Personal Development for Smart People Forums - View Single Post - Bootstrapping as an Independent Game Developer (Requesting Feedback)

Andrew Russell · 02-23-2009, 07:14 AM

Hi Everyone,

About a week ago I posted about my Job-Free project - which is a meta-project about how I want to get from essentially zero to a healthy income without getting a job within two years (detailed version: Job-Free Goal). I'm hoping to get some feedback about my first business plan.

The project is called Sketchable. This is the blog post about the plan, but I will reiterate it here: The basic idea is to make a series of computer games, releasing one every two weeks. I haven't yet decided how long I'm going to do this for.

The games themselves will be free - I want to build up some practice and an audience. However I will be building into these games some things (I haven't talked about these on my blog yet) that will generate a little income and help the audience-building. Specifically:

- A "pay what you like" option that takes users to a PayPal donation page.
- A "sign up to my email list" button (mostly because I have a friend who's into "build a list" webtrepreneures; I'm not sure what to do with it yet, aside from announcing my own games)
- A "share with your friends" button - much like Digg This / Email This buttons on blogs.

As an extra incentive to do these things, I'll probably use some kind of nag screen ("if you enjoyed this game, please consider paying for it or sharing it with your friends...") and perhaps have a reward like an extra game level for each of those things that the user does. I'm not really trying for big results with this, it's just more practice for stage two:

Stage two is where I collect up statistics from stage one to see which games performed the best (downloads, donations, buzz, number of times played, etc). I will then take the best of the games and polish them up into "proper" shareware games - where the user downloads a free trial, and if they like it buys a full version.

There is also a stage 1.5, where I port the games to the Xbox 360 and sell them on the Xbox LIVE Community Games system for a couple of dollars each.

So - please ponder upon this, perhaps poke around my blog, and tell me what you think!

- Andrew

02-23-2009, 07:14 AM	#1 (permalink)
Andrew Russell Member Join Date: Nov 2006 Location: Brisbane, Queensland, Australia Posts: 70	Bootstrapping as an Independent Game Developer (Requesting Feedback) Hi Everyone, About a week ago I posted about my Job-Free project - which is a meta-project about how I want to get from essentially zero to a healthy income without getting a job within two years (detailed version: Job-Free Goal). I'm hoping to get some feedback about my first business plan. The project is called Sketchable. This is the blog post about the plan, but I will reiterate it here: The basic idea is to make a series of computer games, releasing one every two weeks. I haven't yet decided how long I'm going to do this for. The games themselves will be free - I want to build up some practice and an audience. However I will be building into these games some things (I haven't talked about these on my blog yet) that will generate a little income and help the audience-building. Specifically: - A "pay what you like" option that takes users to a PayPal donation page. - A "sign up to my email list" button (mostly because I have a friend who's into "build a list" webtrepreneures; I'm not sure what to do with it yet, aside from announcing my own games) - A "share with your friends" button - much like Digg This / Email This buttons on blogs. As an extra incentive to do these things, I'll probably use some kind of nag screen ("if you enjoyed this game, please consider paying for it or sharing it with your friends...") and perhaps have a reward like an extra game level for each of those things that the user does. I'm not really trying for big results with this, it's just more practice for stage two: Stage two is where I collect up statistics from stage one to see which games performed the best (downloads, donations, buzz, number of times played, etc). I will then take the best of the games and polish them up into "proper" shareware games - where the user downloads a free trial, and if they like it buys a full version. There is also a stage 1.5, where I port the games to the Xbox 360 and sell them on the Xbox LIVE Community Games system for a couple of dollars each. So - please ponder upon this, perhaps poke around my blog, and tell me what you think! - Andrew