Time flies when you’re having fun and working hard. Yesterday marked the 10th anniversary of me setting out on my own to try my hand at this “indie game development thing”. Ten years seems like a long time, so I thought it might be fun to take a look back at what I’ve done over this past decade of making indie games.
In the summer of 2008 I had been working in the Vancouver AAA games industry for nearly five years as a programmer. My wife and I had decided to move back to Ontario and I decided it was time for me to make the leap into indie life and make my own games. I founded a new business called Streaming Colour Studios and started working on my first game.
I spent six months working on Dapple, a match-3 game about mixing paint colours. When I started making the game it was with the intention of releasing it on a casual games portal. However, shortly after I started development, Apple announced that they were creating a new thing called the “App Store”. I decided that Dapple would be great on a touch device and switched to focus on iPhone development. I would launch Dapple in February, 2009 to sales that fell well short of the game breaking even. It was a difficult lesson for me. I had assumed that more of the knowledge I’d gained in AAA development would carry over, but realized quickly that while I had a lot of experience writing code, I was extremely new to game design, marketing, and all the other important parts of making a game.
My next game, Monkeys in Space: Escape to Banana Base Alpha, launched in November, 2009. I had decided one of the reasons for Dapple’s disappointing sales was that I didn’t play to the strengths of the platform. Line-drawing games were all the rage in early 2009, so I tried my hand at that. Unfortunately, by the time the game launched, the line-drawing fad had run its course and Monkeys in Space made less money than Dapple did.
Around this time I realized I needed to start earning more income if I was going to keep doing this job, so I started doing iPhone development contract work about half the time. This allowed me to keep going even though my games weren’t yet breaking even.
In July, 2010 I released a game called LandFormer, a puzzle game about raising and lowering terrain. Apple had started allowing free games to have in-app purchases (the start of the free-to-play era in mobile games) and I decided to release it free and sell level packs inside the game. It seemed like a great idea, but didn’t do well in the end, performing less successfully than Monkeys in Space.
After LandFormer I was getting concerned about finances, so I concentrated on contract work for quite a while. But in July, 2011 I released an iPad app I had written for my new son, called Baby’s Musical Hands. I wrote the app for him, but when I showed it to friends, they kept encouraging me to put it on the App Store. I was hesitant but went through with it. The app took off far better than any of my previous games. It got a write up in Wired, and got picked up by App blogs, but also by parenting blogs and magazines. Professionals, like pediatric occupational therapists, and organizations that work with children with visual impairment started using the app in their work with kids. Baby’s Musical Hands also earned enough money that I could take a bit of a break from contract work and work on my own things again. Most importantly, it showed me that the games that I made had the potential to touch people in a meaningful way through play. It was a wonderful experience and I’m so grateful to everyone who contacted me to let me know how much the app meant to them and their children.
The next game I made was Finger Tied, an iPad multitouch puzzle game that’s kind of like Twister for your fingers. It can be played by yourself, or with friends. This game, made four years after I went indie, is the first time where I felt like I actually designed a game. I finally felt like I was starting to understand what game design was about. I had a clear idea of what I wanted the game to be and how I wanted the player to feel, and designed the experience around that. I’m proud of this game, and it did ok financially, making about double its budget back in sales, enabling me to take on a bit less contract work.
After Finger Tied shipped I started talking with my friend Matt Rix who had just finished a big update to his game Trainyard. We started talking about a collaboration and agreed to try working together on a short, three-month project to see how we liked it. We founded a new indie studio called Milkbag Games, and we started working on a game called Snow Siege. We worked on Snow Siege for a year before cancelling the project. Snow Siege was a promising game, but one we could never get quite right. It was fun, but not fun enough. In the end, I think we got hung up on the wrong details and never addressed an issue with the core design that we could never get quite right. But all was not lost.
A year into development on Snow Siege, we prototyped a bonus mini-game that involved tapping tiles of snow to uncover prizes. We realized this little mini-game was actually a lot of fun and joked about making a game built around its mechanics, but that involved cute animals. But the more we talked about it, the more we loved that idea. We gave ourselves two weeks to prototype the idea and see if it worked (it took three weeks, because everything takes longer than you think it will). When we had the prototype in our hands we realized it was something special. This was Disco Zoo.
We had less than three months to make Disco Zoo. I hadn’t been taking contract work during Snow Siege and now finances were becoming an issue again. If we didn’t ship Disco Zoo soon, I was going to have to look for full-time work. We completed Disco Zoo v1.0 in three months and launched it at the end of February, 2014, with our friends at NimbleBit publishing the game. Disco Zoo launched to an Editor’s Choice feature on the App Store. The game did well enough for our team of two that I didn’t have to go get that full-time job and Matt and I were able to keep working together.
Disco Zoo is cute, and silly, and fun. It was a joy to make. And I think one of the reasons it resonates with people is that you can feel how much fun we had making it when you play it. We hear from players a lot about how happy the game makes them, and I couldn’t ask for a better response to a game than that.
After Disco Zoo we started working on our next project: FutureGrind. FutureGrind is about as different from Disco Zoo as you can get. It’s a 3D, action, extreme sports game build for consoles and PC. When we started FutureGrind it was going to be a 2D pixel art game that would take six months to make. (we’re coming up on four years in development soon)
While making FutureGrind we’ve taken breaks to make a few other smaller projects. Photobomb is a free PC game we made for the 7dfps and procjam game jams in 2015. It’s a social commentary game about how social media mobs can form around events, looking for justice quickly. We’re really happy with how this game turned out.
And in July, 2017 we released a word, logic puzzle game called Sidewords for mobile devices and PC. We needed a break from FutureGrind and took six months off to make Sidewords. We’re really proud of Sidewords and I think it’s a good puzzle game. It was also an opportunity for us to learn how to ship a game on Steam in preparation for FutureGrind.
We are still working on FutureGrind, but we are getting closer to the end. We hit a “content complete” milestone around GDC this year and we are working towards beta. It feels good to be getting here, and the game feels great to play. I’m excited to share this game with the world when it’s done. We’re just not quite there yet.
So… wow. Ten years doing this indie thing. I have learned a lot. It has been extremely difficult at times. But it has also been incredibly rewarding in many ways. I feel so lucky to have met such wonderful people who are also doing this crazy thing called indie games. None of us do this alone and I’m so grateful for all the help and support I’ve received over the years. I have made so many new friends who make amazing things every day. Keep making beautiful games. I’ll keep trying my best too.
❤️❤️❤️
Owen
