Budget : ~20,000 € *

Gross revenue : ~100,000 € *

Net revenue : ~45,000 € *

Kickstarter : 4,245 €

Units sold (PC + consoles) : ~12,000

Price : $9,99

Game text : ~100,000 words

Translations : 6 languages

Middleware : GameMaker Studio 1.4

Lines of source code : ~80,000

Hours of work : 6,000

Time spent : 2 years (1.5 full time, 0.5 free time)

Staff : 1 (+ extras for musics & translations)

Release dates :

Links :

https://www.demetriosgame.com

https://twitter.com/COWCATGames

* All the numbers are very rough estimates.

* Budget is mostly the money I needed to make a living while making this game. I deliberately reduced my way of living to avoid unnecessary expenses.

* Gross revenue is the total amount of money the game generated, cumulative on all platforms.

* Net revenue excludes all taxes, platform shares, refunds... so basically, the money that got back to me.

Context : A 33-year-old French programmer makes a silly adventure game by himself and attempts to sell it!

Today marks the two-year anniversary of this BIG adventure!

I've been wanting to write this Post Mortem for a long time, but I kept delaying it. Most are posted right after the release of a game so you only get a short-term view. Instead, I thought it would be much more interesting to wait & see how my little indie game performed long-term!

This especially makes sense as Demetrios is a one-of-a-kind project. How many adventure games do you know that have been released on every single modern gaming platform, with all versions developed, ported and marketed by a single man?

How it all started

I am a 33 year old French guy. I started programming games at the age of 10 on an old Amstrad 6128 computer! (similar to the more popular C64) But I only made a game intended for sale recently.

Yes, the original intro and some cutscense were made with ugly CGI. The final version is fully 2D hand drawn, thankfully

Demetrios is a game I started in 1999 when I was in high school, after playing Broken Sword 1 & 2 on PS1. I thought they were awesome, so Demetrios started kinda like a fan game! Then took another, more personal direction. It was a first person adventure, focusing on silly interactions and filled with stupid characters.

Back then, I completed it in 3 years on my free time. Of course, in the early 2000s it was pretty much impossible to release a game without a publisher, so this original version was never released and I forgot about it for years.

How the final game looks on PS4.

Later on, I studied computer science at school and university and got a job at a service company for 7 years. But I never forgot my will to make games as a living someday. One day I was fed up with my job and decided to give it a try. And the most obvious choice was to remake Demetrios. There was a whole adventure game out there, "ready" for people to play, but no one was able to!

I made sure to reduce my expenses as much as possible and ensure I could make do with the bare necessities. I knew beforehand that doing just the PC version wouldn't be enough to make a living, so I planned Demetrios to be easily scalable and playable on any device from the start.

Development

So, "Demetrios – The BIG Cynical Adventure" is actually a full remake of that first version I did as a teenager (all the figures at the top only take into account the time spent on this remake) Except I redid everything and improved it vastly.

How do you make a quality game on a tiny budget?

I did everything myself. I wanted to keep the budget as low as possible to avoid any risk. I come from a programming background, so I pretty much learned everything in the process - doing art, composing music, writing story and dialog... but also marketing, accounting – and all the annoying stuff! :p

I started programming the remake with a prototype, which was just two rooms. I made them feature-complete so it would be exactly be like the final version. (of course it evolved a bit afterwards, but not too much!) This helped me a lot as I had the game engine ready, I could gauge if the game would be fun and then expand by making new rooms by following the same pattern.

I was very bad at doing perspectives, so to make the first two rooms, I used a quick 3D software called “Sketchup”. Throughout development I re-did the lines / colors of that first room at least a dozen times...!

Even though I was much older and as such, it was made in a much more professional way, I intended to keep the tone of the original game – in particular the humor and all the possible stupid interactions. This makes Demetrios pretty unique. I call it the "most professionally amateurish adventure game" available! How many consoles games do you know that let you pee in a police department or crap on a photocopier?

