The full saying is "he who pays the piper calls the shots", and that's a good reminder that if we want to be professional game developers we must always have our players interests in mind. We are making games for them to enjoy and they are calling the tune. That can sometimes mean changing our game away from our original vision based on feedback from our players. It also means that we have to understand the niche that we're targeting so it's best to choose one that we're familiar with. A well researched railway simulator developed by someone who understands that fan base will always do better than one developed by someone that does not understand the genre.

Another thing to notice about that saying is the implication that our players are paying us. There are many ways that we can ask for payment and some work better than others, depending upon the market sector in which your game falls. These are the main monetisation methods for games software:

• Premium - The player buys your game and then they can play it.
• Freemium - The player gets your game for free and can pay money to get more in-game resources.
• Shareware - The player gets your game for free but paying will unlock more features or levels.
• Adware - The game is entirely free to play but adverts are shown to the user.
• Donationware - The game is free but the creator asks for donations to support future developments.

The premium model is the most common in the desktop and console industry. The advantages to the developer are that you get all of your money up front and there is no real commitment to support the game once it has already been paid for. A disadvantages is that it can be hard to compete and get exposure when market places become crowded, most players will want some certainty before they will commit money upfront for a game. Another disadvantage is that once the sale is made, that is all the money you will get from that particular player and getting another purchase would usually require the development of a sequel. Finally, premium games are often more susceptible to software piracy as once the copy protection has been cracked the game can be posted to illegal software sites for people to download and play for free.

The freemium model is the most successful model in the mobile gaming sector, and this success is spreading to consoles and the desktop as well. An advantage is that you can offer your game as a free download which maximises the chance that a player will try your game. Another advantage is that you can make repeat sales to the same player and keep earning money all the time that your game still has players. Only a small percentage of players generally spend on in-app purchases, but those that do can often spend a lot if you give them the opportunity. In terms of disadvantages, you need to make sure that you have ongoing support to maximise player retention and it can be quite a delicate balance so that there is a good incentive to purchase at the same time as not making your game too easy once purchases are made.

Shareware games usually take the form of a free playable version of the game with additional features or levels that can be unlocked by payment. The main difference between this and the freemium is that there is usually just one payment to unlock all the features in a game. This has most of the disadvantages of the premium and freemium models with few of the advantages. With a premium game, if you have ten thousand downloads you will earn money from every one of them. A shareware game might get ten times as many downloads but will get a hundred times less sales. Particularly if you are targeting a small niche interest, you can't really afford to waste all those potential money making opportunities.

Adware games make the developer money by giving away some of the content space to allow advertisers to show adverts. This is very common in mobile gaming and on the web, much less so on consoles and the desktop. It's often used in combination with the freemium model so that the developer can also earn some money from those players that don't make in-app purchases. The problem with adware is that you need large volumes of traffic in order to make a nominal amount of money. It is realistic to expect to make about two cents per download on advertising meaning that a million download game might make in the region of twenty thousand dollars. Even if you can create a game with that sort of mass market appeal, there are probably better ways to monetise it than relying on adverts alone.

Donationware is the game development equivalent of begging on the street. Don't do it, it's not professional.

Most of the games released by Exobyte to date have primarily used the adware monetisation model. With three and a half million downloads across those games, it has been reasonably successful for us and more than covered development costs. I always felt that we were leaving a lot of money on the table with this strategy so with our latest game "Pish Posh Penny Pusher" we've gone fully freemium. It was necessary to design the game from the beginning with this model in mind, it's not something we could easily have changed retrospectively and added to our existing games. Pish Posh Push has a shop screen that allows the purchase of coins (to play the game) and tickets (to buy boosts), it also offers rewarded video content where a player can get extra coins by watching a sponsored video.

The combination of In-App Purchases and rewarded video in Pish Posh Push has been far more successful than using only adverts. We have thirty thousand downloads since releasing the game six weeks ago. With the freemium model our revenue per download is closer to fifty cents instead of the two cents per download that we'd expect using advertising. The good thing about this is that we can keep working on the game to add content and improve player retention and that will maintain our revenue levels in the long term.

You have a great game idea and you've made some investigation and are confident that you are filling a viable gap in the market. The next important question is whether you have the resources available to turn your idea into a successful game?

You have now entered the process of deciding upon the scope of your game. Ask an experienced software developer where the greatest risk lies when starting a project and they will almost always talk about scope. Poorly defined scope will cause your project to drag on into development hell.

The simple advice is that until you can consider yourself an experienced developer, with a number of released games under your belt, you should make small games with the tightest scope possible. You need to iterate fast and get games out so that you can grow your experience of the entire development lifecycle. If you create and release three games in three years, you will learn three times as much as if you only release one game in that time.

The next problem is that until you have that experience under your belt it can be difficult to judge exactly how much resource you will need to make a game. It might appear that a game idea has a small scope but in practice a combination of design decisions cause a level of complexity that increases the scope in unforeseen ways. There are things to be done to mitigate this; Using an established game engine, staying within well trodden technologies and using off-the-shelf assets can all reduce the scope of your project dramatically.

