The nice thing about starting with budget games is that it can give you a stable base of ongoing passive income. You can then use this income to fund larger projects.
For instance, I only need to spend about 30 minutes a day on maintenance-type activities (i.e. tasks that are necessary to maintain our income). Most of my time is spent on doing things to grow this income.
So I can maintain my standard of living for at least a few more years with just 30 minutes a day of work (0 minutes if I hired someone else to handle those 30 minutes). In the short term, if I take a day off or work a day, I make the same amount of money.
The net result is that I don''t presently have to work to maintain my standard of living. I could take a year off, and I''d be just fine, although my income wouldn''t likely increase much.
When you reach this state, your mindset switches from "I have to..." to "I get to...."
Another thing to consider is risk management. If the first project you take on will take you 18+ months to complete, you''re taking on too big a risk. You don''t even know if the game will sell. Better to try a simpler game (no more than 3 months for the first project), get it released, and get some money coming in. You can use this income to pay for software and hardware upgrades and to convince yourself that the system works.
My first shareware game, for instance, was a simple shooter game called BrainWave, released around 1995. I wrote it mainly because a friend kept begging me to make a Galaga-type game for Windows. I released it as shareware, doing only the most basic promotion for it, mostly uploading to some BBSes, AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe. I think it made only two sales in its first month, but in its second month it was placed on a shareware compilation CD and made $900. It eventually settled down to only making about $100-200 per month, but it hasn''t been updated in years, and it still keeps bringing in about $100-200 per month -- it''s been doing that for seven years. Occasionally it has a really good month due to being placed on yet another compilation CD. I''ll eventually convert it to freeware and use it to promote our other games. The game took me only two weeks to write and had a budget of $0. I even did all the artwork myself. This simple project, which was originally intended as a test to see if shareware marketing works, has made me thousands of dollars and convinced me that shareware marketing works. This is a 16-bit Windows 3.1 game originally written with Borland C++ 4.5. The code is so old that I''d really like to kill it off, but the game just keeps selling.
Another game I wrote in 1996 (Cash Quest, which I sell as part of a 4-game collection) took me only 12 hours total to write, which I did in one long session. The other three games in the collection ranged from maybe 2-7 days each. This is another product that keeps bringing in passive income month after month.
The point is that you don''t have to risk months of hard work and hope for a big payoff. I think it''s better to start small, build a stable base of passive income, and gradually take on more ambitious projects. It''s a lot easier to complete a big project when you can work full-time on it and all your bills are being paid by your passive income from previous titles.
Better to risk a couple weeks or even just one weekend to create a simple game and get it out there than to spend over a year on a game that may or may not sell. It may only make $100 a month, but that''s an extra $1200 per year that you wouldn''t have otherwise. And to maintain an income stream like this takes very little time.
This approach takes tons of patience, but the end result is that you''ll eventually reach a point where you make more money every month from passive income than you would from working in the industry. And the nice thing about doing a simple two-week project is that you''re done in just six weeks.
You can see the light at the end of the tunnel as soon as you start, so it keeps motivation high.
Steve Pavlina
Dexterity Software
www.dexterity.com
