During an IGDA Melbourne Chapter meeting back in April, The Voxel Agents gave a retrospective of year 1 talk, providing a brief summary of their first year of independent games development. Simon Joslin from The Voxel Agents supplied the slides from his presentation at The Voxel Agents website with the promise of a more detailed account of the retrospective in the very near future.
Well, he wasn't kidding. Recently published as a four page feature at Gamasutra is the whole story which discusses in depth the trials, misses and successes that the small Melbourne indie team has experienced over the last year, right up to their most recent release, Train Conductor 2.
The Voxel Agents have suffered some set backs during their brief stint but they're definitely on the rise, and with the experience they've gathered from the past year, they've generously decided to share all their stats, their expectations coming into independent games development, major lessons learnt on the way, and thoughts on where they had gone wrong and right with the hope that others don't make the same mistakes.
We set out to develop short, sharp, and gameplay-focused titles. Development began hastily, and within six weeks we had Dolphin Hero finished and out the door. Never again would we make a game so quickly! We hadn't given much thought to who would play Dolphin Hero; we just made it. This was a big mistake. Dolphin Hero earned just $300 in its first 6 months on the App Store, but we persevered.
The feature includes an incredible amount of detail and stats from the business side of running the company. Indie developers would find immensley insightful the breakdown of how much money was coming in, where and how it was getting allocated to run their business. All the sales numbers from their games deleases, as well as an informative list of all that they've achieved so far is included.
If you're an indie games developer just starting out, you really need to read this feature now. While it does show the harsh reality of independent games development, it is extremely insightful and even inspiring write up.