I built games full time for about five years, straddling the transition into smartphones.

Building a mobile game that is profitable is a bit like the lottery. You need to build something great to have a chance of winning, but building something great is not a guarantee that you will win. I realize that goes for most business ventures, but I think it is more true for mobile games than most.

What captures the imagination of an audience is in large part a guessing game and a matter of luck. You can look at past successes as a demonstration of that. Flappy Bird was a hit for a bit but it wasn't exactly clear what was so different about it than so many before. Angry Birds started an insane franchise, but I'm not sure if the same game were launched today whether it would capture the same share of the market. It is just really really ephemeral.

But making games is fun, like really fun! I had more fun in those years than I have at any other point in my career. We were banging out a game a month and having a blast doing it. This was very early so we knew there was audience enough for each of those to pay the bills, but I wouldn't count on that these days.

So all of that to say, do it! But don't expect to pay the bills doing it. Maybe you will, maybe you won't, but it is very much either rags or riches with very little predictability on where you arrive.

I should add that we decided to stop doing this when we realized we were now playing the lottery for a living. We had a few times where we got featured in stores and made thousands a day but didn't take off from there and that was that for that title.

If I can offer any advice it is to focus on simple mechanics and keep production costs way down. Don't spend more than three months on launching your first title.

When reviewing the history of ID Software I came upon an interesting fact: Back in Softdisk, i.e. before ID was a thing, the team managed a product called "Gamer's Edge", which is a bi-monthly subscription service (people nowadays would love the idea) that gave players two full games and a bunch of other smaller tools.

I'm wondering if indie teams should more or less do the same if they are not eyeing big hits, which few managed to pull off. Two months might be too stingy, but with the engine and tools built it might not be impossible to pull off a by quarter subscription?

That's anninsane schedule that cannot be pulled off with today's audience expectations.

The main creator of the 10mg collection was on the Eggplant Show recently and talked about releasing games quarterly and how unsustainable that is.

Yeah agreed it's too fast. Back in 90s there was way less demand on resources.

I'm following the Sokpop collective, they are 4 developers that have committed to releasing 2 games per month. The main source of income seems to be Patreon subscriptions, but games also get released on Steam.

Every one game is quirky, vibrant and fun. For few of them I was disappointed that devs moved on instead of continuing working to bring out the potential, but after a while they would return to same concept and release a sequel.

Wow I never heard about them, that's awesome! Immedaitely browsing their webpage...

Funny how "lottery" is the word that comes out the most when we talk about making games for a living.

Big studios solve this by publishing games by the hundreds.

Right. Ya, in truth I think the big studios were all built off a single hit. And those hits keep paying out for a long time and they leverage either the brand to build sequels or just start stringing out new titles hoping another will "hit". Cross-marketing is huge too.

You can be successful building mobile games, just like you can win the lottery. :)

This sounds a lot like book publishing

While I agree that making games in general is a bit of crapshoot, I think that there is a way that you can increase your chance of success. Based on what I understand from creating businesses in general.

If you target a specific group people initially, and make something 'for them'. As one of them. You place yourself in a much greater position to succeed than if you had simply made a game in the abstract in the terms of who it is for.

A great example of this is the FIFA franchise. And most of the football related franchises for that matter. It seems like if you meet the criteria of making a great game, as the OP has stated, failing within these categories is in some ways, harder than succeeding.

Speaking from many, many years of experience:

Cash is king. Nothing is more important than cash flow. A runway is not a development budget -- it is a loan in the form of opportunity cost. Always look for income at all times. And never, ever borrow money for the project.

Regarding people, keep active contacts with other people. Do not shelter behind closed doors. The world moves quickly, and if your team withdraws into its own bubble for 12 months, when you emerge you will find the world to be very different.

Regarding tech, Unity will work better than Unreal because a small team needs to reduce technical overhead as much as possible.

Regarding gameplay, favor simplicity over complexity.

Regarding art, maintain a cohesive and unique style across all elements of design.

Regarding players, start looking for them from day 1. It takes a long time and a lot of work to build a following. And remember, the players are not your customers -- they are your new boss.

As a just average Joe gamer, art style makes or breaks a game. If you pick a style, stay with it. Indie games like stardew, skullgirls, don't starve, papers please, punch club, and darkest dungeon all proved graphics don't sell games, especially on mobile. If anything word of mouth has probably helped most of those. But mostly, the art style is visually appealing and doesn't look like lazy garbage.

More actionable, the choice of colors and their combinations is the key ingredient for cohesive and tight art direction. Pixel art, vector art, low-poly 3D - they all rely more on good colors than on shapes.

It's quite hard to pick each color from color picker wheel and ending up with something decent. Much better approach is to use pre-assembled palettes like ones on lospec.com/palette-list collection. My favorite versatile palette is edg32, but others will work better for certain moods. Working with more than 30-is colors requires experience and patience.

