He didn't do it for the money though. However, the financial toll is so debilitating that he is considering therapy 
for his now hollow soul. 
https://old.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1girefs/who_to_talk_to_after_failed_launch/
>I put everything into my game. If I died before it launched, my ghost would have remained, haunting people, my "unfinished business" getting them to publish the game.
>My goals were modest, I wanted just enough sales that it could get into the "more like this" of bigger titles, and have a slow trickle of income while I added more content.
>I could not get the "big viral spike" needed. I made a game for fun, not for the market. I realize one should make a game for the market, not try to force a game into the market. I wasted alot of time and money on marketing, my sales lasted about a week, and now are flatlined to zero. Without additional funds, and no skill in marketing, I won't be able to revive it via visibility.
>The answer to reviving it may lie in polishing the demo, in adding leaderboards, in adding new content. But I've been wrong so many times before, that I'm having troubles trusting myself.
>How does one reconcile with their passion being the fault? If the force that drives me is what misleads me, how can I trust any future strategic decision or passion? If it was just me, I could handle it. But my hype and confidence dragged my friends into the sunk cost fallacy for years... I could live with continuing to make the wrong decision and hurting myself, but not them, but the lack of success means I cant even atone for that... I tried to accept and move on, and it just felt.. hollow. Once my mind latched onto ideas that maybe it could be saved, I felt alive again. But how can I trust myself, this sounds like classic grasping at straws of hope.
>Because I hermited myself, I have no one to talk to about this, other than the friends who I dragged into this and are in the same boat. Im afraid if I speak my current distress, they will be even worse off. If I state it could be saved erroronously, I will drag them in further.
>I understand psychologists is probably the answer? But I don't quite get it, how is a stranger suppose to know what direction I should take my life after half a decade of work. I hold all the context. I'm old enough to know we are all just winging it, and they probably are too.
>Is anybody here not winging it? Has anybody spent 5+ years on a project isolating themselves and watched it release to a whimper? What came next? Does anybody know how to tell when they are following their dream, vs being weak and following the comfort of their sunk cost fallacy?
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1219800/Galactic_Thunderdome/
Man, he should not have spent five fricking years on this. Jesus christ. It doesn't even have networked multiplayer, where did all that development time go? Normally I'd be more snarky. I knew it would be bad based on the title since this genre of post hits /gamedev every month but I just feel kind of bad about this one. 
Anyone could have told him that this wasn't financially viable if he'd pitched the concept before burning away five years of his life. He's clearly not completely inept though. If he'd spent 5 years making something marketable he might have had some form of financial success.
Game dev waxes philosophical about how his weary soul would haunt his associates if his 5+ year endeavor had gone unfinished. It's a $15 2D brawler that would have been outdated on Kongregate ten years ago.
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I feel like part of the reason he spent 5 years making this is he probably made his own engine from scratch rather than just going with something tried and true. It's all about rapid iteration nowadays, less about optimizing and delivering bugfree games.
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If that's true, he's miles ahead of a lot of game devs right now... He actually went and did it instead of just copying what everyone else uses
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I mean yeah, there's something admirable in that, but ultimately the end users won't care that the game's well-made under the hood. The fact that modern gamedevs keep making their games slower and slower despite the leaps and bounds made by hardware designers basically shows that in the end it's preferable to just copy what everyone else uses because g*mers'll buy whatever slop's they shit out.
I honestly think that the game does look well made if a bit 'neoclassique' with the artstyle being really reminiscent of flash games from the late 2000's. Like the assets he's using aren't actually bad, but they're in an artstyle that fell out of favour years ago. Even other flash games getting steam releases're redoing their artstyles to be a lot more cartoony, Amogus style rather than realismic or grotesque yet clean like this man's game. It's either that or he's lying about spending 5 years making his game and it only took that long because he developed it during lunch breaks at work.
All in all, it's an odd situation since usually these kinds of stories come about when the dev makes something that looks like absolute dogshit from the get-go. I also think that a lot of /r/gamedev is pure cope because there's a lot of games out there made by first time indies that blow a lot of their shit out of the water based on the concept alone. See: Peripetia, Elin, Starsector, those weird psx games made by
s.
Like sure, you could say that some of these games paid for a lot of professional art, but even then the art's still uniquely to the game and helps give it a personality of its own.
A large undercurrent I see with redditor-made games is the ideas they try to implement always end up being kind of half assed or not really that fun. While I kind of get that making all new bespoke game mechanics and then implementing them is hard, I also don't really see why you'd start devving a game if you don't already have an idea like that in mind, since in my point of view, there's very little point in making something if the idea's already been done and you don't really bring any new twists to the mix, however miniscule they are. Another thing is that art's superbly important for games and is probably the reason why they're so hard to make, because you'll either have to pay someone else to make you assets or try your hand at it yourself. I think we've all seen what programmer art looks like.
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Today: use AI.
The 5 people who will cry "muh ai art!!" and still buy the game don't matter compared to the 20 people who will buy the game cause the art looks decent.
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Unironically I think this is bad advice unless you're only using it for background assets like grass textures or whatever. The use of AI for character art reeks and repels anyone who recognizes that shit because it's just the modern version of an assetflip game. I'm also not really sure how good AI is for pixel art either. Honestly the main problem I can forsee's that you'll almost definitely want to touch the AI-genned assets up afterwards unless you're trying to go for the King! mobile game look.
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"muh ai art!!"
Then stfu. Takes you 1min to look up pixel art loras on civitai
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They look like shit AI art looks like shit I wipe my peepee on you.
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"AI art looks like shit"
u up for it ?
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I'm always ready to r*pe.
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I suspect he'd get over 5x the sales if he had an "cute" pixel art style with a cat motif somewhere and random refrences to japanesque design thrown in
Accounts exist to repost and source the shittiest pixel art you've ever seen
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I'm not a game dev, so I'm probably out of pocket...
So many people don't try to learn by doing. They try to find the best teacher they can find to give them the right answers. This leads to an over-reliance on cowtools and little ability to actually know what's going on under the hood.
This guy actually went through and did it, albeit unsuccessfully. I feel like the lessons he's learned puts him in a better place than a lot of people
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Frick the art, just crank that shit out and fix it later. If the gameplay is great, it won't really matter.
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Readable art is important in something fast-paced like this game and it looks like such a fricking mess to follow.
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Oh, I didn't look at it. I assumed it was gay and lame because the dev was on reddit being a little b-word.
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Honestly looks fun. I'd give it a shot if it wasn't $20, had action readable to someone who doesn't watch shounen fight anime all day, and had network play.
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Well then have at it, sweaty!
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Not one single person is gonna read all that
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