Forem: Anul Agarwal

My 11 yr journey as a [solo] developer (I am 26 yr old now)

Anul Agarwal — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 19:12:24 +0000

I am a 26-year-old developer from Vadodara, Gujarat.

What do I develop? Websites, and apps before - now I make games and earn a good living ($5,000 - $9,000/month)

I have developed since I was 15 (out of passion and curiosity). I started making simple websites using PHP, JS, and MySQL (+HTML/CSS). I used to finish projects for 12th grade students and get some small fees in return.

In 2014, I was 16 and switched to Android Apps. I made utility apps - music players, photography, launchers etc. Made around $1000!

I joined a design university in Pune which included gaming as a course. 3 years later I went to Scotland for Masters, all the while still making apps on the side as a passion. I did not earn a lot, as I was busy upskilling and enjoying my Uni life!

Right before COVID, I returned to Pune for a job, and during COVID I 'quiet quit' my work and started building games on the side. The job was paying me ~$400/month [fresher].

I got fired eventually, and set up my small remote team to make games. I hired a couple of game devs and artists. I partnered up with publishers who would fund our hypercasual mobile games. I did this from 2020-2022. I earned about $60,000 in total over these 2 years.

I got a good job offer from a gaming company in Germany in 2022 - got fired again, and I came back to India. I saved about $22,000 in 10 months while I worked there.

From 2023 to now, I am again making games - mostly as a solo developer but also hiring some freelance people time to time.

I make web games for platforms like Coolmath games, Gamepix, and GameDistribution. I also take on freelance projects. They pay well, per game, for someone living in a country like India where costs are low. Over the past few months I am earning $5,000-$9,000 every month.

Each game takes around 2-3 weeks to develop, test and ship to these platforms. I will also put my games on JioGames soon.

I use tools like ChatGPT to write most of the game code for me. Check out this video where I earned $10,000 from a game I made using ChatGPT.

I upskilled in writing and I am very active on LinkedIn (~10k followers). I get my clients and partnerships from there. Writing allows to me talk about my development process in a fun way and gets more people to reach out to me.

I am more like a 'solopreneur'/'indie' game-dev who wants to leverage social media.

All of this to say, focus on upskilling and keep at it.

Developing apps/products is my passion, I have been fired from all 3 jobs I did but that does not mean there is no alternative path. I can never fit in any job structure because I work at a very flexible yet high pace.

At some point, I may switch back to apps! I miss finding problems in my daily life and creating solutions around it!

Happy to answer any questions!

A solo game developer generated over $400,000 in 12 months from his game, with only 2 Reddit posts.

Anul Agarwal — Wed, 24 Apr 2024 05:14:00 +0000

“I did no paid promotion on the game, the only thing were two posts on Reddit on /r/incremental_games”

One of the best success stories of a solo game dev that I came across is of Matias Colotto an indie game dev, who developed the Idle Incremental game “Magic Research”.

[Available on Steam, App Store & Google Play]

The premium game, rated at 4.9 on GP, is a UI-based idle game where you are the headmaster of a newly created institution of Magic. The game contains various systems including exploration and fighting battles.

The game features over 40 hours of gameplay 🤯 with 6 dozen storylines to be explored.

But how did Maticolotto bring this game to reality? Let’s take a look at the interaction I had with the developer:

How did you come up with the idea?

“I love the concept of magic and the idea of using spells to solve nearly every possible situation. At the same time I felt like there’s not many quality incremental games that are not freemium / designed to try to get more money out of the player, so I decided to start the game.

Then, when I designed the Apprentices feature, something clicked and I found the game felt actually incredibly fun, to the point I wanted to play it over other games, even if I already knew how everything worked. That inspired me to keep going and eventually finish the game.”

How did you design the game and balance all the systems and resources?

“In terms of design: Although I had a rough idea (a few google docs and a spreadsheet to balance some key things, like the exp requirements to level up or the bonuses from retirement) most of it was essentially just building the feature I thought was appealing, playing through, and if it wasn’t fun, rebalance or change things until it became fun.

That’s why many of the new discoveries appear as solutions to problems you are haunted by for a while.

It also helped I was just focused on building this as a hobby/side project and not really depending on it to make a living — it made it possible for me to focus on making a good game rather than on monetization.”

How long did you work on the game for?

“It took me about 7 months to build the entire game, end to end, working 6+ hours on it every day. But it actually took much longer and most development happened in bursts. After the initial release on Android, I spent 3~4 more months bringing it to other platforms, doing a lot of UI improvements, and adding post-game content”

Did you promote the game anywhere, like Reddit, Twitter, or Youtube?

“Marketing: I did no paid promotion on the game, the only thing were two posts on Reddit on /r/incremental_games. My account was banned when I made a third post as I guess Reddit’s systems thought I was a bot. I’ve since gotten it unbanned, but I haven’t done any paid promotion or further promotion frankly.”

How many players have played the game so far?

“I would say at least 50k at this point. To be honest it’s crazy how popular it got. It was a passion project of mine and I realistically didn’t expect to get more than about 200 sales.”
(The number is from my interview with Matias 6 months ago. In a recent conversation, about a week ago - the number of players who played the game is ~100k!)

Do you also plan to do a second version?

