

I'm at UTC+8 time zone though, and don't always have Internet access. Could log in for a chat whenever needed. But in general I don't idle on chats, because it gets disruptive when doing other things.

Tried oDesk or Elance? Indie game developer sites are always hot locations, but many don't have money. You'll want the clients who have tons of money and no skill 

Don't like it. Why not just use an indie newsletter? You're not making money from it, yet you're charging. If I'm going to pay $1, I might as well pay $20.. it's the paying itself that puts me off. And at that rate, I'll just expect to get desperate, self-indulgent clone games from amateurs, not actual games.

Unless I get special handcrafted stuff from the games. It has to be more of a magazine to be worth it. With comics and pin-ups of sexy characters and stuff.

Actually, that makes a lot of sense. Most games make you the hero because it just makes for a more epic story. But why not have you start as a sidekick? The initial fetch stuff quests, the condoscending tutorials, bunny slaying... all that makes more sense as a sidekick.

Later on, some plot happens to make you split paths and turn you into the hero of the story.

If it seems overambitious, break it down. Usually you get overwhelmed when you don't know what to do next. Make a to do list. Every day, ask yourself what's the one thing you want to accomplish that day. You'll move faster than if you tried to do everything at once and froze your brain.

Don't force yourself to slam your head on it if you really don't want to. Figure out what's making this difficult. Resequence how you do things.

Personally, I've wasted years not finishing games, by doing waterfall-style programming (which is overwhelming and forces you to restart). Agile programming fixed everything.

Don't teach someone something that isn't immediately applicable.

Manuals and tutorials suck because they info dump things that the player doesn't need to know.

If you want to tutorial, give the player a problem, ask them to solve it with game mechanics, and only teach the controls only when needed. This is probably the #1 reason why casual games sell so well. Games like Evony introduced quests, but in order to solve those quests you needed to learn a basic game mechanic or so. Farmville and Bejeweled clones teach one game mechanic at a time, and give you a 'level' to mess around with it, until you're winning from your own effort. Candy Crush is a pretty damn difficult game, but a lot of non-gamers get into it because of the soft learning curve.

One of the most important things you can put in a game is early satisfaction. That's why a lot of casual game agencies (e.g. Big Fish) stick to some kind of 60 minute rule.. the demo has to get the player to buy the game after playing for only 60 minutes. If the player doesn't have fun by then (the main crime of tutorials), they'll quit and never look back. The hardcore have had fun with the genre before playing the game.

EDIT: Whoops, read the title as 'live of game development' rather than 'game design'.

Regardless, similar theory applies. You have to convince people that you're good, and convince the right people (i.e. someone with the money to hire you). Portfolio is a major thing, sometimes better to have a bunch of small games under your portfolio rather than one big one.

I was the content designer/writer for Dungeons of Fayte while working at Funcom for 5 years, but no, DoF gave us $0 obviously. I didn't post here then because it was mostly my husband who did (the programmer and system designer). So, answer there is to get a job at a big company.

Would not recommend getting a job at a big company. The bigger the company, the more it's about processes, and less about individual skill. Big companies may not have as much money, or will pay you according to "market rates", whereas smaller companies will likely pay a lot more because they're more desperate for employees.

Hack, Slash, Loot sold about 50,000 in it's first year. It's currently looking like a lot less than that for it's second year.

Wow... how'd you manage that? It looks like something that wouldn't appeal to a lot of people, especially with all the dungeon crawlers out there which are better developed in one way or another.

Roguelikes aren't really a niche thing. Diablo does much of the fun of the roguelike - random items, random enemies, bare basics storyline. Put on some good graphics and it's suddenly a mainstream genre.

A lot of people make the mistake of 'dumbing down' to appeal to casual gamers. The key to grabbing casual gamers is giving them fun within the first hour of the game. Slogging through a tutorial is as bad as forcing them to read a manual.

Just lead them through a 'rigged' dungeon crawl that highlights the fun features of the game. I think Fallout Tactics and many of the Final Fantasy games do a good job at getting into the meat of the game right from the start.

