Pickles For The Knowing Ones

    Ten years ago today, I made my first ticket related to GearCity. “Mouse Does Not Move In Main Menu.” A humble little issue that stemmed from my ineptitude of writing a game engine from scratch. Since that time, I have cleared over 6,000 tickets. Written 320,000 lines of C++, 415,000 lines of GUI script, 400,000 lines of XML, and 150,000 words (400-page book) of text. Most of which by hand. A daunting task for a single person.

    Over that decade, the industry has changed a lot. Two major engines have gone with a freemium model. Their tools and designs made game creation easier, and it took away many developers working on the FOSS libraries I depend on. With a lower barrier of entry to make a game, developers made thousands of them. This prompted the largest PC game vendor to remove their barrier of entry. And that resulted in an oversaturated market where marketing is more important than just finishing a game.

    Since I started working on GC, Steam added over 34,000 SKUs to the platform. 94% of these launched after GC went for sale on Early Access. The glut of games has hurt sales of not only my game, but every other niche, mid-sized, and smaller indies. My former publisher went insolvent during the Direct era, which led to a yearlong struggle to regain financial control of the game. And it lost me nearly a year of revenue in the process.

Product growth is out pacing new customer growth.

    But it’s not all doom and gloom. I’ve been blessed to have 30,000 people purchase the game. Over 70,000 folks, including pirates, demos, and returners have tried the game. Approximately 4,000 users are active every month, and a few hundred players are in the four and five-digit hour playtime range. These are numbers I never dreamed possible when I started working on the game.

    I never intended to work on GearCity. I spent ten years in the vaporware game development scene before I started working on an engine for an airship combat simulator. The name of the game was G.A.U., and it was a mixture of Crimson Skies and Silent Hunter. I made a playable demo, but it had major performance and precision issues. I was frustrated with G.A.U. and I just dropped out of college because of a lack of funds. So I found my old cache of floppies while packing and went on a multi-day old game bender.

    After my binge, I dropped G.A.U. in favor of a business simulator. Detroit, Motor City, Air Bucks, and AeroBiz all had the same problems. 16-bit limitations. There just wasn’t enough there. I thought more depth and content could make these games more challenging for a 22-year-old me. Also, business sims are code-heavy and art light compared to other genres. An excellent way to show off my programming skills as a resume piece since I lacked a degree.

    At the time, I was working in automotive parts as a counterman, but also sold exotic car and hard to source parts on the side. Cars and car guys surrounded me every day and didn’t want to go home and work on a game about cars. I wanted to make an Airliner game.

   
If only I could find the video of me lighting a
 squeegee on fire with brake parts cleaner...

    Upon doing my initial market research, I found several well made web-based Airline business simulators that scratched my itch. With this theme as crowded as it was, I turned my attention to making an automobile business simulator.

    In 2010, no one was publicly working on games with this theme. The last game with this theme was CarBiz in 2006. The next was Car Tycoon way back in 2001. And you had to go back further to the early 90s to find the games I enjoyed with this theme. A perfect empty market. Exactly what you want to find when you make something.

Automotive Business Sims had stiff competition in the 2000s.

    And so I set off to make GearCity. Early in development, I attempted to recruit some of my AAA artist friends to join me. But sadly, none of them wanted to work on a business simulator. Especially a simulator about cars. (Damn it, Phish!) This set me back a bit. I wanted GearCity to have high-quality artwork, but none of the folks I knew wanted to work on the game. The only way I could get artwork was to do it myself or pay someone to do it. The latter of which was not an option, as I had just dropped out of school because of a lack of funds. So I set out to make GearCity a resume piece primarily focused on writing model simulations and AI. I hoped that I could generate enough buzz to improve the artwork later.

Not much has changed in nine and half years since
I slapped together the first build of the game.

