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[Snakey]

Hey guys,

So quite a few of us run game development business's and there are lots of you that are thinking of going in that direction. One of the things I've found out in the two years I've been running this business, is that stuff ups occur and that the best thing is to learn from them. However, sometimes its hard to know what will go wrong and I thought perhaps a thread where we openly talk about them would be a good learning experience for those who want to start up.

So I'll talk about my first big stuff up which almost killed my business.

Doing a game that you hate / don't understand
Towards the end of the year I was starting to run out of cash. One idea I had that we came up with was to try to make a "quick" game that we could start selling straight away. I came up with some quick 48 hour prototypes and we settled on making a match three game. I'm not a casual gamer, and thus I actually don't like match three games all that much but more importantly, I don't really understand them either. As in, I don't actually understand the appeal that occurs with them and why people pay for them.

After three months of development (300% estimated overtime!) I winded up with

.

I had spent money on music and sound effects. The music was great and spot on, since a good friend of mine created this for me. The sound effects was not very good however.

In total, I had spent about $2000USD making this game. At the end of it all, it wasn't really that good of a game. There were some decent ideas presented in the game, but they weren't really great with the match three game type according to my play testers.

It was a really expensive lesson to learn!

[MrGando]

Sorry to hear that, but it's a good story. I think the idea of making a quick game is not a bad one though, but I think you should pick a theme/style you are used to, or you like at least.

Thanks for sharing your experience.

 

[Snakey]

No problems, I have plenty of stories which I'll tell in the next few weeks. Certainly putting out quick games is not a bad idea, but I choose a game style that I didn't know much about; nor appreciate. Because of that, I couldn't really innovate beyond what I saw on YouTube or from the demo's that I played ... which results in a bad game.

[bateleur]

Biggest mistake I ever made was a marketing error. Way back before everything was internet-based some friends and I released a game by getting a demo onto a magazine coverdisk and then selling the full version. The idea was, a brief review of the game together with upgrade info would appear in the same issue...

...of course what happened is that the demo made the disk but the magazine didn't end up containing the upgrade info. We'd left it in a text file in the game folder as well, but most users didn't find that. It should, of course, have been clearly visible on screen somewhere in-game.

[Snakey]

Ouch! It's always the small problems like that, that make the whole point of doing something almost more annoying than beneficial. I imagine that the users who told you that they couldn't find the information were the ones who were really enjoying the game and wanted more ... but those that didn't tell you (which could have been potential customers) just went 'meh' and moved on.

[MrGando]

Biggest mistake I ever made was a marketing error. Way back before everything was internet-based some friends and I released a game by getting a demo onto a magazine coverdisk and then selling the full version. The idea was, a brief review of the game together with upgrade info would appear in the same issue...

...of course what happened is that the demo made the disk but the magazine didn't end up containing the upgrade info. We'd left it in a text file in the game folder as well, but most users didn't find that. It should, of course, have been clearly visible on screen somewhere in-game.

Wow , not nice.

Thanks for sharing your experience.

[Farmergnome]

Some of my fuckups have been being too over-commited to a project, like outworking the hours of the rest of the team and sort of having to come to some middle ground about what scale the end title should be, usually after alot of time and maybe some $ has been invested  I guess not everyone has the same devotion/motivation to making games, so yea, that seems to be my repeating fuckup in the past... finding people on the same wavelength I guess.

[Snakey]

Failing to ask why
Everybody says "Make a small game, something like Tetris or Pong", but it's really easy to fall into the trap of making a large game without knowing it.

In one of my earlier projects, it was just a top down 2D shoot 'em up. Nothing terribly complex. But what took a lot of time was making the engine and editor for "everyone". It happened so slowly that so much time was lost that I hadn't even realized.

I've been told that if you want to cook frogs, you put them into cold water and then slowly bring up the temperature. Thus, the frog doesn't even realize that it's in trouble before it's too late.

So the specific failure here, was understanding and asking why I kept missing deadlines. When a deadline was missed, all I did was push the deadline further away. So a deadline of mid March, just became mid April. But I never sat down and asked myself "Why are these deadlines being missed?", "Why is development going so slow?", "Why are there things stopping production?".

Because of this, I was slowly heading into the danger zone without even realizing what was going on. While I had a perfect texture importer, nice editor tool set I hadn't even started on the game yet!

So, now when I set dead lines and I miss them; I start asking myself questions.

"Why is this late?"
"I didn't have time to do the actual programming"
"Why didn't I have time?"
"I had to do x, y, z"
"Is the project actually viable with the time you do have?"
"Mmm, maybe the idea is too large..."

In general, you should always be asking lots of questions, especially "Why?". It helps a lot. "Why do I need to use this technology?", "Why do I need to set the price so low?", "Why do I want to do this game?"...