Comment by bmalicoat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bmalicoat | Hacker News Reader

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I'll go with the trite advice of don't quit your day job. Making games is very accessible right now. Making money off games is not as accessible! I just released my biggest game Pine Tar Poker (https://www.pinetarpoker.com/) and I built it all during nights and weekends when I had another job. Making the game was fun for the most part, but it would have been a lot less fun if I was stressed on how long it took and how much it was going to make back.

My basic understanding of marketing games today is that it's a full time job to stand out in such a saturated market. If you're not posting clips on TikTok, vlogging behind the scenes on YouTube, or putting up your Steam page right now to collect Wish Lists, you're already behind the eight ball. Again, this stress goes away if you're just dabbling in it as a hobby.

Just like anything in life, you start by doing. You can maximize your experience by having the right expectations and goals going in.

As others have mentioned, game jams are a great way to dive in, get experience, and meet some people.

Edited to add: my original answer was colored through the lens of "going indie". If you're looking for a job in the industry, I think that's a much "easier" path. Start building a portfolio of completed projects (not just prototypes!). If you have projects that show your creativity, skill, and grit, that's a lot easier for hiring managers to understand than yet another PDF resume in their inbox.

I bought your poker game earlier and am enjoying it. Well made! A few questions:

- What made you decide on designing a game for mobile vs PC/consoles?

- Did that introduce different challenges?

- Lastly, what engine did you, if any?

Thanks for the support, really appreciate it! Glad you're enjoying Pine Tar too :)

Mobile vs PC/Consoles - I have more mobile experience and the path to publish is more straightforward. Getting through Apple and Google takes very little time and is quite easy. To pull off Steam properly you probably want achievements (more art + localized strings), Xbox and Nintendo require them to approve you. Funny enough I'm in the process of porting it to Steam and hopefully Xbox and fingers-crossed even harder hopefully Switch. I do think you can charge more for the same game on PC/Console than on mobile. There are a lot of examples of this, so probably starting on PC and then going to mobile makes the most sense.

Challenges - Some challenges now that I'm porting the game: The game on mobile lets you tap anywhere in a 3d world. For PC/Console, you might have or likely have a gamepad so I had to make a cursor that was aware of what direction you pressed and "focused" the next object that was tappable and hopefully matched your intent. This is handled for you in Unity if everything is UI-space, but I have a mixture of world (3d) and UI (2d). This is the first game I did a full localization pass on, so finding translators, setting up the game for new languages, and making sure fonts had all the necessary characters without increasing the game size by 2-3x was a bit of a challenge. I am very happy with my solutions though and plan to use them on future games.

Engine - Unity. I have the most experience with it. I am tempted by Godot and to a degree Bevy (Rust is nice!), but I haven't seen enough games ship multi-platform on these "newer" engines. Unreal is nice, but beyond my needs right now.

“just released” says its 9+ years old on app store

you just did another update?

9+ is the age rating. I released it in the middle of December.

How did you handle the artwork?

I have a good friend who is a talented artist. We tend to look for styles that let us produce game content or marry existing content to the aesthetic with minimal extra work. Specifically, picking a good style and using shaders to achieve it can mean the ability to drop in Asset Store assets or models from other marketplaces and get them looking bespoke without much trouble. For Pine Tar, this meant my friend making a halftone shader that we could apply to all our materials.

Another option which I'm using on my current project is to go minimalistic and lean into typography and procedural visuals, so I don't need portraits or specific custom textures. This can work well for games like Wordle, where the game is meant to be front and center and the audience isn't looking for some heavy-weight theme.

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