When a player picks up a potion, just give them some pop up telling them that the potion can either be drunk or thrown, but the only way to know what the effects are is with experimentation. Done. Pass down the information in as little time as possible.

Do a 80/20 analysis - 80% of the fun in your game is in 20% of the content. With roguelikes, it's about killing monsters, getting unique gear, getting surprises (vaults or mutations or other plot things), and epic deaths. Try to give players that stuff in as soon as possible. I'd recommend you skip things like potions in the first hour, and only introduce it much later on once they're comfortable with not dying.

Ha, just found some stuff in the Android code.
http://developer.android.com/reference/android/os/IBinder.html#LIKE_TRANSACTION
http://developer.android.com/reference/android/os/IBinder.html#TWEET_TRANSACTION

No good tablet games yet.

There are a few.

Gimme list of good android tablet games and I will make out with you

So I was wondering, is being a "programmer" becoming less and less important as these types of tools evolve? And if you identify as more of a designer-programmer than a designer-artist, will it be more beneficial in the long run to adapt to these tools? Or is it okay to still stick to your guns and approach game-making from a more hardcore coding angle?

What do you consider "being a programmer"?

I've moved from programming to food & beverage, and to be honest, I'm glad that I did programming first. Some people do liberal arts to improve their view on life... I think programming greatly improved my skills in everything.

You learn to prototype. You learn to go into a situation, not knowing anything, and actually finish the job. You learn how fucked up estimates get... and how to make more accurate estimates. Any startup business owner needs to know the value of a pivot: that moment when you realize, "Hey my business model sucks". Most programmers know how to fix things when a designed feature sucks, by pivoting away from the hole. Too many business grads will dig a deeper grave by throwing more money at the problem.

Everyone who's worked as a programmer for a few months knows the value of not making things perfect and actually finishing the damn job. Most people go through life never knowing this and never finishing anything.

You build more systematic methodologies. You learn to manage projects and people. Managing people is the hard part. If I was working in construction, I'd just yell at them or offer more money because labor is cheap and money is abundant. Programming isn't like that. Yell at people and they leave. Quite often you don't have money for incentives or they'd be able to make more money elsewhere. You learn to control people by guiding their internal motivations.

You also have the people who think that getting answers for google is bad and makes you stupid. Or using calculators. Anyone who's ever tried to finish anything doesn't care about looking stupid, they care about getting things done.

If I wanted to build an evil genius army, I would be hiring people from Stack Overflow or Github, because I know a lot of programmers have the mentality to be proactive and solve problems. Programming is not about optimizing compilers and memory usage, it's the art of solving problems.

i think a programming education can hurt in some places, though, in that it can make you prone to "academic" programming, where you pre-optimize bs that doesn't need it, wasting a ton of time. you sorta have to unlearn some of that, sometimes.

Premature optimization is universally recognized as bad practice, why would anyone teach it? Not wasting time like that is exactly what a good teacher would teach you as 'academic' programming.

They teach it because it's how mass production works. Time is not as scarce when you have 50+ programmers. Then you'd want people optimizing it early. For solo work, you don't actually want to do all that stuff, because nobody cares if your game is lagging by .04 seconds. It also saves a ton of time when you swap code between people, because nobody keeps the code in their heads.

Ebooks. Chatting on the internet while you're in bed and don't want a keyboard. No good tablet games yet. Most "tablet" games are just PC games ported to a smaller screen which aren't designed for touch screen interfaces.

What's the question?

I've worked with unpaid teams a lot. In fact, at one point, I was notorious for actually being able to pull off the vaporware idea guy role quite successfully.

The key is in giving everyone creative freedom. Intrinsic motivation is way, way more powerful than extrinsic motivation. So much so that I'm surprised that managers still exist. Wikipedia, Linux, jquery, joomla, Eclipse were built off volunteers.

