Failure Story of the Drunken Shotgun | Hacker News Reader

Failure Story of the Drunken Shotgun

gamasutra.com

49 pointsvHMtsdf22 comments

I was planning my future to first get great at Software development, then switch to game development once I got the skills.

During that time I visited a few indie game conferences. I realised quite quickly how underfunded and overworked everyone was, trying to bootstrap companies on subsidies. Not with the intention to become the next unicorn, but just for the love of games. Nothing wrong with that, but I didn't seem entirely healthy. At least most artists still understand the reality that they are doing it for themselves. most gamedevs make games for other to play, that naivety is quite toxic.

Perhaps once I'm retired Ill dust off Unity and start create games that I want to create. Perhaps other enjoy them but hopefully not.

Looking at this post-mortem, think the money and investment was worth it for the creator. 4k and 6 months is not that much for the reality check and experience he got from it. Better value then most art or game dev schools.

When I retire, I'm going to make online board games.

I'm doing it from the ground up with my own programming language: http://www.adama-lang.org/

I'm going to build my own UI kit for canvas: http://www.adama-lang.org/blog/ui-flow-with-adama

(I'm learning rust right now on the side)

For the UI kit, I'm going to build a collaborative editor/IDE: no link yet, it's a thought experiment. The language makes the 'collaborative' super easy.

Then, I'll build out the distributed system for making this a platform.

THEN, after all of that, I'll ship a single game.

Being retired sounds like fun, and then I'll build a lifestyle business SaaS around generic state machine-documents as a service... Or something, no idea.

"THEN, after all of that, I'll ship a single game."

A long life to you then.

I don't know. This was an interesting read for me because I recently had an experience that was largely the opposite.

I made a game using free time after work that ended up being featured on most of the big mobile gaming sites, as well as within the App Store itself (on the top banner of the Games bit). It didn't make lifechanging amount of money by any stretch (per hour I think would have just about broken minimum wage by now), but a decent amount considering it was something I was doing for fun. The experience has made me very excited to a) continue to update this one and b) get started on my next game project, which I think has the potential to reach more people. Or at the very least, turn out to be more interesting.

If starting from nothing I think it's all down to either having a snappy and unique concept, and/or a snappy and unique visual style. The best bit is that neither of these things necessarily require lots of time to pull off, just luck (or whatever it is). I have no industry connections whatsoever and zero ad budget, but if you do something that hasn't quite been seen before, and that people/sites will have fun writing/talking about, it can get you a foot in the door. Maybe I'm being too optimistic and underestimating how lucky I got!

I think your postmortem would be more interesting to read about than ops, frankly. It reads like the writer not only was expecting a larger degree of success for a not-so-interesting and expensive-to-make game, it also seems like he never found a group of people which enjoyed playing it.

In your case, it sounds like you would've been fine without external validation, invested not a huge amount of money into the project, and we're focused primarily on fun.

>Better value then most art or game dev schools.

While you could learn what the writer learned in a formal education setting, it very much seems like he could have learned everything he found out here from a few more chats or reddit posts with developers also in his situation.

Additionally, him launching the game seemingly without finding other people who really enjoyed playing the game feels like a major dissonance - I wish there was a concise way to put this without being harsh, but it reads like this was an expensive lapse in common sense and self awareness for someone who has the ability to build software for humans.

I think the mistake was a lack of marketing (well, and all the mistakes that led up to that). Even making the game primarily for himself wasn't a mistake, it was all he wanted to make so it was that or no game at all.

It's reasonable to build a product for a rare audience, even of just hundreds worldwide, but you can't expect a mass-market solution like the app store to find those people for you.

If I build a roguelike I'm going to advertise to 7drl people, not to the app store in general. The same with his thing, surely there's a forum or something where he hangs out with similar people who like insanely hard clickers? Approach them.

I graduated with a computer gaming and simulation degree and went to work in a factory doing tech support. I'm sure I was much happier doing that than I would have been doing game development.

During a gold rush, sell shovels. Or be a for-hire artist when everyone makes mobile games.

Or do cyber security when the entire world is digititalizing.

Although that might affect your mental health more than just selling shovels.

Now that you mention it!

This is quite a confusing post mortem because the overriding failure happened before the project even began. Even a basic understanding of the mobile market would lead you to conclude that only have a few thousand dollars budget is only going to lead to you spending far more than you make. This looms over the entire thing despite the other problems with the project.

Is that so? It seems the mobile market is dominated by big budget free to play games. Personally I find most of them not really fun as they are glorified slot machines and I feel exploited playing them... Anyway we don't see how many of those big games fail.

I would say it is mostly down to luck and marketing. Only a small fraction of games (apps really) make it big, most fail. And even really cheap games can become a sensation (Flappy Bird, 1024, ...). The development budget is not the biggest indicator of success, but rather the marketing budget.

Also, I think that particular game would have worked better as a sold app, or maybe free to play the first level and pay for additional levels and weapons. I mean what fraction of a cent does the developer get when someone views an ad? Add support only works if you have huge numbers.

> Is that so?

Yes.

The reason bigger budget games dominate is they spend an outrageous amount of money on customer acquisition. As long as the money coming out the audience is larger than the amount you spent you're still making money. The cost of entry into that part of the market is enormous and dominated by marketing cost.

Going into the mobile space with a small or no marketing budget and relying on luck is a lottery. No one is interested in a post mortem about not winning the lottery because the assumption is you won't.

It's a very interesting story.

Not just a mere failure, but a total wipeout.

Extremely simple games have succeeded before, eg Flappy Bird, as the author mentioned, so what went wrong here?

Maybe gameplay wasn't satisfying enough, due to a few annoying glitches and obstacles mentioned in the article, and probably the marketing was too weak?

Those extremely simple games were outliers. Most failed. And after flappy, marker became super flooded with even more games.

>> Drunk Shotgun is a top-down mobile game where you control a character with a shotgun, who is constantly spinning and cannot stop because he's just too drunk. You tap the screen to shoot the shotgun to damage goblins coming at you and to move around the arena. Character himself cannot move freely due to his condition, but the shotgun recoil moves him allowing you to dodge attacks, gather power ups and move through the arena to get a tactical advantage. You can also tap&hold to engage bullet time allowing you to time your shot precisely and analyze the situation. Bullet time is not infinite and is replenished by defeating enemies. After defeating 99 goblins you face the final boss.

Pah. Another game that legitimises the perpetration of acts of violence against innocent goblins. In all honesty, this has gotta stop! Future generations will look down upon people of present times for deriving a sick pleasure by the shedging of goblin blood.

End violence against goblins in gaming!

This strikes me as the kind of game that would have done well in the Flash market around 2005 on desktop browsers, but doesn't really work well with the extremely poor input methods available on mobile devices.

Huh? It is designed specifically for the poor precision of mobile devices. You literally just tap anywhere on the screen. That's it.

I wonder if the theme of the game was also a barrier. Alcohol and guns don't mix so just the title alone may have kept people from checking it out.

Only spent 4k? Add in your time at your typical hourly rate and despair. 4k is basically nothing in game development.

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