How a bedroom developer's 'ugly little game' became an App Store hit | Hacker News Reader

How a bedroom developer's 'ugly little game' became an App Store hit

wired.co.uk

131 pointsshawndumas36 comments

I love stories like this. Personally, it's very difficult for me to focus on one project and get it to the point where it's completely awesome and people love it. In the past year I've worked on http://openhercules.com/ , http://emailegg.com , http://omgsmackdown.com/ , http://www.whoopsapp.com/ . I've also spent time working on a multiplayer game in common lisp and just this weekend I finished putting together my first desktop app. Perhaps the most successful site I've made is http://happyjobsearch.com/ , followed by http://visualmess.com .

Which is all to say that while I spend a lot of time on side projects, I have a hard time getting from "this is good enough to show people" to "people love this and want to show other people." Saying no to all the ideas that are always bouncing around in my head so that I can focus on just one, like the guy in the article, always feels painful and risky. My internal dialogue goes, "What if this idea doesn't work out? I should just move on to the next one. That way I'm at least learning something new." What's more, when I initially release a site and it doesn't get any traction, my response is almost always to mentally run from it so that I don't have to experience the pain of disappointment.

How do people deal with that?

Forgive me for being rather curt and blunt but... have you showed other people who aren't your friends?

Not curt and blunt at all - it's a very good question.

Yep I have, though I haven't done any real marketing. Over the past few months I've come to realize that's one of my real hurdles - marketing is just not one of my skills. I'm not sure where to begin with it, though I plan on learning.

I mostly share on sites like this, reddit, and forrst. Next week I'm going to be presenting Whoops in a lightning talk to a local Ruby group, which isn't something I've done in awhile and which I'm very mentally resistant to.

Maybe it's all just a matter of not having the right knowledge or experience. Programming is easy - I always feel like if I can't see the path I'll eventually be able to find it. Same with UI/UX. Not so with marketing, getting feedback, and iterating.

Aaron SW's latest series of articles have informative about tackling the hard problems. http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rawnerve

Made to Stick is an excellent read on the subject of branding and marketing. http://www.heathbrothers.com/madetostick/

I used to run a blog in 2008 and I got it to 6.5million page views before I quit it and I was featured in the book "Blogging Heroes" along with the founders of Lifehacker, Engadget, Ars Technica, Gizmodo and Boing Boing.

My key strategy when I was growing my blog was to find existing communities that would like what I was writing and then build relationships with those communities.

Thanks for the leads! I will check those out. If you don't mind my asking, what made you quit your blog?

It was a huge time sink. I stopped blogging when my mom was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and getting away from "trying to be popular on the internet" gave me the distance to see that I wasn't getting anything out of it.

I also changed jobs to something more interesting and now that's where I put my passion instead of a hobby.

Wow - I hope your mom is doing better. Thanks for sharing what you went through and I'm glad you found something better to focus your energy on.

Posting a link to every project you have worked on in a HN post is not really marketing.

When I first read this it came across to me as sarcastic, belittling, and unhelpful, which would be an unfortunate way to react to someone trying to honestly share his experience of grappling with fear and disappointment. However, I'll assume your comment wasn't meant that way.

Putting those links up was not meant as a form of marketing. They were meant to give context - to show what I meant when I say, "I get these things to a point where they're presentable but they don't make people fall in love."

Do you have any suggestions on what really would be marketing?

visualmess was informative, thank you.

Dev here. I never expected it to do well or sell at all. The way I looked at it is like this "I'll roll the dice, probably won't work out but I'll give it a shot"

I think in general you've just got to get it wrong. If you look at other games by EEG, you'll see "RollRover" - a terrible terrible little puzzle game that didnt even sell 50 copies, Why do we fall Mr Wayne?

Having said that, the biggest part was luck. right place/time etc

Congrats Luca, you have achieved the ultimate goal! If you don't mind me asking, whats next?

Updates with a bit more content ( challenges room / gamecenter ) and the android version

Congratulations on your success! I wouldn't sell RollRover short. I don't have an iPhone to try it, but from the video trailer it looks like a fun and well-made game.

I had a tremendous amount of fun with 10000000. It worked as a fun little joke about upgrading EVERYTHING, it's got a zippy little feeling to play, and not a pixel onscreen in wasted.

And... even though once I beat it I wished there was another level, I found it refreshing that it simply ended and I got to watch the credits like an old NES game.

