Those ones where you walk, and time progresses based on your direction? I started that, and whilst I didn’t EXPECT it to f*** up, I was pretty surprised when no matter HOW I went at it, those events still progressed EXACTLY the same.īounce off a ledge? The game still moved the same way.įell off a ladder? Still moved the same way. That’s because Braid’s puzzles are CRAZY consistent.
The only thing that really takes time now is game design. Unity would give us just the “engine”, which is about 25% of our code, so we’d still have “framework” and “game” to make, which accounts for about 75% of the effort.Īs for how long it would take… we’re getting faster at things all the time.
#ULTRATRON SHOOTY PET GLITCH CODE#
The rest is a mix of bits of pinched code and pure game. I can’t speak for Chaz except that he is basically flat out all the time 🙂Ībout 50% of our game code is “engine and framework” and reused through all four of these games. About half my time was spent coding, and the other half was split between businessy stuff, answering support emails, doing interviews, trawling the internet for things about Puppygames, doing builds, managing the server, etc. Historically, I’d say about 50% of my programming time had been spent on engine and framework coding, and 50% of it on actually coding gameplay. Since we’ve hired Alli and Riven, some of the stuff is now shared out amongst them – Riven does all the clever technical stuff now, and Alli takes care of most of the support and some bugfixing and new development. We don’t really keep accurate logs of what time goes where but the general gist of it is, Chaz does graphics/website/video stuff, I do engine/game/design/business stuff, so the general work is split 50/50 between us. I wish we could knock out these games in 3 months flat - because then we'd be making a proper living, but we don't seem to be able to. As it is I'm just an ordinary run-of-the mill sort of dude who just tries very very hard and keeps going no matter what. This is why it takes me so long to make games - if I were actually good at it I'd get the design right in a third the time, and if I were a better programmer I'd have it coded in half the time too. The reality is that every single pixel is lovingly hand crafted from scratch each time by Chaz, and that I'm a pretty rubbish game designer and programmer with not a lot of actual talent. We do pinch a few sound effects between games. There's not a shared sprite between any of the games (I just watched a review of Ultratron where some guy who repeatedly got our name wrong said that we'd just copied all the sprites out of Droid Assault!). The only common thing in our games is the sprite engine everything else is basically unique. Our problem is maybe that we make it look simple. Unless a genius can think of some way we can make them for about a tenth the cost that’s palateable. So now you know why a) you don’t really want to be an indie game developer if you can help it and b) why we’re not making any more arcade games 🙂
It wasn’t until 2010 that we actually made enough money to buy anything more than a celebratory curry! It is unlikely to ever break even.įor most of the last 10 years, I subsidised all the development of the games by working as a menial contractor in the IT industry and effectively putting every spare hour of my life into them. Sandbox mode took 12 man-months and has so far cost us $56k. Revenge of the Titans took about 7 man-years to develop, or about $420k.
Droid Assault has so far made a loss of about $120k. Titan Attacks has just broken even after 7 years, so that’s cause for a can of lager in celebration.ĭroid Assault took quite a bit longer – about 36 man months, or $180k ish. Titan Attacks took approximately the same amount of time. Ultratron has so far made a loss of $100k. Ultratron took 24 man months to develop, or if you want to put a financial figure on it, about $120k at ordinary salary rates. There were some amusing estimates of how much effort goes into making games from the fans, so here are the facts and figures for you all to see, and hopefully, tweet, reblog, and comment about, until all children are suitably scared in their beds and night and vow never to want to becomes games developers ever again, and some sort of massive JUST SAY NO style meme floods the internets and makes it to the very top of Reddit’s wonderfully insular and self-referential news pages. When I read it back to myself I realised it was actually pretty fascinating reading for people outside of the industry (that is, the players of our games). I was idly warbling away to fans on the Steam Community forums today when I had a little think about some of the facts and figures involved in making games.
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