Flight Game Example - post mortem

This blog is about the FGE post mortem and the FGE sales stats. No pictures this time, sorry. :)

Flight Game Example: post mortem
My good old buddy James "Burning" Laker poked me a while back to write a post mortem about the FGE and end the story with some sales stats. That was a good idea I think as the FGE has a long history and it might be interesting for other people. How did it all start? A long time ago back in 2003 I had a rupture of the cruciate ligament of my right knee and that year was bloody ugly with 2 surgeries and beeing 4.5 months at home until they got my knee working again proper. As you might guess - I had a lot of time sitting in front of my computer and playing with Torque. I was thinking what kind of game *I* would like to play and remembered back some fantastic LAN parties we had even more back in the past with a game called Terminal Velocity (TV) from 3D Realms. Yay, I wanted to create a game like TV! That said I started to learn how the flight stuff is done in Torque, read the forums, tested in Torque, looked at the resouces section, read the forums, asked people in IRC, read the forums... you get the point. But one day I was at a point where I had a more or less decent flying "thing" that had some weapons, afterburners, missiles and all that stuff in one game. Subsonic was born and I submitted a dev snapshot to the GG site. As you might see, a lot of things were already in there that the FGE has today. But life changes sometime your plans and I stopped working on Subsonic due to real life (tm) interruptions. The project dissolved to the background.

Early in 2007 I was talking during lunch with my co-worker Tom Vogt about gamedev issues (our favorite lunch talk) and we were talking that before GarageGames it was a long time the biggest problem that there was no real and reliable game engine technology available to indy developers and got "solved" after GarageGames appeared on the market (Yay!). We then talked that for today's indy games often the unavailability of good game content is the limiting factor. Baaang! Like a flash it came to my mind to make a flying pack with all the stuff from Subsonic and sell that to indy developers to solve the chicken-egg problem. The idea for the Flying Starter Kit was born.

Impatiently waiting that the work day gets over I went home and immediately began checking what was in the Subsonic prototype I developed 2003 and what was missing to make that a starter kit. I started working on a fresh TGE 1.4.2 build and incorporated a lot of the things from Subsonic and soon got to a point where I had a detailed documentation and a demo level full with ugly programmer's art. I posted a blog about the progress the FSK made and began talking to GarageGames' Tim Aste about if they like it and would put it in the GG store. Tim redirected me to James Wiley who took over the content store job from Tim at that time. I submitted the whole FSK and waited for an answer from James. The days went by and I wrote a couple of mails to James. Oh dear, you can't believe how impatient I was getting an answer from GG. But they needed more James replied because there are a lot of guys like me submitted stuff and it all takes time to check them (beside their regular work!). Ok, so I needed to wait a bit more and polish the FSK.

Around that time the new Apple Macbook Pro came out (I _love_ that one!) and I told my wife that this will be my next development machine and I'm going to buy this new notebook once and if the sales of the Flying Starter Kit ever made enough to get it - as kind of a challenge. So, target was set: Get something done people like _and_ earn enough to buy the new notebook. Full steam ahead! Personally I find it important to set small and reachable targets like that so that you can work on something towards you really want to have or archieve.

More days went by, more work was done on the FSK and I renamed it to Flight Game Example because I studied the TGE(A) engine license and fount out that making starter kits is something you're not allowed with an indy license - only making games. So I thought I simply change plans and sell a game with source scripts to avoid trouble with the license. Silly thought. Really silly thought. It was Tim Aste pointing me in the right direction that regardless how I name it, it's a tool/starter kit for a developer and not a game that is sold to the masses. It requires a commercial TGE license AND needs to get approved by GG. There's no way around. Period. Additionally, the GG guys _carefully_ pointed out that they like the FGE in general, but it was missing more features and esp. good looking graphics. But they said too that's something I can work on and get back to them.

Phew. Time to sit back and think about the whole project. Is it worth all the effort? And additional 600 US$ for a commercial license? Upfront? Without knowing if the money comes back in? I already thought it looks good? It does not? It has not enough features?
This is the moment in projects where you need to have balls like an elephant and say "Yes!". It's a hell lot of work, stress, sleepless nights (I really had them!) but in the end I _believe_ it will all come to a good end. So stand up and face the issues I said to myself.

But what exactly did they mean with "more features" and "better graphics"? Isn't it enough to get some basic thing there and sell it and call it a day? No. I began to understand what they mean. It looked like shit and had _way_ too less features in it to be compareable to other products in the GG content store. Really, that's something that has to do with developing yourself. You thought you already were good in or with something and suddenly someone says it can be done way better. You suddenly feel like you evolved a lot in a couple of seconds and see now things in a different light. Without knowing (or with knowing??? :-) Tim and James created a process in my head to evolve and get better even more. Woah that felt good. The FGE made a big step ahead. It made such a bit step ahead that I thought that it could now compete with other products in the GG store and re-submitted the whole thing to James.