I've seen a lot of game development projects fail due to a misconception about scope and resources - many of them my own. Because of this I've tried to capture the essence of the process for evaluating the scope of a game into a formula that can be applied to any game idea. This scoping tool is available for you to play around with here: www.exobyte.net/scoping-tool.html

Some things to bear in mind when playing with the tool: It's only a rough guide, the inputs are very granular and the output even more so. The goal is to give a broad idea of the resources required by a particular game rather than an exact estimation. The formula used currently comes out as being very pessimistic about the resources that will be required for very large, complex and/or high quality games. Remember that triple A game industry titles can have budgets in the hundreds of millions and over a thousand people can be involved in development.

If you're a typical independent game developer, you will have a large number of game ideas floating around your head. If you're smart you'll have them recorded in a notebook somewhere for future reference. The question then is which one of these ideas is it worth spending your resources on to develop further?

Our best tool when choosing which game idea to focus on is the search engine of the store that we're targeting. As Exobyte's games are developed on Android first, we use the Google Play store for this purpose, but the same strategy will work for the IOS app store or Steam on the desktop. Decide upon some search terms that would be used by people to discover your game and use the store's search engine to see how many results are returned and how relevant those results are. Use search phrases that range from quite broad to very specific.

As an example, for the slot machine games that we've developed, the primary search phrases that we were interested in leveraging were the very generic "slot machine" and the more UK regionally specific phrase "fruit machine". A search for "slot machine" produces thousands of results for this type of game which suggests that market is saturated and it would be very hard to get any organic exposure through search. Searching for "fruit machine" on the other hand gives much fewer results suggesting that a game targeted at that search term has a better chance of getting exposure.

Because we were quite early to the market with our slot machine games we were able to successfully target the more generic phrase. That's why our slots games have the words "slot machine" in the title and we did not need to be more specific than that. Our more specific search terms were referenced in the description of the app to ensure that our game was exposed when those terms were used in the search engine.

Stores are now much more saturated, so it's usually better to target a more specific search term and use that exposure to give your app a boost in the more generic category search. This is what we've done successfully with our latest game "Pish Posh Penny Pusher". The generic search term we'd like exposure in is "coin pusher", but that search is saturated with hundreds of game results. By targeting the regionally specific term "penny pusher" we were able to quickly become the best ranked result for that search.

At this point you're probably wondering if opportunities still exist in the stores for games to be successful through primarily taking advantage of free organic search exposure? The answer is yes, there are a lot of opportunities, if you're willing to be flexible with your game ideas.

Here's a very simple example; Railroad simulators are a large and lucrative sector of the gaming market. There is a wide range of potential for new games in this sector ranging from fully 3D sims to top down strategy games. Let's say our game idea is a simple 2D top down game for smartphones that allows the player to make a small railroad using tiled pieces. The game then gives the player little tasks to accomplish such as transporting passengers from one station to another or moving wagons between sidings.

Our target search terms for this game, ranging from broad to specific are: "railroad sim", "model railroad", "railway sim" and "model railway". The majority of games target the US market, so the keyword "railroad" is far more saturated than the regional keyword "railway". That makes "railway" a better word to use in our app title, unless our content is going to be US specific. Likewise "sim" is a very broad term with a wide range of results, in the context of railroads "model" is much more specific and will produce better results.

So is there a gap in the market for a game targeting the search terms "model railway"? As of October 2017 it certainly seems to be the case. With this information under our belt we could be quite confident that a well designed game that targets this market sector would be commercially viable using an organic search strategy for marketing. ​That's just one example, there are many others out there and hopefully one or two that match an idea you have in your note book.

As a professional indie developer our choices are limited when it comes to the game that we choose to create. We have the important criteria that the game must at least cover its own costs. We are not hobbyists that can create games for fun and then hope that they are successful. We must choose the game that we make with care, with the intention of earning money from it built in to our decisions from the beginning.

The first major limitation is scope. The game that we choose to create needs to be achievable with the resources we have available. I would strongly suggest that you aim to create game in less than a year. Not only does working on a game for more than a year become quite draining, you are also putting all your eggs in one basket. No developer can guarantee that their games will be a success so we need to create as many games as possible so that our successes can offset our failures. Keep your scope tight, in a future journal entry I will talk more about effectively scoping your game ideas.

Start small and expand the scope of your ideas as you get more experience of the whole process. Ideally, make your first game in three months or less, go through the whole process of market analysis, prototyping, asset acquisition, development, monetisation, debugging, launch and marketing. Each time you go through that process you will learn new lessons that will inform your approach the next time you do it. Get as much experience as possible of the whole process, especially launch and marketing.

Making small games is a good idea, at least until you have a large team and a secure revenue stream. That still leaves the question of what game to write. You may hear advice to make a clone of some classic game such as pong or space invaders in order to learn the ropes. That may be a good idea for a hobbyist developer, but it is not a good choice for a professional. There is usually no money to be made from cloning old games unless you have an original spin, a license for original IP or a big marketing budget. We need to look for small games that fill a specific gap in the market.

As indie developers we do not have large marketing budgets so our best form of discovery is search. The games that we make must be targeted at search terms that we can dominate. As a case study, Exobyte's most recent game "Pish Posh Push" is a coin pusher game. As is often the case there is a regional search term specific to the UK market for these types of game which is "penny pusher". By naming our game "Pish Posh Penny Pusher" on the application store we were able to quickly dominate this search term and rank first in the search results. That initial group of regional players gave the game a jump start and now the game comes fifth in UK results for the much more widespread search term "coin pusher". A remarkable success considering that some of the competing games in this space have multi-million dollar budgets.