

My Recent Nine Months as an Indie Developer - potomak
http://www.eiswuxe.de/looking-back-my-recent-nine-months-as-an-indie-developer/

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Eiswuxe
Hi,

I'm the creator of the blogpost and I just discovered the discussion here. I
would love to answer all questions and take a stand on things like "ads on a
kids application". But the article travels the internet so fast that I am not
able to check all discussions regularly. So I would like you to ask your
questions in the comments section of my blog if you really expect an answer.
Its the only place where I 100% check all comments each day. Hope you
understand.

cheers, Eiswuxe

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cageface
It seems like games like these really live or die on the strength of their
artwork. I've considered doing something like these myself but I have no idea
how much it would cost to hire an artist to do this kind of work. Does anyone
have any experience contracting out app art?

~~~
polymatter
Would also like some advice on contracting app art. A game I started as a
personal learning project, is growing and some good consistent art would be of
tremendous value to it.

~~~
jonbro
At my company we just ended up hiring someone, but for our past projects we
worked with contractors (in fact, all but one of us was a contractor).

There are tons of people out there that are dying to get more work in the
indie game scene, and some of them are even good.

Adam Atomic wrote up this piece about contracting pixel art a while back:
[http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/AdamSaltsman/20090724/2571/Pi...](http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/AdamSaltsman/20090724/2571/Pixel_Art_Freelance_Best_Practices__Guidelines.php)

You may want to dig through the pixeljoint and way of the pixel if you want
that particular style. If you are looking for artists more generally, the
tigsource forums have both places for posting portfolios and job offers. I
think that polycount forums may have places as well, but I am not as familiar
with that one.

The point is that a ton of game artists hang out online, and you can get to
them through there. I am pretty sure that some of the superstars do contract
work as well. Paul veer did super crate box's animation, and as of 6 months
ago was taking on freelance.

However, the artist we hired was an ex-coworker of a friend of a guy that we
met at a hack day, so just getting out there and meeting other game developers
can help as well.

Regarding costs, it is generally cheaper to hire an artist than a programmer,
but not by much. Maybe 2/3 - 3/4 of the cost of a good programmer. You
certainly are not going to get solid work for free.

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jdwhit2
_..I came up with a farm that has certain animals on it. Tapping an amimal
would make it wiggle its head and make a noise._ [..] _All my apps are
available for free on the android market featuring ads_

Is it strange to have ad supported games for toddlers? What possible benefit
could a company get on a click-though from a toddler?

I really enjoyed reading through your reflections, it is always fascinating to
see how success comes from the most unlikely angles :)

(edit) elipses

~~~
brador
Benifit from clicks on a game like this? My guess is none. They don't know it
happens because the ads are not being targeted, or if they are, they're
targeted at the parents who own the device and browse the web using it etc.

The kids will give a very high accidental click rate, but need to call mommy
to hit the back button/close safari, which is enough time for the click to
register as legitimate and not accidental.

So yeah, pretty spammy, but money is money.

~~~
Eiswuxe
I already tried to place the ads in a way that minimized accidental clicks.
But you can never prevent it. People even email me if I can refund an iOS
purchase because their kid "accidently unlocked" the full version via in-app
purchase (even though I warned about that circumstance in the app description
AND iDevices have a feature to disable in-app-purchases for exactly that
reason).

I designed the apps with the idea in mind that kids should never play those
games completely alone. But that leads to a discussion about education in
general which is much to big to start here.

The main reason for my apps is not that the parents get some peace during the
day (even though a lot of people use it exactly for that) but that kids learn
together with their parents, like they always should do. An iDevice /
Smartphone is not a toy for toddlers with which you can leave them alone. But
this stuff is way beyond my control.

~~~
brador
Question: What if you had not stumbled upon the idea to build the toddler
games? Would you have soldiered on on a low income or packed up and returned
to corporate life? and after how long?

~~~
Eiswuxe
Due to the fact that my first son was born in december 2011 (and that I knew
that this would happen:)) I would have tried to prototype and release stuff to
"stumble upon anything succesfull" until the money from my grant was used up
(march 2012). Then I would have tried to survive as long as possible with my
savings, and then, when I would not see any light at the end of the tunnel,
would have returned to a day job in order to support my family.