Honestly the answer wasn't what I expected. It got a lot better, but there's still room for improvement. Unfortunately this time I hadn't that Bang! thing and it didn't evovle in my head this time and saw what they meant. So I asked them for permission to release the whole thing on my own and call it a day. After some back and forth and upgrading to TGE commercial they finally gave me the permission to get the FGE out of the door. Big thanks here again to Tim and James!

If you read carefully you might wonder why I said "Unfortunately this time I hadn't that Bang!" some sentences before. Why? Now afer some time that the FGE is out of the door and sold so far somewhat ok I made the evolvement _afterwards_ and understand now what they meant the second time. Tim and James were right the second time too. I see today that there is a lof of more potential that can be put into the FGE. But it is kind of a learning process. I didn't see it before. It's like standing in the middle of a staircase. You can see downwards what you already archieved, but there's plenty to learn and take when you look the next steps upwards although you can't see _what_is on top of the staircase. What does that all mean? I learned a hell lot out of this project and there will be further improvements to the FGE.

Side note: If I ever manage to get to Oregon or to the indy games con, I'm promising to spend Tim and James as much beer until they're drunken. ;-) Thanks for beeing so kind and patient with me. I know I wasn't easy.

What was good / What did I learn:
- Listen _carefully_ what others say about your stuff. Esp. when they are known to have lots of experience listen carefully to every word they say.
- Torque is wonderful.
- GarageGames is a bunch of highly intelligent and friendly people.
- Work more closely with artists next time.
- Plimus.com is an awesome and cheap indy sales platform.
- Mac and XCode are wonderful.
- Visual Studio Express compiles a lot faster than Visual Studio.net 2003. Less optimization in VS Express?
- Blogging to announce your product and get feedback is a good thing.
- If you blog and put in videos, plan enough bandwidth for your webserver. I had up to 70 GB traffic a month!
- If you think you product is finished, take a break and get back with a fresh look to see if it is _really_ finished.
- Beta testers are a good thing if you listen to them.
- Making a demo is one thing. Making a _product_ out of it is a complete different story.
- Having a _released_ product evolves yourself a lot.
- Finishing a product brings you new job offers.

What was not so good:
- Work on my impatience.
- Don't let Plimus deliver your download to the customers. Uploading 69 MByte to Plimus via http sucks and fails often. Let Plimus deliver a serial and build your own product owner page where you can supply the latest downloads.
- Before release, test on more machines. Didn't notice the initial FGE TGEA bug due to different DirectX SDKs.
- The currency difference between US$ and Euro sucks (currently around 1:1,4). The more the Euro raises the less I get because I set the FGE price to US$.
- Plan some time for bugfixes after your release!
- At the time of the release my webserver was too weak for all the traffic that came up. Replaced it with something more powerful.

Conclusion:
Good project, learned a lot. Would do it every time again.


Flight Game Example: sales stats
Sales numbers is something that a lot of people are usually interested in. Some because they try to make estimates for their own projects, some because they want to see if other people have success, some because they want to get a feeling for the market or special products and some have completely others reasons that I'm unaware of. :) Unfortunately sales numbers are also often unavailable to the public because of contracts, NDA's or simply because of privacy. I'm going to tell a bit about the sales stats of the project and the costs I had because I think it belongs somehow to the post mortem, has somehow an educational factor and for some people I'm sure it will be a little "shock" because they might have wrong expectations how much sales such a pack can generate (or not generate).

So, if you're still reading this I guess your interested in the sales stats. :) Please take a second and guess how often you think it sold so far. But note that a flying pack is a niche thing and not something for everyone. I'm asking that because a couple of people I talked to in the meantime had _way_ too high expectations about sales numbers of this pack or these kind of packs. Now, roughly 3,5 months after the initial release the FGE sold 77 times so far. That's a bit below my own expectations and still way lower than expectations that some other people had (they thought these kind of packs sell a couple of hundreds instead of below hundred). That's what I meant with a "little shock". These kind of packs are nothing to get rich from.
But in general I'm fine with the sales. I got the costs for the commercial license back in and have a little money left over as you don't have to forget that Pliumus gets some money from the gross as well as some countries deduct the VAT from the price and you need to pay taxes on the income. So, I said it has an educational factor too? Well :) maybe not for everyone, but if you thought at the beginning of this blog "Hey, I'm doing such a pack too" hold on and and spent your time better on actually making a game instead of a pack! Seriously. It has _way_ more potential to sell better than a content pack. Just my 2 Euro-cent. My next project will be a game.

Anyway, hope you enjoyed this blog and thanks for reading. If you ask what happened to Subsonic, then wait for my next blog.

Martin


P.S. I'm going to order my new Macbook Pro by the end of this month. ;)