These guidelines can help to build something that catches attention, and assets tend to be simpler and easier to iterate on.

All sound advice, from what I can tell.

Regarding your profile, when I read it I feel like I am already in the middle of a game.

I used to work for Zynga. My advice is to think about how you'll gain users. The mobile gaming world is basically user arbitrage. You buy users (via the ads market) for X, and if you make more than X, you print money. It's helpful to find a creative that gets clicks for cheaper than the rest of the market. Eg. if your ads have slots machines, then it costs $25 to acquire a user. If you find some niche, like cool cars in your ads, maybe you can spend a lot less to get users. I'd recommend testing your ads before even starting on coding a game, test out a few different branding concepts. Really successful mobile gaming companies have a tight loop between their ads and game development. It's important to get quick feedback and see how new game features affect user retention and spending habits. Note, all of this costs money! Do you have a marketing budget to acquire users.

What not to do: spend a year coding a game in your basement, then "release" it and hope it grows from word of mouth. Those days are long gone.

Maybe that's the 'most sure' way to generate money from games, but in my opinion most of those games are bland and generic. Maybe you just want money and don't care about who will play your game, but hard-core optimising your ad-gamedesign loop means losing a lot of the opportunities for fun and less traditional designs.

Absolutely. Art vs. business. If you're happy painting a masterpiece even if nobody sees it, then you only really need advice on how to make beautify art.

I think most artists want an audience, and that requires skills on the business side. Having a successful business also pays to create more art. I can't help you there!

If you look at the app store top 100, there aren't that many "fun" or original games up there. There's even a tonne of idle click games! I think one thing that's important to recognize is that most people playing mobile games don't see the experience as a 'game'. It's more of a passive ride to distract themselves for a few minutes. Idle click games aren't fun in a traditional sense, but they have isolated a reward feedback loop in your brain and serve some function to make its users enjoy the experience.

I didn't work at Zynga on game design, so I'm not here to defend corporate mobile game design. However, I don't want to knock the business side of things too much either. I learned there's a ton of creativity in creating new hooks and game modes to increase engagement/spending. Games constantly riff off each others game loops and it's a very quickly evolving field. There's also lots of room for creativity in making successful advertising campaigns.

Someday if you feel like shooting the breeze about business, I would love to chat with you. Email in profile.

This has to be one of the best first posts ever.

I don’t want to discourage you, and I have never built a game myself, but I have heard a lot of horror stories from small shops to large shops. If you were my friend I would recommend you read about the failures of others before you and how to avoid them. I would recommend you use lean startup principles so that you get something into users’ hands ASAP. Maybe give yourself a short deadline, like 1-3 months, and say you HAVE to have a public demo by then so users can begin telling you what works and what doesn’t.

Good luck! You have a great runway if you’re able to avoid common pitfalls. And even if you never make enough money you (probably) can get another software job easily.

Agreed on the lean startup principles/short deadline. You've got to get something into the hands of users as soon as possible. You might also want to consider doing some design up front and making a landing page. Perhaps you can gauge interest that way and receive feedback.

That guy completely relied on the financial support of his girlfriend for years. I think he did some odd jobs here and there, but mostly he was just working on the game not making any income. Obviously for that game it paid off in spades, as they were millionaires pretty much overnight once it was released, but that won't be the case for every game, or in fact most games, and it's not something you should ask of your significant other most times.

I've worked on eight titles professionally working for game companies that never made the money spent developing them. It's a hit driven industry and there's no guarantees, unless you hit on an untapped market with a lot of pent up demand for something (like Natsume had been dropping the ball and releasing garbage Harvest Moon sequels for over a decade at that point, Stardew Valley came along and showed them what the fans actually wanted). Even then it's still not a guarantee.

I'm out of the video game industry now, but still work on my own games, but it's only a few hours a week here and there. I've had some success over the years, but not enough to justify asking my wife to let me quit my job and do it full time.

I didn't know that part about his girlfriend. I've had a hard time finding info on what he did.

But I wasn't suggesting that it's a "good" way to make it. I just said it's something to do to help.

There's a chapter about Stardew Valley's development in the book Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, that's how I knew about it. It's a good book and a pretty easy read. I appreciated seeing the process of how other companies and indie developers work.

From what I read in Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, he’s kind of a case study in what NOT to do. I’m very glad Stardew Valley ended up being a commercial success, but if I were his friend at any point in his process I would’ve tried to get him to get something into the users’ hands immediately.

Yes, that chapter reads like the postmortem of a failed project, except it all somehow works out in the end. It’s a fascinating story but I’m not sure what lesson to take from it.

the lesson is that there's no recipe for success. every success is blazing their own way, and for anyone trying, they too, will need to blaze their own trail.

Try working on the game 20 hours a week while keeping your job. If you truly love the concept and love working on it while still working full time, that'd be a good sign to potentially scale it up with your full 60-80 hours you'll be spending.

Have you ever done this though? This is how I started and progress was impossibly slow.

