Archive for the ‘The life of VGS’ Category

Making a living

There’s a lot of information about how you can monetize from flash games. When I look at it I wonder how many of that information is written from the real world perspective in mind, which is: is it possible to make a living from flash games?

Not everyone has the skill and the vision to create Desktop Tower Defense, Bloons, DinoRun or some other hit games. For a game like these to appear a number of requisites are necessary and then some luck to help. These games or better said, these IPs are certainly profitable or at least allowed its creators to further expand their development.

But if you haven’t created a successful franchise, how are you going to live from flash games? Here is my opinion, after all, I do it full-time.

Don’t make a good game, make all your games good

I lost count on how many times the sentence “make a good game” has been used, but I find odd that there’s not a lot of mention to producing quality work continuously. If you want to monetize: make a good game; if you want to live from flash games: make all your games good.

Short games are too risky

If you create short games (less than a month development time) thinking that you’ll sell all of them for $500, think again! In my opinion, any game that receives that extra mile of polishing and featuring will substantially enhance the quality and therefor the probability of being licensed for more money.

Cut your expenses

Before starting this business I made about three times the amount of cash I do now. All I did was to cut expenses. It’s not that hard and you don’t have to lower your standards as long as you can identify when do you really need something or it’s just stupid to waste that money.

Why do I do it? I’m happy, that’s the whole point of doing what you want to do for a living: being happy. I just don’t have that many Xbox games and I don’t go out to dinner so often. I learnt to be supermarket smart and so on. It’s all common sense, really.

And why do I say this? If you really think that you’ll be rich from game development, if that’s what moves you… maybe you should think if this is the right choice for you.

Self-employment is not easier

So you have your own schedules now? No boss sucking your soul? Well… I work about twelve hours a day, six or seven days a week. In my before gamedev life I worked six to eight hours a day, five days a week. Oh I also had vacations! Now I take some days from time to time.

My current boss is a soulless man that keeps pushing me. My boss is me, sometimes, me and my partner Marco, which is the good side of my boss. You see, if you are in charge, the weight of decisions is on you! The responsibility is also on you!

Keep focus!

I’m going to write this in a confusing way, because that’s what will happen daily… Don’t waste your time browsing forums and reading blogs: work! Don’t waste your time watching TV: read blogs and forums! Don’t waste your development time with stuff you don’t need: code THE game! or relax and watch some TV. Don’t waste your time recoding everything: write reusable code in AS3 for crying out loud!

Hope this helps!

All game development takes dedication, love and hard work. Unlike most game development markets, we don’t have publishers to approve and release money ahead of development, it’s on our back to support ourselves. The tricky part is to keep development tight and smart and create good games continuously.

I hope that this helps if you are just starting up. Use your head and get ready because sometimes it’s really hard, but nothing pays the feeling of having a game out there being played by millions.

Happy Birthday to us!

00 hours and 00 minutes of March 1st. February has ended which means that Vortix Games Studio has been around officially for twelve whole months!

Just a short post, time for a celebration!

Everybody else is doing it…

…so why can’t we?

Welcome to Vortix Games Studio blog. We decided to create this are as a way to expose ourselves to the world a bit more, share ideas, show our work, release our rants and in a way bring together the information we have scattered to an area a bit less institutional than our website.

We hope you enjoy your staying and find this blog both fun and informative, if not now, in the near future.

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