It’s been a long road but I have officially hit 2 million downloads on Windows Phone across 15 games earlier this week. It’s a great feeling and accomplishment, but there is a lot more work to be done on other platforms and making it to be as successful there.

Hopefully I learned a lot from my successes and failures in the Windows Phone Marketplace and will be able to translate it to other platforms in the near future. But just as a word of advice to everyone out there, not because you are popular on 1 platform means that it will translate to the same success on other platforms. There are just too many different variables that come into play that determines the success of games.

I may not be pumping out as much games as I used to but fear not as I am still as passionate as ever, albeit a little bit busy because of cool stuff at work

With GDC barely 24 hours finished, I have come to multiple thoughts on the state of the industry and what I should be spending my time on.

1. Unity is totally dominating the minds of all the indie game developers I have been talking to. This includes but is not limited to “I’m learning Unity (because XNA is dead)”, “I want to publish to multiple platforms”, “I want to get back into programming so I will learn Unity”, and “We are in the process of switching to Unity”.
2. I should get back to making original games within short time frames. I’ve mostly been doing ports of my existing games as I was deciding between Monogame and Unity. Now that I have decided to go with Unity, I can make fun games that are unique. Finishing a game is fun wether it fails or succeeds.
3. Multi platform is the key, being exclusive to just one platform will not net you the breadth that is needed to make your game successful.
4. I am lucky to be able to make games myself without the help of other people as I can iterate and create games at a fast clip.
5. The quality of the talks at GDC has been great this year, the amount and quality of shwag has gone down though. GDC has been more social than ever for me thanks to the GDC vault, so I can concentrate on making and reinforcing bridges within the industry.
6. The female to male ratio is definitely better now at GDC, I won’t even try to guess the ratio but there is a noticeable difference between this year and last year. This is good for the industry, and I believe the day of a 50/50 split will come
7. There were a lot of decent parties this GDC with the ones I got into were free booze. Thankfully most of the clubs have a quiet area where you can actually shmooze with people

This is not a exhaustive list but these thoughts I think are going to guide me and how I interact with the industry. Oh and I need to start pumping out games again since most people remember me as the guy who pumped out a ridiculous amount of quality games in a year.

This post will cover my experiences trying to tackle the different platforms out there. I got my hands dirty with iOS, Android, Kongregate and Windows 8. Not all the projects are the same, and all of these are ports of my Windows Phone 7 games. By port, I mean they got ported over but substantial changes were made to adapt each game to the strengths of the platform. Let’s break it down by platform and what games I ported over.

iOS - Armored Drive

1. The port was done in Objective-C with the help of Nick Gravelyn and Charles Cox. I did the design and most of the art, Nick did the programming and Charles handled the business-y part of the port.
2. We ported over Armored Drive because that is my most successful game on Windows Phone. Our original business model is to have the game as a paid download with IAP purchases.  We launched with $1.99 as the price and got a few decent downloads, and some IAP purchases. However we never got critical mass to get us through the channels. Currently we are in a Ad Supported model with IAP purchases to help augment the Ad revenue. Currently the ads are making more money than the IAP
3. Piracy is a big problem when were going with paid downloads, but now that we are free with ads we are monetizing the pirated versions of the game
4. The iOS marketplace is so saturated with games that it is hard to get any visibility. As well as get any reviews from the review sites (many of them want you to pay them to review the game). Unfortunately we did not have any marketing spend budget as this is a bootstrap effort to launch the game
5. Apple by far is the most pain in the butt experience when it comes to publishing the game in the marketplace. There is not much visibility into the process and you have to wait 7 days for it to be approved.
6. Still in the red in terms of money spent to get the Armored Drive up and running. Will need to get more exposure to Armored Drive to prevent it from dying.

Android – Impossible Shoota

1. Android was not as painful as other developers would say because of Unity. Unity shielded me from all the pain of handling 1600 different devices out there. Well, it can only work on Arm7 devices which cuts that number very low. Deploying to the marketplace takes 4 hours, and does not have any sort of manual QA, just their automated systems. Android is the most confusing in how to get everything setup, usb drivers, keys, etc …
2. Android marketplace is the worse when it comes to marketplace visibility, just releasing the game I think I got 2 downloads without telling anyone. It’s quite horrible to see how a free game gets too low of a download. Granted this release is more of a experiment than anything else. The game was released as a beta, and is fully playable. Currently I am making it into a full fledge game, hopefully I can get this done soon and do a official release when I finish it.

