These things are always motivation boosters. I've had a gaming idea for a long time now but I feel that I know close to nothing about graphics programming to make it work.
It's motivating from a hacker/programmer perspective, not so much from a business one. 8 months full-time effort for new car money? Unless he means a new Tesla Model S, it's not very encouraging, especially considering so few reach this level of success.
I don't want to put other developers off - when I talk about 'new car money' I'm not talking about earnings where I can afford a car and nothing else, just that I'm not out buying mansions in Beverly Hills (or Primrose Hill for those in the UK).
I didn't go in to this to make money, so the financial benefit has been a hugely pleasant surprise!
yep. what i want to read is an article about failure, or stats about rate of failures, where failure is not earning above average wage over the time it took to make the app.
Well, even he probably has only an imprecise idea how many hundreds of hours he spent on it, but I'll speculate it's comparable to how many hours he'd spend getting a master's degree in CS (at night, while working full time during the day). I don't know how the job market works in his specialty in his country, but in some job markets in the US, I estimate that being able to list that game and its sales performance on a resume is worth rather more than a master's degree. So from that side effect alone, this sounds at least as good as him taking a generous fellowship to get an exceedingly good master's degree. It's not vast wealth in one fell swoop, but it doesn't seem like a failure. And if he wants never to send out another resume in his life, instead writing and selling his own software, it's harder to quantify the benefits of business and tech experience on a first app, but ramen profitability on one's first less-than-a-year-in-development app sounds OK to me. The title oversells the achievement (top 25 ... in some smaller countries) but your term "failure" undersells it even more.
Hi, I'm Adam, the guy that made the game. I completely see where you're coming from, but in the article you'll read that my measure of success was making back the few hundred dollars I spent on art - so as far as I'm concerned I've succeeded beyond my wildest dreams!
I understand that my success is another man's failure, and that's fine with me. The 'success' of Pumped 1 is funding the development of Pumped 2 - I actually have a budget this time! But it's definitely not a bootstrapped multi-million pound startup - just me making games about grown men on kids bikes! :)
The article mentions some resources in the Engine and Learning Materials sections.
He learned by following tutorials for Corona SDK[1] for a couple months, learning what he could of Lua[2] and making a very simple game.
Then, he switched to Cocos2D[3] and had to learn Objective-C and Xcode. He bought the books Programming in Objective-C[4] and Learning Cocos2D[5] and started reading and coding.
He also regularly visited the Cocos2D forums[6] and Ray Wenderlich's site[7] to solve problems as they came up.
Start by deciding whether you want to target a single platform or a list of multiple platforms, and then choose whether you want to work with 2D, fixed pipeline 3D, or programmable pipeline 3D.
For single platform 2D, research the platforms standard development kit. For cross-platform 2D, find a library exposing an API supporting all available platforms[1]. For cross platform 3D, create a list of hardware you wish to support and find the maximum common OpenGL\GLES version and GLSL shader version.
This should give you an idea of the graphics API you will be working with and need to learn.
[1] http://www.libsdl.org/ is one such library if you go this route, I believe it's used in Angry Birds and Valve's Linux port of Steam.