I knew nothing about the guy's story, so this was kind of heartwarming.

If you like this, you might like Dungeon Raid even more. Similar idea: puzzle match, dungeon-crawl theme. But much more addictive, and deeper.

EDIT: fixed the name

Seconding this. It's an utterly engrossing dollar game that ate huge chunks of my summer.

Yes, indeed I do love Dungeon Raid already and have poured countless hours into it. I almost have every class upgraded to level 10. If there was a sequel I would buy it tomorrow. 10000000 was a breath of fresh air. I'm a little sad DR hasn't come up with a sequel or at least some updated content. It's a good game with very deep strategy and surprisingly a lot of content in a way, but now that I'm mostly through it I'm wishing for more.

These games hit a certain sweet spot for me in that you play in short sessions but there's a long term progress you can work towards. That way even when I'm tired on the subway I can chug slowly forward and still feel like I'm making progess. Other times I can rejoice in playing with zenlike brilliance.

Presumably this game took off because Eli Hodapp of TouchArcade covered it. But according to http://toucharcade.com/2012/07/26/10000000-review/, Hodapp discovered it via the TouchArcade app's Hot New Games list.

Does anyone know how games make it to that list?

Ugly little game? Screw you, Wired.

It's retro, not ugly.

It's all subjective but being retro doesn't mean something can't be ugly.

The vast majority of early Atari games where 'ugly' as where a lot of 3rd party NES games. However, retro gaming tends to ignore that and focus on gameplay even if it's bad gameplay which can add a beauty all their own.

It's... Fairly ugly. Lots of "retro" games are beautiful. This one isn't.

And a lot of "beautiful" games are quite boring to play. Even if this game is "ugly", does it make it less fun to play? Personally, a game like this is inspiring because it means that it is possible to make a successful game without spending a lot of resources on graphics, and focusing more on gameplay.

That wasn't the debate. It was more that it's retro and ugly but being retro isn't what made it ugly.

No, Swords and Sourcery is "retro". This is ugly.

But ugly has nothing to do with good.

It's retro but the pixel art isn't that great and is implemented pretty amateurishly. Seems to drop frames at some points even on a 4S when its really not doing much too.

With a decent artist this would be a very good looking retro game.

>"I haven't played any games at all in the last year. I worked on 10000000. That was the deal I made with my wife -- I would make the game but that was it, it was my project." Luca Redwood spent a year in monastic isolation with no free time distractions besides new prototypes of 1000000, getting a little better each time.

I really envy this kind of drive. My dream is to be that "bedroom programmer" making small games and it seems like there is simply no time.

There's time, you just have to figure out where else you're spending it.

Cut out any free overtime at work, cut out TV, cut out video games and books... and there's a lot of time.

I think it would have been a different story for the Luca Redwood if he had a toddler vs having a pregnant wife

Sounds like he had his fill of the game but couldn't bear to stop until it was finished.

"Some people said to me that they wanted to play more," Redwood told me. "It's great that they like the game but, you've finished. You're done."

I bet he took the FREEDOM tag from a sticky note attached to his monitor.

Congratulations to the developer! This is a great story to boost my resolve to finish writing my little game. I also used to work in finance and kept daydreaming about something like this. Some of my friends have published games on the app store but without much luck. Crossing fingers...

I was just watching a gameplay review on Touch Arcade and, man, this game looks fun.

One more reason I need trade in my Android for an iPhone.

http://toucharcade.com/2012/07/26/10000000-review/

What amazed me is that "Bejeweled" has become an entire genre, like "platformer". The original isn't just cloned, it becomes a foundation for larger games.

This happened with Doom, too. For a long time, every FPS that came out was called a "Doom clone"; there was no such thing as "FPS" as a genre.

It's fun to think of games that create genres and those that don't: the "Tetris" genre never really caught on like the "Doom" genre or the "Bejeweled" genre. Yes, yes, there's Dr. Mario and a host of other clones, but I get the feeling that FPS and Match 3 are gonna be around a long, long time.

Bejeweled is a Tetris clone in some ways. They're all "puzzle" games, check out how similar Bejeweled is to Tetris Attack or Meteos.

This game looks closer to Yoshi's Cookie than Bejeweled, actually. Sliding an entire row/column requires different strategies than swapping two adjacent tiles.

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