Not a real money-maker, is he? Here’s a little piece of mind that I wrote about it. I think a lot of you developers out there have gone through this so it should be a familiar tale.
My name is Mladen Bosnjak, I’m a game developer from Croatia and am 19 years old. Since I was 10 I’ve been playing with game development (started with Serious Sam’s Serious Editor. Fun times.) I’ve always been fascinated by the technology behind PCs and games. Through the years I’ve learned how to use programs like ZBrush, 3DSMax and Photoshop and a bunch of other freeware alternatives to them.
I started my first real game in 2009. as a tech demo for the splendid NeoAxis Engine, from that tech demo arose my first game entitled SickBrick.
I made the whole game almost by myself, with programming help from a great friend from Canada Ron “Maxwolf” Macdowell who also took on publishing and my guitarist Dodo who recorded the riffs for my soundtrack (I would have played the drums myself if I had any money for studio time, instead we’ve got programmed drum tracks).
In October of 2011. SickBrick came out (oh what joy we brought to the world 😀 ) on sites like Desura, GamersGate and Apple Mac Store. The price is $7.99 I have since managed to sell 26 copies.
Which means I’ve payed more money for the engine license than I got from the game.
The first problems post-launch started happening almost instantaneously. The Linux version of SickBrick uses a Wine wrapper to start the game and we did not state that clearly anywhere. The Linux Gaming Community got pissed. Real bad. I got at least ten 110 reviews that state “not a native linux game” and I’m still getting them even though it says in the summary of the game that it uses wine. We just want as many people to be able to play the game as possible. A full linux port of the game will be made available when the engine supports it.
I will be submitting SickBrick to Steam soon to see how that will go. Try out the demo if you have the time and let me know whether you think SickBrick has a chance of being on Steam.
Future plans for SickBrick are a patch adressing some frame rate problems and better pathfinding. We will also be adding effects like DOF, MSAA, SSAO, FXAA and a complete redoing of some areas that look pretty bland.
Stay tuned for the first patch which will be released really soon. Like within the next week soon. :D. Oh, and a big thanks to the IndieDB and ModDB community for supporting me all the way through! You guys are awesome.
Cheers!