This is the third part of my Hang Line post mortem. You might want to start at part 1 first:
DISCLAIMER: This section is going to be less fun than the other parts. It's all about data and it only has two Kermit jpgs (sorry). But it does have a lot of facts and figures about the game's production, all the tools and plugins used and lots of other juicy info.
When I was thinking of entering the terrifying world of indie game development, I read a crazy number of game dev articles. A lot of them told me now I was doomed and that the Indiepocalypse would spare no one. But there were some articles I found helpful - those that provided honest and thorough postmortems of exactly what the developer did and how it turned out, and what it cost in terms of time and resources. So I’m hoping to provide exactly that with this article.
Before you start reading, to give context to the data below I highly recommend familiarising yourself with the game by watching the trailer:
And ideally trying out the game (it's free):
Download on Apple App Store:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hang-line-mountain-climber/id1372005090?mt=8
Download on Google Play:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.yodo1.hanglinerescue&hl=en_US
Development team
This is the easy bit - it was just me!
Well, more accurately it was just me up until soft launch, then afterward I partnered with a publisher called Yodo1.
Aside from that, I did rope a few friends in to help with sound and music.
What experience I had when I started
Before making Hang Line I was working on AAA console games mostly as a designer or lead for about 15 years. I had mainly worked on action adventure games like Bulletstorm, Timeshift, Wanted etc. At the point I decided I wanted to make my own game by myself, here’s what my experience looked like:
Design: 15 years experience.
Programming: 1 year of experience from my very first job in video games.
Art: zero experience.
Production: who needs production experience when you’re working by yourself!? Er...
Before quitting my job and making Hang Line, I spent about 4 months learning Blender via tutorials, just a few hours per day. I also spent many evenings making a simple parking game prototype in Unity to improve my programming skills over a few months. This gave me the confidence I needed to get started on a full project by myself.
Budget
This is a very simple section but I’m including it as people often wonder about how expensive it is to make games. Basically the cost of me building Hang Line from start to soft launch was as follows:
My living costs for a year and a half
Cost of fixing my laptop when it decided to die (you should definitely have a spare computer to fall back on in emergencies)
Cost of a few Unity assets (you can see the prices below)
Cost of entering the Apple development program (99 USD per year)
Cost of entering Google Play development program (25 USD one time fee)
Aside from a few other smaller expenses specific to my situation, that was about it. Unsurprisingly, as a solo developer, by far the most expensive thing is simply your living costs. The only thing to be aware of is that if your game makes over 100k USD per year then you will have to pay for a Unity license, but hey, that’s a good problem to have!
Development Timeline
Here's a summary of the development timeline:
So in summary - the game took a year and a half to build from zero to fully a functioning soft launch. But in total it took about 2 and a half years from start to final release.
Production Breakdown
To track my progress on Hang Line I used a simple online tool called toggl:
https://www.toggl.com/
It works like this: when you start working on a task, you click the ‘start’ button in toggle. When you finish working on the task a few hours later, you click the ‘end’ button and simply write what you did in a few words. Then if you like you can also set what type of work you did (coding, art etc).
Using toggl serves two purposes:
Once you click that ‘start’ button, you are highly encouraged to actually stick to whatever task you started and not waste time reading articles, looking at Kermit gifs etc.
Once you’ve finished a project you get a really handy set of data that you can use to see a breakdown of where you spent most of your time.
So for Hang Line, according to toggl, this is what I spent taking the game from start to Soft Launch:
Total hours: 2571
Total days (assuming an 8 hour working day): 321
Total weeks (assuming 5 days work a week): 64.2
Total years (assuming 48 weeks per year of actual work): 1.34
The actual time I spent on the game at this point was actually about a year and a half, but there were times when I forgot to log a task, or periods where I couldn’t work on the game due to other commitments, hence the number above being a bit lower. At soft launch the game had about 5-6 hours of content.
Note: I only tracked tasks using toggle for getting the game to soft launch. For the period up to full launch when I was working with the publisher, I didn't use time tracking.
I pulled the data out of toggl to a spreadsheet and made this pie chart:
Here’s a bit more information on the categories:
Art: includes technical art tasks like rigging, post processing etc. as well as UI art.
Technical issues: stuff that I had to solve to be able to work e.g. getting computer fixed, build creation issues, xcode, cloud build etc.
Sound: getting sounds to play from code, not the actual creation of audio samples.
