Hi! I've been following Snacko for a long while! Your gamedev journey is inspiring
I've been thinking over very carefully how I should plan the jump to fulltime dev myself. When did you decide you were ready to take the leap of faith, and how much of the game was done at that point? How have you been supporting yourself regarding funds during development since then?
first, thank you so much! i'm glad my girldisaster journey was at least helpful for somebody out there!
this is gonna be a bit long so i'll just put a break here;;
when did we go fulltime?
about a year after working on the project purely for fun
we were going to release it as a tiny game for any amount of money just to say we released something
well that didn't happen, obviously lol
when we realized people were legitimately interested in it and got publisher meetings, we decided to scale it up
but then found out it's way too difficult (mentally) to work on a game while working full-time
we had some money saved up, and i just finished college. what better time to absolutely ruin our lives give fulltime dev a try?
our plan was: if our savings dip below about 70% of the total saved, we quit
luckily, we never had to worry about hitting that point because we finalized with a publisher soon after (but we no longer have any savings now so ? lol)
if you don't think you'll need outside help it will be easier on your wallet, but remember that means more time on your end taken away to do things you will be less comfortable with
how much of the game was done at that point?
not a lot. it had basic features: farming, walking, talking to people, placing objects, fishing, etc.
this is what the game looked like around that time (2019 summer/fall)
the problem? they were all not that great or they didn't scale well. since then, the game has evolved and changed a lot that it's almost unrecognizable from a systems standpoint
best examples is schedule system to handle NPC actions, dialogue trees, and cutscenes
i would say only maybe 10% code/asset-wise, but 90% of the concepts and plans were already in place
this is what the game looks like now!
how have we been supporting ourselves?
barely hahahaha.
we got a set amount from our publisher each month. this can vary depending on your contract or if you decide to forgo a publisher
most of it goes towards paying for contract work (vfx, sfx, music, additional programming, etc.)
another portion gets sucked into admin (yearly accountant, lawyer, business operating expenses like licenses)
the rest goes into our living expenses. mortgage, bills, etc.
patreon was anywhere from $300-$600 at our peak, but some of that went back into merch for the higher tiers, so we can just say $400 avg
we got a $10k USD grant from epic games (megagrant, free to apply) in october 2019
our kickstarter was around $40k USD. most of it went to paying composer! (it's worth it trust me)
now that our publisher funding has ended (it's been...5 years wow), we have some personal debt as i made the choice to keep some business cash on hand just in case
Hello 🥺 I've been quietly following Snacko for years -- first on Instagram, then on Twitter, but then I left Insta and Twitter. But I just found you here! I really love your work -- it's so heartwarming 💜
What else have you been working on lately? I'm gonna go through your Tumblr myself but if yiu have any in particular you wanna point out, I'd love to be aware of it. Please get me into the top of your marketing funnel 🥺🥺🥺
awww, thank you for your sweet msg ;__;
i do have an account on tumblr for snacko, but i always forget to update it: https://www.tumblr.com/snackodev
our discord is probably the most active where i try to update people on patches and things like that
but i'll be doing better keeping tumblr up to parity with twitter from now on!!
we've been focused on snacko, so outside of that, i haven't done anything that wasn't personal work that's not game-related (like........fanfics and stuff 💀)