Kongregate – Impossible Shoota

1. The version of Impossible Shoota on Android is almost identical to the one on Kongregate because I used Unity. The biggest difference are the controls and interfacing into the Kongregate js files. Uploading to Kongregate was painless and fast. Integrating their leaderboards was super simple as well.
2. Getting feedback on the game is easier with a web hosted game. People don’t have to bother downloading an app, they just have to download the plugin on their browser, and voila they have the game. It really helped me iterate on the game with this kind of method.
3. Piracy sucks balls on Kongregate, your game is pretty much pirated the moment it hits the service. Especially looking at the telemetry, I have 98% of my players originating from china from the 4399.com and 7k7k.com sites which are super popular in china. Currently I have made $0.26 from deploying to Kongregate.

Windows 8 – Impossible Shoota, Quadra, and Traffic Cop

1. These games were ported using Monogame, which was super easy to use. It basically uses the same class names, namesspaces, etc … so code changes are super minimal. The biggest change is that I have to up-res all my art to fit the bigger screen and different default orientation
2. Developing was a little bit of a pain since I had to build the content files using VS2010 and develop the rest of the game in vs2012. But once you get a hang of it and write a few .bat files then the process is pretty straightforward.
3. No one is buying or using the store in Windows 8, there is not enough volume to make decent money out of Windows 8 except if you are a big name IP. I’ve made $56 dollars on the Windows 8 store so far.

So far I have not replicated my success on Windows Phone, but I am confident that once I learn more about Unity and the various platforms I can make a really good splash on the other platforms. I just need to sit down and keep developing, improving and learning.

Thanks to Unity building a Web based games was as easy as exporting with a few clicks. The game is originally targeted for Android but I will be using Kongregate to get stats and feedback from people and iterate at a very rapid phase. Since Kongregate is super easy to deal with even with their high score table it is now my number 1 choice to get real time feedback across a wider audience while making some ad dollars on the side

Here is Impossible Shoota on Kongregate: http://www.kongregate.com/games/mechaghost/impossible-shoota

Anyone interested in Impossible Shoota for the web? It’s actually the sequel to Impossible Shoota, but right now I don’t have a better name for it. Please do try it out and comment here for any bugs and suggestions. I can pretty much update instantaneously so you don’t have to wait for any certification to approve it

http://games.occasionalgamer.com/impossible.html

So if some of you might noticed I started talking about Unity, that is because during the Christmas break I checked off one of my bucket list items to learn Unity. For the past 4 days I have bathed myself in Unity land where I started to port over Impossible Shoota to use Unity. I’ve also successfully ported Impossible Shoota to Monogame for Windows 8. Now that I have experience with developing for these 3 platforms I am going to dissect what I learned and compare them. Please note that these are my experiences and might not apply to you.  Also as a quick background, I started as a XNA developer back in 2008, developed Xbox and WP7 games. I also have 3 games using Monogame on the Windows 8 marketplace. Currently I am working in Unity to bring Impossible Shoota to Android.

Monogame:

• Easily ported over my XNA code with very minimal code changes
• Code changes came in from adapting input and in app purchases
• Art changes were big because my ports were coming from WP7, so I had to embiggen my art assets
• Getting my game to work initially with Windows 8 was a pain in the butt because I had to figure out how to include the .xnb files
• There is no content pipeline for me while developing, so I had to have vs2010 and vs2012 open so I can compile my content on vs2010 then run a script to copy them over to vs2012

XNA:

• I have not touched XNA in a while because of the absence of support for Windows 8 which was a platform I wanted to publish on
• My XNA skills transferred almost 100% to monogame
• Still making money for me

Unity:

• Very rough learning curve for me as I had to learn their concepts like prefabs, GameObjects, Components, etc …
• It feels very modern because you attach components to gameObject which easily adds behaviour to the game object
• 2D is not too bad as long as you use one of the frameworks on the Asset Store
• Costs money to get all the tools/libraries you need, nothing big but it is not as “free” as XNA or Monogame (I think I spent on it like close to $500, but thats part of development expenses, and save myself from all the work that I don’t want to do)
• The editor is awesome, I can change values on the fly, adjust my scene while looking how it will look in the game. This is how game development should be.
• Porting is almost as easy as a few clicks(if you setup your game right)
• Impossible Shoota will be very rough and not organized properly, but my next game will have benefited from I learn here
• After Impossible Shoota, I will go make a fully 3D game. This is something I have avoided most of my indie career, but after seeing the tools I am convinced that it won’t be as painful as I remember it.

I am currently a big fan of Unity because it has opened up all this awesomeness with very minimal headaches. Monogame will still be a big part of my strategy going forward.

My indieness has been in hibernation since I started working again late last year. Being a full time indie is very rough on the wallet, but very rewarding to the soul

Anyways, what has waken up the bear? Windows 8 and Monogame. The biggest thing that bummed me out about Windows 8 was the XNA support being dropped. Partner that with decreasing ad payouts, and that was the recipe for me to take a break from making games and make some money

Anyways, I started working on porting over Impossible Shoota PC version I have to Windows 8 Modern. It was a fairly straightforward process of downloading the correct Monogame libraries, XNA bits, Games for Windows Live, etc … After which it took me around 30 minutes to make the code mostly work with Windows 8. I had to remove Isolated Storage, and Disable the Media Play capabilities. I’ll figure out which libraries to use soon.