There's a catch, though. People still need money. For unpaid projects, best bet is to build it as a hobby. Or use people who value the experience more than the money (teenagers, retirees, housewives, bored rich people)

Be fair. If you're making money, split it fairly. Split credit fairly. Most people are generous and don't really resent getting slightly less than they deserve. But everyone knows when one person is being greedy.

You do need a 'decision maker', though. Someone to have the final call when designs or direction conflict, and they need to be trustworthy enough by the whole group to override decisions. Authoritarianism is the best choice in small teams. Democracy is designed to limit the power of the leaders... if you have a democratic group, you simply have a team where nobody trusts each other.

Also wrote this which covers a lot of indie group management: http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=27653.0

In a sense. Quit to start an unrelated business. Someone offered to pay for some consulting, since I had some free time. Before I knew it, I was making over twice my previous salary, with plenty of lucrative job offers to turn down.

The indie life actually suits me a lot better. I find that I'm most efficient working 12-18 hours a day, 3 days a week. The momentum really picks up with time, but I'd need a lot of spare time to clear off the fatigue. Under those conditions, I could probably do a month's job in a week. But good luck trying to explain that to an employer or convince him that I should be in the office only 3 days a week.

Also, in app development, you have like a programmer, a designer, a couple of salespeople, and some senior/middle management guys. Maybe 2 programmers if you're doing something like a web app. The programmers and the designers are the real rockstars. The others are useful but have diminishing gains. Even if you ignore unfair pay distribution, the people who add to the costs of the app are the most expensive. Cut them out and you have a far cheaper app... which means that there are a hell lot more opportunities open. What's worse is that most app development groups often have teams of 2-3 people who accomplish less than a single skilled person.

With a typical company, a typical sized app might cost about $30k-50k. With a minimum sized indie group, more like $10-$20k (and the members get a bigger cut). You'll also find a lot more clients as it's easier to justify the costs.


Also, was going to give a bunch of tips but it would just echo what FamousAspect said.

Basically, you do need to know where the money is coming from, and at least have a bunch of numbers that support that, even if the numbers are biased. If you don't have the numbers, at least have enough cash on hand to survive if your hypotheses are false and your games flop.

I'd strongly recommend getting an alternative cash flow before quitting because games take a very long time to pay back. Buy some stocks in something, learn to play poker, join some multi level marketing scheme, sell some lemonade, marry a spouse with a salary.. whatever. Just make sure you have a way of living through a few years.

Ha, I was hoping for something more high level like a RPG maker/Adrift/AGS, but I'll take what I can get. Thanks for the suggestions.

I was already convinced. He was just the first guy who was good enough to make it that big.

we're all crazy cultists who are already convinced. but the spouse/parents/friends need convincing and it's so much easier when you have someone who made a bunch of millions to point to

i want to make a game but im not skilled in programming.

Programming is like learning an alphabet and communicating in writing.
Game Maker is like communicating by drawing pictures.

One is a lot faster to get into, but after a while, it gets really tiring. It's never easy to learn how to program... but you spent a few years learning to read and write, and you could learn to program just as well.


Also, it sounds like you're looking for RPG Maker. RPG Maker is definitely a nice place to start off... plenty of flexibility and smooths you into programming/scripting, but you can immediately start making stories and stuff if you want.

If you have something you want to do, figure out if it's possible to do it, and then do it.

Else browse around some of the collaboration forums, work with someone, get a little experience on how others did it. It's sometimes more fun to work in a group and you don't have to worry about the direction of the game or whatever - someone else is working on that.

A lot of people out there think the same way you do and like the same kinds of games. Find them and work with them.

Well, we could toss you a bunch of theory, but it's probably faster just to write a prototype of this and see what happens.

Not sure why you need such a complex system anyway. What's the goals of the system? Why do you need critical hits? How does different types of defenders improve the gameplay? Why do you even need to round the final damage?

Good systems should be designed with the resulting gameplay in mind, not putting together a bunch of arbitrary mechanics from other systems. You should chop out as many mechanics as possible because everything added is another factor to balance. What would go wrong if you simply did a basic hit point and damage system?