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Comment by mmastrac | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps a negative example might be interesting? I started working on game-development tools in 2015 and have sold a grand total of $0. Granted I have been contracting for the last year and haven't done development or marketing for a few months, but I would say it's a clear non-success.

If you're curious what it was, it's here: https://codano.com/typeforge/.

The reasons I've probably done poorly:

1) I haven't spent time networking with the people who are the market of the product. I worked with a few people on /r/gamedev on it last year, but never followed up.

2) There's a lot of other tools in this space, some free, some not-free (but platform-limited) and I haven't distinguished myself from any of those.

3) There's not a lot of supplemental material to suggest how people might use the product and why people might want to use this product over any others.

EDIT: and if you want a free license for kicks, just email me (see my profile).

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Game Industry Vet here. Unfortunately middleware or tools for gaming have gone to the 0 margin, free area. Mainly because 99% of game generally don't make much money so people dont invest heavily. Those 1% that do make a lot of money tend to invest in the their own tool development or want to retain control of their middleware hence less money in the pot.

Another interesting point, IMO, is that game development attracts very capable developers. Thus they tend to be very adept at finding things for OS instead of forcing the company directors to buy large licences for convoluted software they don't need :)

I'm finding that people spend way more money in the rough prototyping phase than during the "ok let's build the real thing" phase. Especially in things like asset stores.

Myself and a bunch of friends working on VR stuff easily spend $10-50 on a random helper to get a prototype done in a few hours rather than a few days.

That is really interesting. I think definitely find myself doing this as well. It's easy to justify both personally and professionally. Thanks for bringing that up.

Interesting! Good to know, and this obviously matches with my experience.

I feel like the level of complexity required to sell software for game development has moved up a fair bit to things like procedural texture/mesh generation.

I don't know if I'm going to continue along these lines. If I can squeak out a minimal revenue stream I'd be happy, but if there's literally zero opportunity in this area I'll have to look elsewhere.

At the risk of derailing, some feedback, if I may: I think it need better examples.

Of course, you're selling the tool, and it's the buyer's creativity which limits the outcome rather than your own - but the first thing I'm thinking when I look at that page is "oh this tool is at least ten years old, maybe it's still good, but I'm going to try and find something more modern".

It's just a weird psychological effect of the fonts on the page, I suppose. I'm not saying everyone's like that - and actually, I'm not the target market anyway, so maybe this doesn't apply. But I suspect if I'm thinking that, that others are too.

Thanks for sharing that. When all we see are success stories, we miscalculate the amount of effort required to start generating passive income. Passive income is rarely passive from day one.

Looks pretty cool. What language and UI toolkit did you build it with?

It's a Java app with a JavaFX web panel for the UI. I have a second (unreleased) version based on Electron and a Java "backend" for doing all the image processing heavy lifting.

I've been working on the hybrid framework as an open-source project here: https://github.com/orbitaljs

Codano, good name

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