“I am working on a second game, yes — which is why there haven’t been many updates on Magic Research for a while! But it’s still too early to announce much.”

This should be a solid inspiration for all the game devs out there looking to work on their own projects — Being a solo game developer comes with its own set of constraints — You have to become the artist, designer & marketer of your own game.

I have played the game and interaction between different systems is quite good. A perfect recipe for an indie game dev — if you are limited by Art, just make the UI your art!

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I am Anul 👋
👨🏻‍💻 I post insights, memes, and how-to’s around the games industry
🎮 Follow to level up your game development & design

I invest a lot of time to research and edit my articles. To show support, you can follow me or subscribe to my newsletter!

You can connect with me on LinkedIn where I talk about gen-AI tools and game industry trends.

Do we have any game-devs here? Happy to connect!

Anul Agarwal — Wed, 24 Apr 2024 04:32:56 +0000

I am new to this platform and looking forward to the game-dev community here!

I am using ChatGPT to animate my characters, in less than 5 minutes. Here is how you can do it too:

Anul Agarwal — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 04:28:42 +0000

I have been experimenting a lot with ChatGPT and DALL-E 3. You can create:

🌟 Game Characters/Assets
🌟 Game Logo
🌟 Game posters/marketing materials
And now, Sprite-sheets, so you can add more life to your game.

Here is an example:

Here is how to do this:

🌟 Start a new chat with ChatGPT & Select GPT-4 & DALL-E Plugin

🌟 Prompt:

🌟 Revisions

You will not get the perfect result on the first go. You need to provide feedback and train the chat.

State the problem & ask it to ‘fix it’.

Now this is great! But we want 16 frames.

Finally, we have our desired Sprite sheet!
You will not have the perfect sheet here. This is good for experimentation and visualizing different characters.

The next step is to ‘slice’ this sheet and generate a GIF. There are 2 ways you can do this:

ChatGPT — Data analysis

Simple and straightforward but not very flexible to customize. It slices the image by dividing the image into 5x3 frames.

HuggingFace Spritesheet editor

I prefer this as you can customize the boundaries and specify how many frames in each row exist.

Our final result!

And another one!

You can generate as many characters or item animations are you like.

Btw, I generated a famous trending game entirely using ChatGPT! Check it out here!

Subscribe to my YouTube, where I shared how I earned $10k from an AI-generated game!

Summary

With ChatGPT & the new DALL-E 3, the possibilities are endless. The end result may not be perfect, but it is far better than what it was a year ago.

With upcoming improvements, we will be able to nail pixel-perfect results that we can use in the game!

Stay tuned as I experiment more with gen-AI tools for game dev!

You can connect with me on LinkedIn where I talk about gen-AI tools, earning $$ from games and game industry trends.

I built a game using ChatGPT in 2 weeks that made $10,000

Anul Agarwal — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 04:20:06 +0000

I used ChatGPT to make the famous Watermelon Game, in less than 2 weeks, which earned ~$10,000 over web platforms and through organic mobile players!

ChatGPT
I use ChatGPT a lot to write gameplay mechanic code for my games. It is the best tool to delegate complex mathematical problems that are sometimes needed while coding games.

For the Watermelon Game, I used ChatGPT to:

👨🏻‍💻Write gameplay code

🌟 Controlling the dropper,
🌟 Dropping of fruits,
🌟 Merging the fruits to evolve into bigger fruits,
🌟 Win/Lose condition!

🎨 Generate the 2D fruit assets of the game

🌟 I asked ChatGPT (DALL-E) to generate some 2D images for the fruits in Kawaii style!

Then I imported these into an online PhotoShop tool (Photopea.com), to clean out the background and use them in Unity!

It took me 1 week to get the gameplay right and another week to polish the game!

Then all I had to do was reach out to various web-platforms to publish the game 🙏

Earnings (Web-Platforms)
Once the game was ready, I reached out to various web-game platforms. These platforms have a loyal player base that keep coming back to search for fresh and new games.

The most common way to monetize on these platforms is to show Normal ads and Rewarded ads.

I earned from the following sources:

✅ GameDistribution (ad-revenue) ($1,500)

✅ Coolmath Games (license fee) ($2,500)

✅ Rainmaker Games (special one-time request for their web3 startup) (license fee) ($3,000)

✅ Publisher competition (SuperSonic) (one-time fee) ($300)

✅ Mobile organic installs (My previous app got banned!) (ad-revenue) ($2300)

Distributing games to web-portals is one of the easiest ways to generate revenue from your games!

Watch the video
To explain better the revenue from each source, I have created a YouTube video (~8.5 minutes):

https://youtu.be/jiSFsdyRgzA

In the video, I cover:
🌟 Generated 2D assets using ChatGPT.
🌟 Writing gameplay code using ChatGPT.
🌟 Different web game platforms where I distributed the game.
🌟 Earnings from the web game portals.
🌟 A list of a few web game portals where you can upload the games.

If you found the video useful, do subscribe as this is my first YouTube video 🙏

I plan to do more of these in the future, if you have any questions related to making games — leave your questions in the comments!

Until next time,
Anul

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I invest a lot of time to research and edit my articles. To show support, you can follow me or subscribe to my newsletter!

You can connect with me on LinkedIn where I talk about gen-AI tools and game industry trends.