At some point you’re just draining yourself of every spare hour, you’re underperforming at your day job, and you’re not really moving forward.

It’s ok to do for a month or so as a litmus test, but after that I fully support diving in full time (in full knowledge that there’s a 95% chance you’ll fail).

You can always get another job.

A lot of entrepreneurs have to bootstrap this way. I personally don't have interest in starting my own business. However, I have played music intensely for years while studying and working. It's do-able, you just have to have the passion and dedication in your off-time that overcomes tiredness. If you can't do it while fully employed with benefits, if you don't have the devotion then, how will you with even less structure and when finances start running tight?

This might be ideal, but some people would not have the energy to do that much work in a week, and since the OP has a 12-18 month runway and probably can get another software job easily and quickly should they need to, it doesn’t feel as necessary in this case. But I do agree in general, and it would be wonderful to never dip into savings at all.

I'd agree with this, as someone that is doing this (though have no intention to leave my job). WFH has made it easier than ever to find the time, which admittedly isn't easy, but turning it into a grand life decision does make for a convenient excuse to put off just sitting down and starting it

this is the best advice here

this

Random thoughts from a solo game developer:

- Validate the idea. Try building a prototype and verifying your idea before comitting to it. You'll learn a lot about whether your game idea is fun/can be made fun, and learn the ropes of your new dev environment in a way that'll let you throw away your early code with no regrets.

- Pick Unity if you don't have experience with either. You'll get to results faster, and at solo dev scale, the quality Unreal offers won't matter.

- If you've decided on a mobile game, do some research on how effective monetization on mobile works, come to terms with how bad the options are and decide if you're still into it

- Runway seems OK for what you're doing, but word of advice: it is mentally taxing to some people to be in financial "freefall". I know this hit me hard when I made a similar decision to yours.

That said, there are a lot of good parts as well. Seeing people play and enjoy your brainchild is definitely more rewarding than working somebody else's startup or company, and as a venue for creativity, game development is hard to beat for somebody with a programmer skillset.

I wrote a game with a friend early on for the App Store. I second the notion of validation. It's great you have a friend who can design graphics for the game, but prototype and test the basic mechanics before you get too wrapped up in the appearance. Using simple placeholders will speed up your iteration as you refine the mechanics. I spent a lot of time writing a vector graphics layer (this was in the days of iOS 2), and while it was very cool, it took a lot of time that could probably have been better spent trying experiments with the basic gameplay. The game was not a big success.

A. Talk is cheap. Be aware with who you align with as you will probably learn the hard way that people's actions and words aren't always the same.

B. Cashflow coming in immediately is super rare. However you distribute or make a deal, it easily takes 1 month to actually see the real, usable money. I've had a lot of deals that were "ready to go" and still took about 2 to 3 months to finalize.

C. Your mental health is your most prized, valuable possession. Avoid burnout. Sleep regularly and well. Stay to a schedule. Eat healthy. Exercise. Do not work more than 10 hours a day, no matter how badly you want to. That 18 hour sprint means you'll work 40% efficiency the next day. Plus you risk burnout. One day off a week minimum devoted 100% to fun and/or relaxing.

D. Organize and learn you will be juggling short, mid and long term goals. Dont sacrifice one too much for the others. Find balance.

E. Dont bite off more than you can chew or be too ambitious. Yes, ambition is good, but you're juggling high risk. If you make an easier game 1 to do that extends your dev time by another year in cash flow, game 2 could be grander than your current vision. Plus you have experience to help you. You might be better off build 2 to 4 smaller games that help you build cash flow and experience that all give you the skills to tackle your dream project with precision.

F. Theres a lot of shitty advice on the internet. In the end, trust your hard earned experiences over someone else's "never did it" bullshit.

Good luck.

I would highly recommend you not quit but perhaps see if there are any more flexible working arrangements you can come to with your current employer.

Perhaps you can go part time or take 3 or 6 month (unpaid) leave?

I wish you all the best whatever you choose to do. Make sure you post an update when you have something to show.

Also maybe go the 'devlog' route and document the process on YouTube and Twitch as those are pretty popular right now and is a good way to gauge interest and feedback for "free".

If he's not too tied to his job, leaving and finding another one in 6 months shouldn't be a big issue. Whenever I start looking, it takes me around a month to get a new gig.

This is not a normal time though and who knows what the job market for OP's area will look like. Potentially there will be lots of people looking at not too many open positions.

I work in a mobile gaming development house, so maybe I can share my 2 cents.

From the look of it, the landscape of mobile gaming is pretty competetive nowadays. I'm not sure which genre you are targeting, but from what you are describing I think it's a casual game? I strongly recommend Deconstructor of Fun to you as it covers mobile gaming pretty extensively and we have been using it for industry information from day zero. Subscribe to the newsletter and try to figure out the landscape for your genre, and see where you can find an edge.