I worked on this project part time before leaving my job, then full-time for almost two years. Aside from family time, it took all my time. About 8-10 hours a day, weekends included. I never stayed up at night though. I always went to bed before midnight. I need 8 to 10 hours of sleep anyway.

I kept everything from the original version and added a lot of stuff. Chapter 5 (the graveyard part) was almost scrapped during development because I felt it didn't bring anything to the story. However I kept it because it's a nice change of pace, with only puzzles and no characters to talk to.

Here's an example of art that evolved while doing the remake. The top screenshot comes from the original version from 18 years ago, the middle one from an alpha build of the remake, and the bottom one from a final build. Quite the improvement!

The game is pretty long for the genre (~10 hours) and text heavy. If not for the puzzles and the always-short dialogs, this could be seen as a Visual Novel. I wrote everything myself in English and later translated it into French. But I intended to make it available in more languages. I feel this is very important for an adventure game.

This was a challenge considering all the text involved, but fortunately I was able to find reliable translators, most who were beginning in the field and were especially looking for a good name on their CV! As such, the game ended up available in 6 languages, including Spanish, German, Italian and even Russian! Quite uncommon for a low budget adventure game, I believe.

Aside from the text length, another thing ended up being an obstacle for translations – the text in graphics. Some of the humor comes from the graphics themselves, and having to translate these was pretty annoying because I needed to do it myself and export all these pictures for each language. This was a lot of work! I'll be more careful about that next time.

This includes some comic cutscenes (which were added specifically for this remake)

Many other things were added for the remake. In particular, a hint system through collecting cookies hidden on the screens. Each room has three and you can check how many you've collected and how many you're missing from each one! The point was to provide an in-game way to get help.

How many times have you been stuck in an adventure game and had to scavenge the internet for a walkthrough, sometimes getting unwanted spoilers in the process? Well, the cookies don't give you the solution. They give you contextual hints! And if you're stuck really bad, you can eat several to get the exact solution.

Little did I know that this would end up as one of the most praised features of the game! Some people spent hours, straining their eyes to look for barely-visible cookies, even forgetting the main plot sometimes!

Technical issues

Making a Full HD (1080p) 2D game isn't quite as easy as it looks from the programming side!

I had no idea until making this game, but even a 2D game can be GPU intensive. At first, Demetrios wouldn't run well on Intel HD graphics or other integrated chipsets, and it took a while to figure out why.

Actually, their fillrate just isn't good enough to draw more than twice the size of the screen (1080p) per frame (which actually isn't a lot at all, when you have to draw so many elements on screen, including full-screen graphical effects) So I had to rely on surfaces (a specific mechanism GameMaker Studio has) to optimize this, which in itself gave me a lot of trouble (more about this on the Mac paragraph!)

For a few months, the YoyoGames forum was closed – this made it difficult to get replies during some parts of development.

Another technical issue relied on the texture pages. Considering the game has 1080p art, the initial loading time was pretty long. On Windows, GameMaker loaded all the texture pages when launching the game – which means loading ALL the graphics within the game on startup! This worked fine for 8-bit graphics, short games or tiled-based ones – but not for long adventure games!

The team who made "Fran Bow" had a similar issue and alerted about this. After a while (a few months before the release of Demetrios) Yoyo Games issued an update with an option to fix this issue! (giving the possibility to load texture pages dynamically during gameplay as they're needed)

One last thing I had problems with were the particles. Initially, Demetrios had some cool particles effects going on in some screens. However, right before release on PC, I noticed the game crashing without explanation on some computers. But not mine. I couldn't reproduce it, so I had to remove them entirely and replace some important effects like rain with generic sprites. Less pretty but at least, the game was perfectly stable for everyone!

Internet issues

But the biggest problem I encountered... is not directly related to the game at all.

For a long while, I just couldn't get a working internet at home.