Monday, February 14, 2011

Slow progress

Low point. Writing this to gather some energy again to make progress. I've been reading my own past blogposts, re-read my post about my $100 / day goal and my fantasies of creating some sort of survival game. I've made some progress towards each, but nowhere near enough.

On the game front, as you can see from some previous posts I made some progress in learning how to make pixel art. It's not that great, but to me it seems like acceptable art as long as the gameplay itself is interesting. At least it could serve as a placeholder until in a later version it could be replaced by something made by someone more focused in creating art. Re-read my post about what type of game I'd like to create. Very vague and about a few lightyears away from being a real concept of anything, but I still agree with myself that the direction / general themes I describe are still interesting to me.

In the income side I'm currently doing something like this:

$0.25 / day total from 2 paid iOS apps
$0.25 / day from 1 ad-based iOS app
$0.33 / day from Finnish-language guide to Tokio
$1.70 / day from HeartBooth which I launched a week ago
$1.00 / day from Coolest Friends

-----
~$3.53 / day

My goal for 2011 is to reach $100 / day, so really far from that still.

What should I do to progress? I think I need to find ways to take small steps, like releasing small games that would as a side-product generate art assets that I could then use in bigger projects. However I'm skeptical enough about the chances of making any revenue on really small game projects that it's preventing me from trying. I feel pulled towards releasing social sites / more everyday tools for iOS since it's easier to picture those making money. For example I recently had an idea about making a start-up equity investment simulator for start-up founders to see how their stake in their company would evolve as it goes through several rounds of funding. I could imagine such an app to sell some copies even if pretty expensive, but I'm not sure it would take me any further on the game side.