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[GeoffW]

That's nice I hope sales are quite higher than my commercial shoot'em up game (Clean'Em Up) Hope sales go higher as its an amazing game

Hi - Clean'Em Up looks really nice, but I know there are a lot of other pretty 2D shooters.  I wonder if that's the main reason you're struggling?

[GeoffW]

It's about time I posted what I've been up to since the Megamort release.  I've had coverage from several sites especially indiegames.com (twice), plus I believe some reviews of the new content are in the works.  The game's selling much better but I'm still not exactly making a fortune (or indeed a living).  The thing now is to decide whether to do any ports (an iOS version has been requested many times) or get on with my next project.

[amidos2006]

That's nice I hope sales are quite higher than my commercial shoot'em up game (Clean'Em Up) Hope sales go higher as its an amazing game

Hi - Clean'Em Up looks really nice, but I know there are a lot of other pretty 2D shooters.  I wonder if that's the main reason you're struggling?

Yup the main reason that people judge the game as another 2D shooter without even trying the demo (the game is different in lot of ways that traditional 2D shooters) but when they saw neon graphics and explosions they thought its just a rip off Geometry wars

[starsrift]

This is a great devlog, probably because it is unusual. Thanks, GeoffW.

[GeoffW]

Time for another quick update:

• Sales have remained steady since the Megamort expansion release.  This is quite different to the initial release, where sales spiked but faded quite rapidly afterwards.
• I'm in Little Big Bunch 2!  This has reminded me that I should get around to approaching some other indie bundles after Christmas.
• I've decided not to port to iOS, Android, Windows RT or Mac, or to localize the game.  All of these have been suggested to me at some point by someone, and there are good reasons why they might work out (especially the iOS port) but I'm not confident and I'd rather get on with my next project.

I'm planning to move house after Christmas (to Yorkshire) and sadly I probably won't have as much time to devote to indie game development for a while.  I should get around to concluding this thread next year though, with some graphs and numbers that I'm sure many of you will be interested in.

[GeoffW]

I just want to quickly mention, for the benefit of anyone following this thread, that I'm currently trying to organize a co-operative indie weekend sale over on the Business forum.  If you're selling an indie game directly from your web site, you should get involved!

[GeoffW]

It's currently the last day of a half price weekend sale I'm running (26th, 27th Jan).  This seems to have gone down well on reddit and a few other places around the web, I've got lots of extra traffic to my site and I've sold a bunch more copies of the game.

While I'm on the subject - I've had a noticeably higher baseline amount of traffic / customers ever since the IGF finalists were announced (7th Jan), it's not direct traffic from the igf.com site but the correlation is clear.  This is despite not making it as a finalist or honorable mention in any category (unfortunately), so I guess the IGF must be doing it's job of stirring up interest / discussion about the games!

One last thing - I'm doing a reddit AMA right now, not sure if this is really going to take off but feel free to head over and ask me some questions if you read this soon after I post it.  Or you can post questions on this thread any time.

[GeoffW]

This week The Trouble With Robots has had something of a second wind on IndieGameStand.  For those of you who don't know, this is a 'pay what you want' site that offers a single game for sale (not a bundle) every four days.  They seem to put quite a bit of effort into attracting a good audience and I'm thrilled to have made over 900 sales, with 15 hours to go!

Naturally, because most people only pay $1.50 or so this isn't exactly going to reverse my fortunes.  But it was well worth the effort and it's great to see so many people enjoying the game for the first time.  I've also got a few new pieces of fan mail.

Anyway, if you're in a similar situation to me, I couldn't recommend it more!

[GeoffW]

The Trouble With Robots has been out for a while now, and whilst I've written plenty about it in this DevLog I feel I've been a little shy in the way of hard numbers.  And that's a shame - one of the things I love about the indie game development community is that we help each other out when we can, we share information, and we generally ignore the dog-eat-dog nonsense that seems to characterize the corporate world.