What excites me with Windows 8 is the ability to do In-App Purchases which will let me give away the game for free, and not rely on ads for making money. I’m going to be focusing on accelerator type of IAP objects so that people who want to normally play the game can, and those who just want the best can buy their way Obviously this is a design that has to be carefully balanced and tweaked, and I believe I am up for that challenge.

I believe in giving away my games for free, and letting people who want to support me have an avenue to do so with in app purchases

April 1st marked my 1 year anniversary as a full time independent game developer. 1 year ago it was a very scary notion that I will be striking it out on my own as a independent game developer without the support of a full time job.  I had to do my own taxes, health care, dental, customer support, marketing, networking, development, art, sound (outsourced to 3rd parties), wash dishes, take care of a puppy, and clean the house. Yes being a independent game developer includes house chores and other things, especially when you are staying at home all day.

However I need to confess that being fully independent and at home is boring and dull. First of all, I am usually at home with no one else to talk to about work other than my girlfriend and my puppy. They are awesome at supporting me, but they are not co-workers that share the same passion. The puppy being more interested in treats and making a mess out of toilet paper. It is easy to lose your passion and direction in such a relaxed and unstructured environment where you are the master of your domain. This is my fault though, as I took the opportunity to actually relax and catch up on games, and just chill. Before this I really have had no big breaks between jobs since I started working for the tech industry in 2005. Sure, I had 2 week vacations here and there but it was not like a multi-month decompress and relax.

As a independent developer money was not guaranteed on a month to month basis because of the nature of ad networks. Money was good during the first few months but it began to slowly shrink as more competition popped up and more people started using the Microsoft ad network. Because of that I started doing WP7 development for other people. I worked on the Pizza Hut App on WP7 to help supplement my income. This was a boon for me two ways; it provided me extra capital to keep myself afloat during bad times, and secondly it allowed me to develop my Silverlight skills on WP7 which would prove to be a very valuable skill to have.

Which brings to me another confession, I have not been full time developing games all this year. I had to take a 40 hour a week contracting position at a startup in Seattle last November. Income from my games dwindled from an average of $4,000 to $2000. A big drop in my monthly income, which prevents me from supporting myself with just that (I have a mortgage to pay). The contract ended at the last week of march, so I come full circle as once again a full time independent game developer on my 1 year anniversary Sadly, the income from my games is still not enough and I am currently working on another 2 month Silverlight project on the side, while looking for a 40 hour a week “main job”.

So where does this bring me? Well, since I said before in a previous post that the WP7 gold rush has ended for me. I am on to bigger and hopefully more successful venture using HTML5 and Windows 8. Many of you have argued with me that HTML5 is still too young and currently hard to monetize. But this is a new frontier with a potential 400 million users having access to the Windows 8 app store. I intend to replicate my success with betting early with WP7 into a Windows 8 success

So in closing this mini rant/story of mine. I am truly happy that I have decided to take the plunge. Being able to call myself a independent game developer has opened so many doors that were previously unavailable to me. I have earned people’s trust and respect which has more value than all the money in the world combined.

When I moved to HTML5 to make my games, I decided to use the impactjs engine, which has a pretty nice game framework in place plus a fully functional level editor. Obviously the biggest change from me is moving from C# to Javascript. This is a big change because Javascript is a interpreted language which forgoes the compiler. So you don’t get nice compiler warnings and errors when using the language. Although this can be remedied by using a Javascript optimizer like closure which will check your javascript code and try to optimize it. Another big change I had to endure is the lack of object oriented-ness with Javascript Thankfully you can fake OOP behavior in impactjs and have something similar to c#. It also did not help that I was a total noob with Javascript when I first started HTML5, but that was not a big hindrance to me at all. It took 1 week for me to get comfy writing Javascript code.

It was easy to get up and running with ImpactJS and HTML5 thanks to Jesse Freeman and his book “Introducing HTML5 Game Development” (amazon link). Took me 1 weekend to go through the tutorial and become adept at using ImpactJS.

The ImpactJS framework is nice because it sets up HTML5 into something very useful with it’s game framework. To me it is very similar to XNA but with more useful modules like built in collision detection and physics. What also helps me out is that it has this very simple yet robust level editor called Weltmeister. You get to setup different layers with different zIndices, collision layers, and tile sizes. It does not have all the bells and whistles a level designer might expect from a level editor, but it is enough to make a cool game.

So where am I at in the game development process for my new HTML5 game? Currently I am fleshing out the game and it’s feature set in a document. While in tandem I am starting to prototype and test out the different game mechanics that I need in the game.  I am targeting the web and Windows 8 for releasing my new HTML5 based game.