A new kind of games company
Every software developer secretly wants to be a game developer. The problem is it's really hard to make games sustainably. It takes a huge amount of effort, and marketing games is often an afterthought. If you thought making a SaaS app was hard, multiply it by 10 for making games.
After reading IH for a few years and learning a bit about marketing here, three friends and I have formulated a model for a new way of building games as a sustainable side-hustle.
It's a big experiment but I'm excited to see where it goes. We've released our first game and we're just about to release our second one. If this works we believe it could be a way forward for other people too.
Here's the story of what we're doing:
Trending on Indie Hackers
Mind Provoking Idea.
Very cool. Good luck!
Just curious, what game engine are you guys using? (Asking for a software developer who may want to make games some day.)
All four of us are using different tech. I am personally using web tech + electron to make my roguelike games. One guy is doing hand-coded C++. Two more are using unity (one 2d and one 3d).
Interesting. Hand-coded C++ sounds hard-core!
What web tech are you using? I've been dabbling with Phaser 3 recently, but I'd love to know what else is out there.
+1 for web tech! I'm interested to know more about this as well
@stevenkkim So far I have been using vanilla JavaScript and rot.js to render tiles to a canvas element. I base my games off the boilerplate I built which uses that library.
Lately I've also been just pushing HTML elements around on the screen. You can do some pretty great stuff with CSS (particle effects etc.) and it's not too expensive resource wise.
I think for my next game I'm going to switch to my preferred language ClojureScript. My last game has been a real grind with JavaScript.
Neat stuff, thanks for sharing!
for sure! this is cool! never heard of rot.js sounds like a simple framework.
thanks for sharing!
Good luck.
I like many also wish we could just build games for a living. As I always say, if I can get to the point where I make enough from my side project to sustain myself; all my time will go back into games. I already started with a few different concepts but they are on hold.
I hope you get there! Watch this space, maybe our model could be a way for you to do that in future.
Love this idea, Chris! I hope it works and turns into something relatively sustainable.
Thank you! 🙏
You got that right. I have plans to one day become an indie game developer, but the struggle is real compared to building a SaaS application. I'm working my way towards one day becoming an indie game dev. For now, building browser extensions will do 🙃
You reminded me of an indie game group I used to support, Sokpop Collective: https://www.patreon.com/sokpop
Not sure if you've seen them, but they do this too, 1 game a month. I supported them for a while, was neat because they shared the source code. They build cool small games, I think you can find a few neat insights from their development model
Yes Sokpop are doing this very successfully. That's interesting they share the source code, I didn't know that. I think your plan to start with browser extensions and move towards games makes a lot of sense. It's a safe way to work towards you goal. Good luck!
yup, turns out Im not so great on design so that's one area I'll be working on improving, slowly but surely.
thanks! good luck to you too
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