That said, unless you have been going through a full scale mobile gaming dev from begining to end, you might overlook some aspects. For example, you didn't mention method of marketing (but do have a market target), but that's one of the key areas that contribute to the success of a mobile game (and pretty much every indie game), and could be pretty expensive if you go through some channels.

Another thing to think is how easy it is for others to copy your game. It's almost fair practice that companies start copying other games, not only the gameplay flow, but even the look and style of it. Big companies do that as well, so be careful.

Your financial looks good, 12-18 months should be good (I'd target for 2 years though), and about the engine, we are using Unity, but I guess it depends on the project and your experience. If you think the gae won't have top graphics and you don't have a solid C++ background, maybe Unity is easier?

I wish you the best of luck but… I strongly urge you to keep your job.

Don't quit your job. At least not until after you actually have a playable game. It always takes way longer than you think it will. You're going to want your day job so you can bootstrap the game development.

As for engine, Unity if you know C#, Unreal if you prefer C. Unity if you like documentation, Unreal if the lack of documentation doesn't deter you. Unreal has a better networking stack.

just don't.

i wasted 18 months on creating a game. it was an awful time with millions of boring-but-necessary tasks and sales on mac+linux+windows were basically zero.

if i had a time-machine, this would be the one decision i'd reverse.

Is your game for sale or available? I'm releasing my first game now and am curious to see examples of negative results -- since all I ever see are positive results.

Don’t you appreciate the knowledge and experience you have now though? I’d never consider that a waste.

Don't make the mistake of dismissing game design. Spend way more time than you think is proper on non-digital paper prototypes and greybox digital prototypes. Get your half-baked games in front of people and watch where and how they struggle, get bored, have fun, lose interest, etc.

All the best engineering, art, audio, marketing, and polish in the world won't make a game more fun. Stickiness comes from game design and game design comes from iteration.

Adding to parent, the premise of your game is very hard to change after you've started. You will think of new ideas that you will have to axe as you progress, so get a non-digital prototype you know has appeal. It will keep you on track.

Whatever you decide to build, make sure to get people playing your game as soon as possible. Don't wait until some specific milestone, show it to people immediately.

The biggest mistake that people make is waiting too long before showing people what they are doing, and after they put in months of effort they are disappointed that nobody seems to care about their stuff.

If you can't find someone who will play your really rough first proof of concept, then you probably won't find people who will play the finished game either.

(Also, just because someone will try one version of the game, doesn't mean they'll be your beta tester for ever. You'll need to find new people to try your game all the time. If your game is good it should get easier.)

So, I am one of the cofounders of Kidoteca, where we got some family members to invest and we released a bunch of games.

1. Kidoteca never turned a profit, mind you over time the revenue is not terrible, but investors lost their money basically, games are still for sale and still generating revenue but too slowly to be useful.

2. Many bigger investors are wary of supporting such business, because they got scammed (games in general have some fraud here and there, mobile game industry, has rampant fraud, IP theft, actual physical stuff theft, and a bunch of other crimes, corruption, government espionage... it is just nuts).

3. If you still want to try anyway, knowing all that... there is a whole industry named "hypercasual" games, where you create a simple game, and publish through some platforms, and if the game is successful, they help you spread it further and share the revenue with you.

4. DO NOT attempt to make PC/console-style games on mobile, you will lose money, people that want "real" games do it on a Switch or PC or a Dingoo (a cheap mobile console from Korea) and so on.

5. As much as I wish selling games directly were a good business model on mobile, it isn't, people just want free stuff, so you have to rely on freemium or ads, sadly for Kidoteca case both of these models are terrible considering our target market (kids below 6). One of our competitors that had success, did so by having the game be the advertising in first place, ie: the game purpose is make the brand known, and then they get money selling cartoons, toys, t-shirts, etc...

How do you plan to execute better than your competition? Keep in mind, any great game idea you have will be instantly poached by others who know how to execute quickly.

Game publishing is a numbers game. Most games go unnoticed, very few will break even, only "lottery winners" will make real money. The stores are full of well executed games with original ideas that you/we never heard about and never will. Games in page 1 of each category will make money, then there is those from page 2 to 10000.

We've spend a year and a half building a game that made us just over $1000. You increase your odds by having a name in the industry: known game designer, known franchise, known publisher, something that will put you in the front page of gaming websites for a few hours, but even that is just a push, no guarantees. You can also go for a quantitative strategy: build lot of small simple games. This last strategy worked better for us.

Make sure you take this decision knowing that failing is by far the most likely outcome. That's the hard truth about the game industry.

Sorry if those are not the encouraging words you hoped.

Best advice I got in a similar situation:

Don't plan to do any work in the first month.

I ended up doing a ton of cleaning / organizing my apartment. Straightened out finances. Started journaling. Tried things like taking freakishly long walks.

After a month I not only felt ready to work, but also that I had prepped a lot of useful habits!