If I would have to take care only of myself, I would have tried to continue
even with a minimum income.

~~~
brador
Can I ask how much the grant was? (Didn't see the amount mentioned in the
article) and did the grant come with specific terms or was it just "here's
some free cash, go have some fun :)"?

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tluyben2
It's a shame he used Corona. We made that mistake for our first two games.
Don't get me wrong, I really like LUA, but Corona, to me is a scam. And here
is why: LUA allows you to quite straightforward plug in 3rd party libs
(DLLs/SOs), but they intentionally crippled this in Corona; it's not possible
with the 'normal version' (you pay 100s of $ for;
<http://www.anscamobile.com/pricing/>). You need to buy an enterprise support
'thing' (it's not a license, it's a one-off) which costs, and I kid you not,
$40.000 per 'feature' you need added. So we started porting our games as this
kind of crippling, to me, is just lock-in-and-steal. If you wrote a
significantly large game in Corona and you need something from iOS/Android
which is not in there yet, you are going to pony up $40k (multiple times
maybe).

And yes, we could've known this upfront obviously. But I think quite a lot of
Indie guys skip over this point at first.

~~~
pfedor
Which framework do you recommend? I know of Unity, Marmalade, Corona and
Cocos2d-x. (I once tried porting an SDL application to Android and gave up,
after many many hours sunk.)

~~~
tluyben2
We currently ported all parts of the Corona API we use to Monkey
(<http://www.monkeycoder.co.nz/>) and I created a LUA2Monkey script which does
~80% of the translation (at least for us ;). When done I'll release that stuff
in Github.

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roel_v
"First I wanted to argue that it was a real 'game' and not just a 'press this
button to fart' app, but one thing why I started my own business was because I
did not want to mess around arguing. _I wanted to code._ " (emp. mine)

Ouch. I'm afraid he's in for a rude awakening at some point in the not too far
away future.

~~~
Eiswuxe
I went through rude awakenings for the last several years because people spent
more time arguing than being creative and producing their stuff. Besides that,
if my undertaking goes out of business, I want at least have some fun while
doing it :)

~~~
GFischer
There's a line of thought on startup success that basically says that customer
validation is more important than creating a good product:

[http://www.slideshare.net/Alex.Osterwalder/successful-
entrep...](http://www.slideshare.net/Alex.Osterwalder/successful-
entrepreneurship-5747012)

it basically says not to kill yourself building the product before testing
that there's a market for it. Create a minimum product (MVP) instead :)

You did that with your Farm for Toddlers game, found your niche, now go ahead
and be successful :) (I guess you already are, by my standards :) )

Edit: by the way, thanks for sharing and being open with your revenues and
your experience

~~~
Eiswuxe
Its true that you should not start a company on the idea of "I dont care what
anybody wants, I just want to do as I please". I try to find a good mixture of
what "looks promising" and what is fun for me to do. Atm, those toddler games
perfectly fit that scheme. Sure I try to push it all into a direction where I
can build more "typical" games.

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viandante
I asked there, I also ask here. It seems he lives in Germany. Somebody knows
how much he gets after taxes? He probably has also to pay for pension (~16% -
?) and health care (~ 15% ).

~~~
viandante
Thanks WA and kayoone.

So, let me get this straight:

\- Health insurance can be considered as a fixed 500 monthly ammount.
Question: Can it be higher?

\- You are not obliged to pay for pension. Here I doubt a bit. Independent
workers pay 26% of their income for pension in Italy...

Which means (in thousands):

=======

+50

-8 - no tax income

-6 - health insurance

\----

36

-0.7 * 36 - income taxes

\----

25.2

\+ 8

\----

 _33.2_

33.2/12 = estimated monthly 2760 euro

=======

If that were true, that is really good.

~~~
roel_v
Minus capital expenses, various sorts of outsourced work (art, accounting,
...) and fees left and right (bank, chamber of commerce, ...)

In a startup phase you can avoid most of them, and they're all not very big
but still add up.

Also, this is without pension contributions (if I'm following your
calculations correctly?), whereas an equivalent full time job would include
them.

Still not too bad, but not an equivalent of what one would make in a 'regular'
job, even when keeping risk discount factors low.

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rlm
Google Cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:RheixSV...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:RheixSVNVcEJ:www.eiswuxe.de/looking-
back-my-recent-nine-months-as-an-indie-developer/)

Edit: It seems like it's back up now.

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6ren
> but one thing why I started my own business was because I did not want to
> mess around arguing.

To me, this is the key thing he did that enabled everything else. That, and
observing actual appreciation in real life (those kids).

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bh42222
I know simple isn't the same as simplistic. But still, how many games like
this could exist before their profit drops to be like other games? I don't
think there is a high entry barrier to creating them?

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webmonkeyuk
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