has anyone here spent more than 2 years developing a game alone?
Who didn't... :)
My current policy is, if I spend that much time developing one game it means I will not finish it anyway (and even if I did it would sux), so I cancel such game.
For some reason, all my successful games were made in span of months (or less), never years.
Stellar Monarch (4X, turn based, released): GDN forum topic - Twitter - Facebook - YouTube
I created a game in the image of "StarFlight". It fell flat! I worked on it for about a year and was very proud of my accomplishment. I submitted it to publishers for distribution, but was rejected out-right by most of them. The founder of Matrix Games contacted me through e-mail and explained that my game was the wrong genre for their market. 
In the interest of "showing off", I will post my FREE game here:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BySKIgkx3OcbdV9obUlEWVZIUWM/edit?usp=drive_web
Very sad potato..........................
I also have a TGC link with images:
I had the idea for Goofy Cubes for more than two years, but the development was off and on, because of client work mostly. I rededicated myself to it in the spring and released it a month ago.
Now, after a few bug/maintenance releases, I'm just starting to market it. It's a lot of leg work, but I still believe in it. If six months from now it's floating belly up, so be it. Time to move on to the next game (or make GC more fun).
I've been doing game development as a hobbyist for decades and have never published a game, though I've loads of partially complete projects on old drives which have only been seen only in private circles. I suppose I helped with one released project, which sort-of counts.
But I'm not sad at all about it. A few years ago I produced a software tool with the intention of making money. Got a few clients and the project turned into hard work and quickly ceased to be fun at all. I eventually stopped supporting it to win my freedom back.
As a hobbyist I can afford to spend 6 months coming up with a unique procedural planet algorithm, but if I'm producing a product to sell to the masses it's all about producing content quickly and keeping costs down. I create my games as a hobby so it can be less like work and more like art.
I worked a lot too to make games, but so far, I failed miserably.
Here is a demo of my latest one:
http://creatures-of-gaia.com/demo
...but I really have some self confidence troubles. After all, it's not the first game I made and so far I only lost money with them.
I actually even quitted my job to try to make a living with games, but so far it has been 8 month without income and a career break.
It'll be the last game I make, I'm already planning to stop and look for a normal job, starting from scratch, not in games anymore. I have to pay my bills!
It hasn't really been a wonderful experience, more the opposite. There is simply no room for "average" games. If you don't reach top ratings, nobody will even look at it after a few days. Like somebody previously pointed out, with hundreds of new games per day on the apple store, your game has to be great and to be lucky enough to get noticed. It's much more likely that what you spent a year working hard on will be forgotten forever in ocean of "average" games nobody cares about. That's the hard reality of making games. It's an extremely competitive and ungrateful business. Or at least, that's how I experience it. Somehow, people seem to only see the top-100 successful games, without noticing the huge ocean of unsuccessful games behind. I don't know of any field with such high competition and so many studios closing and emerging.
Hi,
I tested the game, and I think you did a good job.
I think it needs some more marketing so that people get to know it.
of course, there is a bit room of improvement, but thats only some details:
1) I missed to see how much gold coins I have so that I know when I can go to the dealer
2) there should be the upgrade Icon in the team split window box, when you can upgrade a team member
wish you good luck
Thx for the feedback. The little upg. icon is actually a quite nice idea. ...as for the rest, like the gold coins, yeah, it's still "in progress". Thanks for trying it out.
I think there are a lot of people that develop games that fall flat and reading through the posts Shade has pretty much nailed it. It's so easy to keep going back to the one game and try to salvage it over and over but the best is to just start another game and learn from the previous game. I worked on a game a couple winters and then released it and it never caught on, it can be a real downer but life goes on.
Thx for the feedback. The little upg. icon is actually a quite nice idea. ...as for the rest, like the gold coins, yeah, it's still "in progress". Thanks for trying it out.
I actually just spent some time playing your game, too. I'm a sucker for a good RPG/turn based strategy. The five level cap was pretty interesting, in that it really made a difference how you decided to level up your characters. You could level some guys up with health every time and then put them on the frontline of your formation, and level up the other guys with damage every time and put them in the back. Pretty cool!
The main thing I noticed was that the UI (while generally pretty good!) was a bit difficult at times. Sometimes I felt like I had to click on my guys a couple times, and it wasn't super obvious which guy I had selected. It also wasn't obvious when I could select someone. Like, if the attack animation is still playing, then I can't select my next guy, but the UI doesn't really indicate that. Also, I would have liked to be able to walk around the map without having to click each tile along the path.
But otherwise I thought it was looking pretty good. Nice sound, good artwork, fun gameplay.
Hi, i found many games which are really well made and can do good into the marketing but those games only suffers from the good source of marketing strategies.
Big banners only take an advantage of their brand names and faces less problems in promotions.
Recently, i have made this game with good response in the market with above 10,000 downloads and good reviews.
the only problems i m facing is the promotion and lack in marketing strategies..
Game name - The Theft Master
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.migital.TheTheftMaster&hl=en