Tell your friend in design they aren't allowed to create any original content. They have to do everything using stock or readily available material. Build a proto. If the proto has any legs or fun, you've got something. You don't need to quit your job to know this yet.

You might want to watch this for inspiration: Short Hike Post-mortem (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZW8gWgpptI8) about single developer struggles. Of course, this is one of successful stories, so your mileage might (and will) vary. Give yourself tight deadlines and see if you can stick to them. Do not be afraid to bail out early, if you see that game development is not working out. I'd suggest keeping your daily job until you at least have minimal working prototype of your game and get positive feedback.

As for games on mobile platforms, be prepared if you will create something new and unique - it will have dozen of clones on day three after launch.

You'll only know if you can succeed if you try.

Even if you do succeed, expect growth to take 1000x more energy/focus/time than you realize. How will you get your game to stand out? Organic growth is like planting a seed. It grows slowly. But within a couple of years you'll have a tree.

When I launched my side project I had this dream of hundreds of people signing up within the first days/weeks. In reality, 1 person did. Who cancelled a few days later. However I'm now 3+ years into it and it provides for me and my loved ones.

Also... be prepared for a lot of mental games. Thoughts like "what am I doing?", "you're going to fail", etc. Being on your own takes a mental toughness I never imagined.

Decide what your monetisation strategy is. Lots of people say they don't want to "pump money" from customers, bit you do need a way of making money, and if most of your customers will give you very little / no money, some customers are going to have to give you a lot.

I would personally recommend ruthless simplicity. Particularly on mobile (other than gatcha), most of the most popular games are fairly simple, but polished to a shine. Extra features won't help attract players, and anything that puts people off in the first 5 minutes of play is a disaster. No-one likes a 10 minute intro, that explains 20 different things to them.

Spend more time than you think to think about how to deliver your games to customers. I don't mean the app-store, but how to get them interested in the game so they open their app-store and actually search for your game. Do you have a community or some other channel of communication for involving people in your game?

The 1 hardest thing about making games is making a game that's so good and fun that people will not only look at it, but also download, play and keep playing it. The other 1 hardest thing is getting people to even look at that, even if you give it away for free without ads.

Most small businesses fail. Are you okay if that happens?

Absolutely, I know my odds of failing are above 95% but also know that the odds of learning and having fun is 100%

Good luck! I hope your dreams come true.

- Do not fall in love with any ideas. Once you have a couple of people play-test something, if it doesn't appear to be fun, be ready to discard it. A lot of things sound good in theory but generally don't work in practice. Some things will work with some changes but you should always be ready to let go of something and move on.

- For gameplay, keep the implementation as simple as possible. It might be tempting to implement a "generic/abstract" idea of something to get a clever implementation which works for many cases (which do not yet exist). Please think about the kind of bugs the resulting complexity could cause and whether they would be a pain to debug. Simplicity of implementation also makes it easy to refactor it later if you feel that it needs to be changed.

- Do not underestimate the work that goes into "finishing" the product. Once you have the basic concepts of the game working, you'll need stuff like UI, save/load/replay, high scores etc. This is not overly complicated but it's not trivial either. If you want to implement save/load/replay features, you may want to think about it in advance.

- I do not at all like Unity and love Unreal (no connection except unhappy and happy user respectively). However, just pick the one with which you will be more comfortable developing.

Again, I wish you luck and hope you have a lot of fun and learn a lot from your efforts.

I hope you're rich, because the vast majority of indie games, even when well designed and marketed, fail and most of the rest make almost nothing. And most of the rest of those only succeed for a few weeks or months when let's players happen to discover them and make them viral.

As far as the framework, my advice is Unity or Unreal for 3D or console, Godot for 2D, but Unreal only if you have a studio and a budget otherwise it's overkill. But in the end the framework itself matters less than the license, which matters less than the game itself and the platform(s) you intend to publish to. Remember the guy who made Flappy Bird crapped it out in a weekend and made so much money on it that it actually scared him.

It's also important to remember that the code is the least important part of a game's success. The code just makes it work, it's the plumbing, not the architecture. The days when clever programming could make a game are long, long gone - now, code is only notable when it breaks. What makes a game successful is design, artwork, production, the things the player engages with and cares about.

No, sorry.. what makes a game successful is mostly luck, but a game won't have a chance to be lucky without the rest of it.

Making games is like gambling, and all rules of gambling apply:

- Do not gamble money that you are not prepared to lose.

- Do not gamble all your money at once.

- Know when to cut your loses and quit.

- Luck does not last forever.

For those recommending that you stay at your job while creating your game... Some companies have fairly strict contracts regarding "moonlighting" and doing things on the side. In certain cases, the company might be able to own your game even if you don't use company assets to build it. So before you try to do this, make sure to discuss it with a lawyer to avoid unpleasant surprises.

Do this if you want, but think of it as what it is: gambling. You're trying to spend 12-18 months on one roll of the dice, and your chances of success are close to zero.

