The Good, the Bad, and the Sobering.

With the rise of the indie gaming community, there comes the inevitable question: Is this profitable? Well after doing much research, I can pretty much sum up the answer in *shrug*.

Yes, there are raw numbers out. The short answer is that in order for a studio to be self-sustaining, one would have to hit sales of units into the tens of thousands. Great news if you're doing this at home in your free time with minimal overhead, bad news if you're trying to support yourself solely on this endeavor, sobering if you had hopes of turning this just-for-fun shindig into something you can do for a living.

So after our last weekly phone conference, we've decided to temper expectations. The best situation we can hope to get to now would be to publish a few titles and get acquired by a publisher. The likely case will be that we make a few bucks for our troubles, and have an impressive portfolio to pursue a career at another studio.

Implementation of key engine features will begin this week, as well as organizing game elements in preparation for content generation. I'm happy to report that the game has evolved substantially from what we had previously envisioned, and the brainstorming has led to the creation of an idea-board for future titles.

Lazy-reinventing the Map Editing Wheel

Yesterday I stumbled across an awesome open-source tile-based map editor. Recently rewritten in C++/Qt, it has almost all the features that we need. They've just added plugin support, so we're free to code all the functionality that we need. Did a dry run of testing with the XNA included tilesets and it worked great.

This is great news, considering it significantly cuts down on development time for the content editor. Now all there is left is to check out how extensible it really is, and whether or not to include Quest/Item/Character editing or to handle that separately.

Genesis

With the rise of the indie game development culture and the plethora of free high-quality tools available to the public to produce professional quality software, we have this unique opportunity to start our own game development studio. Our terms, virtually no overhead, no monetary risk. Best case, we establish ourselves as legitimate developers and turn our pseudo-studio into a real money-making company. Likely case, we make enough for beer money, or use this as a stepping stone to get into a real studio. Worst case, the fruit of our labors never sees the light of day and we abandon the project, lesson learned.

The first project that we've planned is a 2d-based RPG. Finessing a revolutionary game engine out of the XNA starter kit will be unlikely, but not totally impossible. Instead we'll focus on content because a good story will always prevail in an RPG.

So, this blog will chronicle our experiences, hopefully on a consistent basis.