With that said, here is the first of my three part mini postmortem:

The Numbers

To date The Trouble With Robots has sold:

• 134 copies directly through the Digital Chestnut web site.
• 1,017 copies in the IndieGameStand deal.

The total takings were $1,686.47 directly (of which I get around 90%) and you can see on the IndieGameStand site that I made $1,472.28 there (the actual figure is slightly different due to the effects of the 3 game bundle option, and I get 70% of it).  I also sold through Get Games, including the Little Big Bunch 2 bundle, GamersGate and Arcade Town but I'm not at liberty to share those figures here.  I will say that Get Games were particularly helpful, but none of these places are likely to make you wealthy on their own.

Here is a rough graph to illustrate how it played out:



The blue line is visits to the web site, whereas the red line is direct sales over the nearly nine months it's been since launch.  Note that there was actually a massive sales spike during IndieGameStand which would easily go off the top of this graph if I'd included those figures as well as direct sales.

Later today I'll post part two, detailing a few of my development mistakes...

[GeoffW]

Development

As you can see from my last post, the game hasn't been much of financial success especially considering it took ~1.5 years to finish.  This was way over my planned six months to a year, and looking back I've identified three main reasons why it took so long:

1. I took on a lot of tasks that could have been contracted out - for example sound effects and marketing.  Even engine development can be thought of as part of this category since I could have used a 3rd party engine instead of bringing my own tech up to scratch - though I don't think these things actually save as much time in the end as people like to assume.  The upside of all of this extra work is that I kept my costs down and I learned a bunch of new skills along the way - therefore I don't actually consider this strategy to have been a mistake.

The major exception was art, which I did contract out as I knew my own work wouldn't be to a high enough standard.

2. I made an original game.  I'd have spent far less time designing and iterating features and possibly had more success if I'd decided to do a clone or near-clone of an existing computer game.  I'm not sure whether to consider this a sad fact about the state of originality in the games industry, or the simple result of a disconnect between my own priorities and what gamers are really looking for (you can post your thoughts below).

3. I made a quality product.  The game is relatively well balanced.  The cards are diverse.  The graphics are varied.  The AI is solid.  It runs well on old machines.  It supports different resolutions and wide screen displays.  Load times were optimised.  The music loops seamlessly.  And so on... all of these things take time to do right.


Was time spent improving load times and performance well spent?

In retrospect, despite trying to be realistic about the time it would take I still took on too much work.
 

[GeoffW]

Lessons Learned

The biggest problem with The Trouble With Robots has been getting people to understand what it is in the first place.  It's quite a unique game, kind of hard to explain even to a gamer and that unfortunately made it difficult to sell.  I've already said that I think I'd have done better by making a game which is just like your favourite game of the genre plus killer feature X or clever twist Y.  Or alternatively a game that fulfills a desire players already have.  Even within indie games, popular sub-genres have emerged and I'd have been wise to entice their ready audiences.

People don't play demos as much as they used to.  I believe more people impulse bought The Trouble with Robots on IndieGameStand for a dollar or two than ever played the free demo.  This is amazing and it's a relatively new phenomenon.  I think the way people make sub $5 buying decisions is very different to what we as an industry are used to.

Graphics have been a difficulty - for an indie on a small budget like me, it's possible to make a game with appealing graphics by carefully designing the art style.  I regret not thinking about this more carefully.

Finally, I suspect, to be successful your story needs to go viral - I mean the story of your game, what it is and how it came to be.  Think about how to present yourself in an interesting way so that people might want to get behind you.  All the effort you put into courting reviewers, building Facebook pages and so forth doesn't mean squat compared to one good viral story.

Final Words

Despite my failure (financially speaking), I did manage to complete and release a game and I had a great time doing it.  I want to thank everybody who helped me along the way.  I'm back in full time employment right now, but I'm bursting with more ideas than ever before - you will hear from me again.

