Glum Tom

Background

In 2013, the game company I worked for suddenly shut down with little to no notice. As a fresh game developer with only one year of industry experience, this abrupt change was distressing, but I quickly realized it presented an opportunity. I had always desired to make my own games, so two fellow developers and I combined our skills and experience to start an indie game company with our original creations.

Since mobile games were booming at the time, we decided to dive headfirst into the casual game genre, allowing us to learn and grow while avoiding advanced development techniques that were above our skill level. Unfortunately, since we all came from solely a technical background, we didn't have a solid business plan for our startup. But we had the passion and courage to step out of our comfort zone and create games that we truly liked. We named our startup "HardyPix Games."

For our first indie game creation, we wanted to create a mobile game adventure that was affordable and quick but still had interesting gameplay. We admired the well-known Egg Catcher Game by Softdiv Software for its relaxing qualities combined with multiple levels to keep the player interested. We redefined the game by introducing our own character creations with plenty of cute expressions and simplifying the controls.

Alas, Glum Tom was born. To play Glum Tom, players have to discover and identify all of the character’s behaviors and facial expressions if they want to collect more eggs. Our hope was for these changes to make the game more unpredictable and exciting for the user.

Postmortem

Although neither Glum Tom nor HardyPix Games were financially successful enough to carry forward, I still fulfilled the lifelong dream of creating my own game, from conception to the screen. We never regretted our decision to have courage and try. In the end, launching into the indie game sphere was a fantastic opportunity and a million-dollar lesson for us.

If you are a game developer, I encourage you to release your first game ‒ no doubt it will be a memorable experience for you. But, if you can try and avoid the mistakes we made, you’ll be in a much better position to keep your enterprise going. The main reasons for our downfall were:

● We lacked a proper business plan.
● We didn’t do any marketing whatsoever.
● Our startup didn’t have a sufficient cash flow.