You also don't seem to have any game dev experience. You could easily spend the entire 18 months just learning how to write games. The transition from CRUD apps to games is brutal.

Having done exactly this, I say have a blast and enjoy the freedom to create, but be prepared to re-enter the industry because that’s almost certainly what you’ll have to do.

I put my time working on my game on my resume, and it did help me get good jobs in gaming and VR, that I probably wouldn’t have landed otherwise.

You should read Stephen's blog here... he covers the highs and lows very honestly and eventually went back to a corporate gig despite making some really cool stuff: http://treasureadventureworld.com/

I don't have any experience other than dabbling in gamedev here and there. I definitely recommend reading Blood, Sweat, and Pixels. At the very least read the chapters about Stardew Valley and and Shovel Knight to get an idea of the challenges you will face as an indie developer.

I worked on several games, one within a small startup (was a really popular .io game, 300k+ MAU), yet they all failed to generate enough revenue.

My suggestion: don't create a game. Create a gamified tool for a specific niche. To make a high-quality one, do something related to a domain/hobby your are passionate about. For example, if you enjoy cooking, create a gamified educational cooking app, where you actually learn how to hook. Do you like playing the drums? Create a Music School simulator (eg. you are the teacher, get students, you teach them, something like Game Dev Tycoon).

That being said, actually earning money with a game is REALLY hard UNLESS you go for a specific niche, which makes it a lot easier to market your game or ask money for the game.

I'm sure there's a lot of excitement on moving in to a new potential venture, and there are many good stories of those who pull it off!

Unfortunately luck plays a big role in the mobile games market. Some simpler games (like flappy bird) make a ton of money, but most indie games often get only short bursts of cash flow.

Because you did not indicate that you have worked on a game before, I'd strongly urge you to not burn the bridges with your current job. Perhaps go for a 50:50 for work:game.

It's great that you have a long runway. Most games only take 4-5 months to develop. Try to get the product out as early as possible.

You might need to invest a significant amount of money on advertising. They are relatively cheap in CPC, but it will be a significant cost early on nonetheless.

I built 2 games, 200K downloads. I didn't quit to work on that particularly but it took me only 3 weeks to build a very simple react native trivia game that I knew instantly it was going to be a hit. The game is only for a specific european country, so, for the total population, it was pretty cool. It was top charts on app store / play store for a while and the hundreds of reviews of people loving the game changed my life.

I eventually needed to take a job since it wasn't profitable for long (2-3 months) and my plan now is to build other games and quit the boring corporate job once for all.

The only advice I have: launch as early as you can. On my second game I waited unnecessary months, and I realized I could've prioritize a lot better.

And btw, I spent nothing on advertising. Everything was organic.

I would make a Roblox version first for some of the game play mechanics. If people like the game and you get product/market fit come out with an IOS version if you need to. You can release pretty minimal games on Roblox and see what works very quickly.

12-18 months is not enough if you don't have another safety net, like living with your parents or something. I wouldn't try a career switch like that without having a community of people that will help me, like in a new job or as part of a bigger project, or at least four years of runway.

If you become even a mediocre game developer-promoter in 10 months I'd say you are really gifted or got really lucky and got all the opportunities to learn fast. When you start running out of money and only have three or four more months or runway you will need like rock-solid mental and physical health to not go crazy.

I was about to suggest "yet another RPG that no one will ever play" but then I read your post with more attention.

I have this old idea around a turn based RPG game that simulates the political scenario of a developing country in an elections year. Main individual goal: to be elected for either a city, state or federal mandate. The more turns you play, the more your chances increase of climbing the political ladder up to the presidency. Corruption, ethics and media layers add the complexity to the game.

Hey, congrats for your decision to leave the startup and starting your own thing. That's the most important aspect here.

You are in Spain but you haven't said where? If you are in, or near, Barcelona try to get involved in the local te h scene. There are some great EU funded incubators who would help cover all the parts of the business you don't already have expertise in, and also have a vested interest in raising your (marketing) profile.

18 months is optimistic in terms of runway. Try to raise the same again in angel/friends & family funding. It's much easier to do that now, at the beginning, than it is later on, when suddenly everything seems bleak. Very best of luck, P.

Make an io party game - the genre is super fun to create in, was growing rapidly before COVID, turbocharged during COVID and remains underserved. Growth is built-in because of inherent sharing. Use a game engine like Playcanvas so you can publish it to web and wrap it into a mobile app if you'd like (Unity is fine too, but doesn't work on mobile web, whereas Playcanvas works everywhere). Ads monetization is of course the quick route, but if you have the patience to add cosmetics and premium levels, you can make a killing from in-app purchases.

Curious, what is an io party game?

Like skribbl.io, an online Pictionary game. Maybe also things like agar.io or slither.io, but those are less for parties I think. Jackbox.tv comes to mind as well, but obviously that isn’t .io lol

Games ending .io are generally fun, simple, multiplayer, and browser-based

I did this, twice. Shit financial decision. Thought it would be fun but it just burned me out more with millions of little cuts. Thinking about doing it again.