[tlark]

Wow amazing that was an amazing read. I am just beginning to crank up marketing on my CCG (with drawing). Your much better looking game and lack of financial success makes me a little nervous. On the otherhand our game is online, I dunno how much having to install and being on a desktop hurt you. In my mind the packaged software is a little old skool. Anyway. I'll keep all my numbers and we can have a compare!

[GeoffW]

On the otherhand our game is online, I dunno how much having to install and being on a desktop hurt you. In my mind the packaged software is a little old skool. Anyway. I'll keep all my numbers and we can have a compare!

I've had similar thoughts about download vs online, though mostly relating to (possible) future projects.  If you're online it should also be much easier to support different platforms (e.g. mobile) which could work out well for you.  Good luck!

[silversteez]

Kind of new here...been lurking. Finally registered to thank you for making this thread! Very cool, man. Lots of great info.

Thank you, sir.

[GeoffW]

I just want to let anyone who's still following this thread know that Art Castle have been busy creating an iOS version of The Trouble With Robots.  It's due to be launched on the App Store this Thursday (27th of November).

Mobile version official web site: http://www.troublewithrobots.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ArtCastleHK
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ArtCastleHK

Please support them on Thursday if you've been waiting for an iOS release as I know many people have.



From the point of view of this thread this is a very interesting time.  I've heard from many sources that competition on iOS is very tough, but Art Castle seem to be doing an excellent job and digital CCGs have been rising in popularity since the PC release (just look at Hearthstone...).  Let me know if you have any thoughts or questions and I will of course keep you updated.

[Netsu]

Thanks a lot for this thread, it was a great read and will definitely help me with marketing my game if I ever finish it

[Dewfreak83]

This may have been the most interesting and useful blog I've read on here yet - thanks for all your words of wisdom!

Good luck on your future work!

[GeoffW]

It's out on the app store now.

Early indications are promising, I gather play-asia.com sent an e-mail about the game to a large mailing list, which is something I never really had access to for the PC launch.  At least one person I know found out about the game this way before I had told them about it myself!

It also currently has a 5 star app store rating, though whether it manages to hold on to that after the free launch period is yet to be seen.

[GeoffW]

We launched on iOS with a high risk strategy - the first chapter's free, whereas the second and third are paid, and all chapters were free for the first two days as a launch promotion.  The game rose up the charts during these days and the free promotion seems to have generated a lot of good will - but we didn't hit the (crucial?) top 10 in any of the charts (we reached #46 in iPhone Card Games, for example).  Intuitively I feel this risky strategy probably did pay off, it just didn't pay off enough.  In the high noise iOS world we might've been dead in the water without it.

Since then our chart position has been in decline.  This is despite a nice review from Touch Arcade, holding on to a 5 star rating on the App Store, and praise from users everywhere I've looked.  It just doesn't seem to be enough.  Apparently we're a

.

Hopefully the Art Castle team have some plans to rejuvenate awareness, and in case case there's the upcoming Android launch to look forward to.  I'm not really sure what to expect.  I don't know the Android app world at all.

[Scullywen]

Hi there! This is Mariela from the ArtCastle team. Just wanted to keep you updated about Trouble With Robots on mobile. Like GeoffW said, the feedback from the first days on iOS was very encouraging for us: we'll preparing more updates to keep the game fresh and alive. It'd be a great help if any of you guys play and say some nice words about us! .

The Android version will be released very soon. Probably on the first week of February. I'll come here and tell you when we have a fixed date; I feel you deserve to know, given the support you gave to GeoffW in the past with The Trouble With Robots. I read the entire thread, and there are really interesting pieces of advice for anyone here to learn (including me!).

Please allow me a little spam now xD (just a little bit!): we've opened our social media profiles and I want to invite you to connect there, if you wish to follow our news:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/troublewithrobotsgame
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWR_game
And our website, of course: www.troublewithrobots.com