So earlier on in the year I did a presentation at iFest Sydney about how to turn a passion for making games into a profession. It covers my journey from a student to a developer who makes a living off flash games.

I hope it has some useful perspectives you can take away if you’re looking to get started making money off flash games. If you have any questions just leave a comment!

This is what I’ve done so far, it got me thinking about all the things I haven’t done yet

What is a guy who hasn’t done any of these things doing presenting to people aspiring to do these things?
I’ve got a long way to go.

But I am doing what I love. It’s my job to make games – I don’t have a job on the side, I don’t work for someone else.
And so far, its payed for my university education on the same subject.

Everyone and their mom’s has the greatest game idea
Hard Lesson: Having the best ideas doesn’t make you a talented game designer
Skill: Turning that idea into an experience – it has to be learned.
You won’t get it right the first time. Or the second.
Best way to learn is to practice, the same way an artist or musician has to.

Minimalism if perfect for indies, especially when your starting out – cuts down time, makes up for lack of artistic talent.
Make a kick assed half, not a half assed whole

As an indie it is almost impossible to predict what will make money.

Your best bet is to make something that you’re passionate about. Something that you want to play. That passion will seep into every aspect of your game and chances are it will excite people as much as it has excited you.

As an indie, you’re the only one who will ever see your code. Programatic Perfection is masturbation as long as it works it doesn’t need to look good. Don’t ever rewrite. Ever.

You’re a game designer, not a programmer, concentrate on where your skills are needed the most. The places that people will actually experience.

Never program anything that has been done before. And almost everything has been done before and done better.

There is no reason that your next spare hour shouldn’t be spent making an game. After those 5 slides, you have everything it takes to be churning out your own games. Go!

Use FlashGameLicense.com to sell your flash games with ease!

Since this time I’ve also made:
Mr Runner 2: $19000
Mr Runner 1: $2500

Great set of resources: http://www.pixelprospector.com/indie-resources/

Recognition and respect: the successes of your previous works are presumed in your latest games. People come to respect your brand and the games that you make. It’s almost guaranteed that Mojang’s new game, Scrolls, will take off purely because of the respect generated for the studio by minecraft.

Often you’ll find that your games cross promote themselves. When Chaos Invaders was featured on Rock Paper Shotgun they mentioned Mr Runner 2, and I had a surge of beta testers. Often sites will refer to BitBattalion as “creators of Chaos Invaders and Gnop”. This type of validation works wonders for generating interest and also getting published at all. My latest game “Pathos” wasn’t well received by indiegames.com, but published simply because of BitBattalion’s previous relationship with them.

Your online presence will do work for you. If a sponsor comes across one of your games through your site or an article, they’ll often inquire about secondary sponsorships. All you have to do is negotiate the right price. Almost a quarter of my total income has happened through this alone.

Last but not least, I’ve received multiple of contract offers through my online presence, 2 of which I’m currently working on – there are a great deal of enthusiastic startups and companies that are actively looking for great game developers to work with. Your online presence is your key to their hearts and their wallets.

Contract work pays really well. And once you have built up a successful brand, you’ll have more contract offers than you have time for.

But just because you’re doing contract work doesn’t mean you have to do the worst contract work imaginable. There is a wide variety of contract work available, and if you’ve built up an awesome brand you’ll have the liberty of choosing.

Thanks Guys! Hope you could take something useful away from that!