Where in spain? Shout out from Valencia!

The most important thing from both the production and audience experience standpoint is for the game to feel coherent: it does not leave open contradictions in its premises and execution. If you ignore this the scope of the project easily blows up ten or a hundredfold because the contradictions turn into an unsatisfying experience that is very difficult to solve without resorting to brute force effort.

If you have that, though, you have avoided the biggest source of failure.

Yeah, that's not enough money.

People think games are like startups, but with games you don't get to iterate after a failed release. People don't take a second look at games.

I’ve never tackled a game before, but as someone who has done the whole “iterate publicly” thing (link in profile), I’ve always wondered whether games are basically “startups on hard mode” for precisely this reason.

There’s so much competition and things can really unravel due to missteps early on in the piece.

I guess the flipside is the market is both huge and very willing to spend money. So swings and roundabouts.

A message to my previous self: Before you write a line of code, decide what the interactions are going to be and then use an engine which can handle them and no more. If you're writing code that handles when two stacked physics enabled boxes have their supporting structure removed from them at near t speed of light, but don't require such interactions to make your game fun, then you're stuck in a tar pit from which you'll never escape.

I don't think this is a good idea unless you already have a great talent in making game. Leaving your job will put a great pressure on yourself.

Instead of doing it yourself. I think you can start by hire some developers from 3rd countries to get the job done. There are not short of talent developers from there.

When you hire a good developers, you can focus your time on tweaking gameplay, design, marketing, and build a community around your game.

Hey there! Fellow game dev wannabe based in Barcelona, Spain that has considered something similar as you. I've mostly built stuff for fun, but hit me up if you want to do some open discussions/feedback sessions.

Like others have said it is a brutal industry with most games making no money, but there is a formula to follow if you want a chance of success.

Make peace with the fact that "you're making a game". I did this a while back, but the thought of "you're not working, you're building some stupid game no one will play, you should be working" made me quit and get a job. So, this is my advice for you: make peace with the fact that you're building a game.

Good luck. Enjoy the process.

Would recommend reading Jordan Mechner's Journal on the Making of Prince of Persia

https://jordanmechner.com/store/the-making-of-prince-of-pers...

I'm my opinion - 18 months may not cut it. I would consider 3 years, You need thinking time to develop your idea, games, time for pivoting.

You will have roadblocks, but enjoy the journey. There are many creative ways to sustain, write about your progress.

Rely on games is always not that easy as you can imagine, but I will also say good luck to your adventures! Don't forget, there are a ton of youtube videos talking indie game making and alike, I am pretty sure you can learn many valuable tips from them!

What you're looking at doing is buying a lotto ticket that has 12 - 18 months of wages and time attached to it.

Why not just work on it as a side project. Like is there a hard deadline where you have to meet that requires this rush to release?

Consider your runaway to be 6 to 9 months. Shit happens (and will happen). Good luck!

Create an MMO but also an MMO framework so other people can use the framework.

The framework might actually turn out to be more popular than the game.

To be honest, I'd suggest (and this is coming from someone who has worked in the gaming industry) you'd almost be better off working strictly on a good mobile framework with a good UI than a game itself.

If you can create a low code framework, with a nice UI for would be developers, that is a much less crowded space than yet another (sorry) mobile game with 30% off the top just to be put into the IOS or Google Play stores.

It's not as sexy to non developers, but from a problem solvers standpoint, it sounds hard and from a UI developer stand point, it sounds difficult.

Working on a game engine is the ultimate (and very common) game dev trap. It's a recipe for never finishing anything as all your time and energy is eaten up trying to generalise your code to support infinite games.

It could also be argued that adding a generic game to the pile of a million games, built with the same tools that everyone else uses, and that doesn't challenge one in building it and doesn't add anything new to the industry is also a trap.

Make a non generic game then. Players don't care how you coded it.

My point is, if you want to make a game, make a game. Making an engine is the ultimate distraction. You should only be considering an engine after you have a few similar games under your belt and know there's a market for it.

I kinda feel like this is the equivalent of quitting my job to focus on my garage band to make it big. Good luck though!

For your first game, with no visibility or reputable brand, you should probably plan should be to get a publisher.

I think the days of successful games developed by one person are gone.

Or you could do it just for portfolio building.

Have fun and don't bet the farm on it because making a hit game is really slim odds.

I've worked in the mobile games space for several years now, currently at a mobile games startup. Some advice:

- You're biting off quite a bit of tech you've never used, it sounds like. If you want cross platform mobile + web support, Unity is probably your best bet in terms of ease-of-use vs. portability

- I'm not sure a graphic designer is going to be able to help you with the more game-specific aspects of game graphics, but I could be wrong. Animations that work well with your game engine of choice can be a big pain

- I would buy a book or a course on some kind on mobile game monetization and marketing. It was very different from what I was used to in the SaaS space. Paid user acquisition seemed like a strange concept. Running paid UA campaigns with different install price bids based on quality of player was also a strange concept. If you want the game to make money this stuff will come up.

