I have been thinking about the game it's on my mind a lot of the time. I am trying to figure out how to solve the financial problems of the game. I will go into depth on my thoughts here.
Our Situation:
Sin, and I are not millionaire stock brokers hiring hookers and snorting cocaine. To put that into perspective the rent I pay for my single bedroom apartment costs slightly less money than is being spent on development. That is how much of a bill this game is for us to make. This summer I am probably going to spend a few days moving to an even smaller apartment for financial reasons. That's my money situation. Sin's situation is not much better than mine. He lives in Europe, and electricity is extremely expensive there for rendering, and he still has not paid off his student loan debts. He has cancelled vacations to help pay for the game, and taken other austerity measures not dining out and being more frugal in general. We are both making a lot of sacrifices to make this game, and make it great. So that is where we are at right now. We are sacrificing material well being in order to focus on our artwork here. That is how much we believe in each other, and this project. That is our level of commitment. We are starving artists.
Before First Release:
Prior to our first release Sin, and I each got a little bit of practice in as independent developers. I was bad at visual art. Sin was bad at writing. The project I abandoned was made for fun and to practice. I abandoned it because the friend I was working on it with died in real life, and I just didn't want to work on that anymore. I stopped working on games for a few months. I never made a patreon page or anything like that. Sin made a dumpster fire in tyranobuilder. He can't write good, and it was an unpopular engine. He did monetize it but I don't think it ever got more than 3 supporters. He opened up a "Looking for writer thread" and I said to myself fuck it why not. It became clear to both of us that if we worked as a team instead of alone we could combine our skills, and make a much better project together than each of us could make on our own. We came to the agreement to abandon that project and start over from the ground up. The Kelly model is the only thing we salvaged from either of our games other than experience / practice. Several months later we have our first release.
First (Major) Release:
Our first release was gigantic. Over a thousand renders, 6400 lines of code, 10 animations. We waited a long time before releasing it. We considered splitting it in to parts as we are doing for day 2, but we wanted to make as big of a splash as possible in our first impression. You only get to make one first impression. We got a lot of encouragment in the form of praise in the thread in comments mostly positive, along with 15 reviews all 5 stars. It became clear to us that people did indeed enjoy our hard work. However, in spite of great praises financial backing was more mediocre. Don't get me wrong we love and appreciate all of our financial backers, but we do have a shortage of them for our development needs.
Second Release (Minor):
We fixed the small amount of bugs, did a bit of proofreading and added a single scene. This was a stop gap measure and a way for us to stay active, and get some more views for our project.
Third Release (Medium):
A couple of hundred renders, 8 sex animations spread out over a few scenes. This is where we are at now.
The Present:
Damaged Goods is generating $83.55 each month in revenues. Damaged Goods is currently burning about 10 times that amount every month. Sin and I talked about the finances of the game, and we came to the conclusion that this old onion video is the current state of Damaged Goods financially.
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We throw a lot of money in a hole and set it on fire to make money. We are looking for other people willing to throw money in our money hole so that we can throw less of our own money in our money hole. Can we count on you to throw money in our money hole?
Short Term Future:
In our current financial state we will continue to perform at our current pace which is a good pace. Next update is going to have a lovely lesbian scene that I am looking forward to. We are capable of continuing our pace for 1 or 2 more updates without growing our financial backing.
Long Term Future Money Hole is Well Fed:
We will see this as encouragement, and burn even more of our own money on top of our supporters money. The size and or pace of releases will improve a little bit. This is the future we are hoping for. This is the good future. The more support we get the better.
Long Term Money Hole is not Well Fed:
This is what we are trying to avoid. That extra bill adds a lot of stress. We may need to rely on a free community rendering service which has very long lines and is really slow. The money hole will have to shrink. We will burn less money. This will mean fewer renders each update, and longer time between releases. We love the game a lot, and we love making it. It is a true passion for us. However we are not willing to go homeless in the process of making the game. A man can only eat ramen noodles so many days in a row before going mad I spoiled myself and ordered a pizza this week and it was a real treat for me.
Conclusion:
These two futures of coarse are on a gradient. So every little bit of financial encouragment from our supporters encourages us to work a little bit harder. People generally pay for something based on three things. Preference, Performance & Trust, and we are trying to build up all three of these things offering a game of high quality with many paths and keeping our word. If you are broke like us we understand if you can't support the game money wise, but a good review or telling your friends can help out.
Thank you