- Try to use services as much as you can. You're a startup, after all, you want to spend your time building the things that make your product unique. Playfab is okay but lacks decent analytics features + crash reporting IIRC. Firebase is good for mobile apps stuff but the analytics aren't great and they name stuff horribly. Regardless, pick one and try to lean on it heavily - only build the stuff you absolutely have to. Lots of tools have free trials and free tiers, use them.

- If you've never worked in games before, I would look up normal game development process. A simple version is to prototype things aggressively, then throw the bad parts out, then repeat until you're ready to do what's called a Game Vertical Slice, which usually just means to build all the "essential" parts in a way that lets you use them together. You want to flex your core loop in GVS, so you'll need each relevant piece in a usable state. When you make your GVS build, play it a lot, share it with friends, maybe try to get some friends of friends or parents involved. You want honest feedback. Is it fun? Are there parts of it that aren't? Are there things in the core loop that don't make sense? Are there gaps in the core loop? The data you'll get out of GVS is going to very aggressively scope your actual launch + success.

I say look into game development processes because I think it's important to timebox your curiousity and perfectionism. If it were a side project, I would say kind of follow your curiosity and build things exactly as you want them. Because you're trying to actually launch something, I would follow a hard structure such that you know you need to move on when you're spinning your wheels.

I'll try to think of more to write back. If you have questions I'm happy to answer them. Games are great, and making them is also great.

It's a terrible plan, which is why you must do it.

Make the game first, earn money from it, then quit.

I love that energy, and totally sympathize with the desire to take charge of your own vision. One of the great things about this industry is the willingness to take risks. Creating my own successful game is one of my life goals as well! Game creation can be a really meaningful experience and its a great combination of a lot of different skillsets. It's also a ton of fun.

But.

If you want to make this successful, first you're going to need to understand the risks here, as well as define explicitly what you're looking to get out of this. Are you looking to just make money, or execute a creative vision? What will you decide to do if those two things come into conflict?

Second, of all the potential business models out there, making a game is probably one of the riskiest ones you can possibly work on. You're going to need to come into this knowing what you're doing.

At minimum, you should be able to answer the question - "Why does the world need this game?" Why would someone play this game, and more importantly, pay for it?

If you were an experienced game developer who had released some number of small indie titles and looking to spend some time on a title you know can have an impact, thats one thing. But making a good game that people want to play is very difficult, time consuming, and requires a lot of experience. It takes years to build the skillsets needed to be successful in this industry, and thats even with a programming background. The fact that you don't have an idea yet of what game you want to make, nor have a familiarity with an engine yet, tells me you're a couple years away from being able to quit your job. Also, the fact that you say you're motivated to do this because you're bored of your job and want some self-actualization, tells me you're doing this for the wrong reasons. You should only quit your job and make the jump if you're already progressing on a game you know can be successful and just need time to develop and publish it.

So here is my advice. Keep your job for now, or if you don't like it, find a new one. Join a game jam on itch.io, timebox yourself and your partner for some short amount of time, like a week or a month, to create several small "throwaway" games to build skills and the understanding of how much you can accomplish. If you don't have many obligations outside your job (kids, family, etc.) you should be able to accomplish a small complete game in a month in your spare time. Do this for a year or two, and if eventually you find yourself making a really great game you just need more time to work on, then you have your answer. But by choosing to quit your job before you have even started exercising these skills you're setting yourself up for failure.

I sincerely hope you succeed and find your vision. But in order to succeed, you need to have a good understanding of the risks involved, and the skills and experience to know how to overcome them in concrete terms.

As someone who's just completed a game jam with a small game, this is a fantastic hobby at minimum and I hope you're not deterred from being creative. I only advise caution when talking about turning this into a job. Who knows, by doing this just as a hobby at first you may even find that this gives you the right outlet you need to enjoy your day job more! That was more or less the case for me, since my present job means I'm not building things as much and deal more with a lot of team dynamics and bureaucracy.

Edit: This video was pretty enlightening to me in terms of pitching game design - if he won't accept your pitch, why should you? Theres a lot of other good videos on the GDC channel as well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LTtr45y7P0&ab_channel=GDC

There are a lot of replies in this thread but yours is the only one worth reading. You gave really valuable advice and insight instead of the usual "game making is lottery" and "don't do it" babble that does not give any reasons at all. I hope the OP reads your post.

Just commented to say thanks for the quality post :)

Appreciate it! Thank you.

A million yes to all this!

Can I work with you?

Lol Don’t do it.

Create awareness.

Start a twitter account. Document your progress. Build a following. Gain an audience to sell your dreams to. Then launch it.

And give it away for free. Sell some life saving gems. The “whales” are going to be your biggest spenders.

Good luck!