    With a shoe-string budget, I recruited a few people here and there to work on parts of the game that I couldn’t. I picked up an artist who didn’t work out, but we still see his influences in parts of the game. Kristin (Main Tutorial Voice) also started working on music for the game. Her early pieces were OK at best. She stuck around for the longest of anyone and greatly improved her craft. Some of her work on the game is not in the newer builds.

It's a start.

    Eventually, in 2011 I came across my main competition, Automation. It was another game, with a similar theme, started at the same time on the other side of the world. The big difference, there were three of them, including a top-notch artist, whereas I was working alone. Knowing I could not compete directly against them, I tried the next best thing... join them.

    Their lead programmer rebuffed my overture to merge the two games. I presume because I suggested using my engine instead of theirs. At the time, they only had an engine designer, whereas I had a playable game, minus a designer. The amusing thing is, they fought their engine for years before throwing it away. They eventually rewrote the game for Unreal and switched to technologies I built my game around, SQLite. Had we merged with the manpower, we could have made a seamless transition to next-generation graphics APIs on my engine and upgraded the GUI, without a full rewrite. We would have finished the game years ago. Instead, they’re stuck in development hell as a designer mod tool for a larger game. And I lack funds/manpower to improve the graphical designer or the GUI. It worked out well for them either anyway. I digress.

    Seeing how this attempt failed, I dropped plans for most of my 3d systems. I doubled downed on the economic models and go all-in on the project to get it done. And at that point in 2011, I quit my job in automotive retail and started working on GearCity full time.

    In 2012, I took a part-time job teaching programming and technologies. I used this money to seed the development of GearCity. I attempted to “Crowd Source” artwork for the game. But Serhiy, Amit, and Ashwin did most of the artwork. Because none of these artists communicated with each other, because the pay was low, and because I was ineffective at managing artists across the globe, the artwork turned out bad. Most of it wasn’t how it needed to be. Everyone who enjoys the game is very lucky that Serhiy (MrX_ua) stepped up and took charge of the remaining artwork for the game. He had to hamstring his talents to keep the art direction the same, and he finished everything we needed, in time, and in budget. Without him, GearCity would have failed.

Mostly I Taught Small Basic.
I also taught a bunch of other stuff too. Maybe that's another blog post.

    In 2013, I founded Visual Entertainment and Technologies, LLC in preparation for our first public Open Beta of the game. On March 28th, 2013, I released GearCity 1.0. A few websites picked up the release, and even the guys at Automation threw out a Facebook post. (And if they read this, many thanks to them for that. That post was the introduction to my game for many users.)

The first review of the game.
Most other early sites that covered GC have bit the dust. But Indie Retro News is still kicking.

Every Open Beta Releases
Did you know every Open Beta release of the game is available on our website?

    We signed up to be on the LittleIndie distribution platform, a small-time competitor to Steam. But sadly they went bust before we could launch. The Open Beta and the few sites that covered us led us to sign up with KISS ltd as a publisher.

    Another year passed, and the feds did not renew the grant for my teaching contract. So I was forced to monetize GearCity early. We launched into Early Access on May 30th, 2014. The publisher grouped us with four other titles and did not give us top billing in the initial PR push. They also couldn’t give Rock Paper Shotgun the correct game key to review the game. None the less, we generated 200 sales in 2 days and 2000 in a month.

RPS Review.
Bugs, AV Software, and Renderer Crashes, the bane of my existence that never effects me.

    The release was about six months premature, and that killed our initial momentum. The game had many issues, foremost of which was tutorial videos not playing inside the game on modern Windows machines. This issue drove our initial review scores down into the low 70% range, and we suffered ever since.

    The next few years were nondescript. Our review scores slowly went up. The game did well enough for me to continue full-time work, but never good enough to hire the help I needed or rewrite the weak points of the game. It seemed every step of the way, something would pop up that would reduce sales. The biggest of which was Steam Direct.

Player Count Trend
You can see us slowly getting more and more players over time.

    Besides Steam Direct’s impact on small and niche indie titles, the new system crashed KISS's major selling point, getting your game on the platform. In just a few months, the publisher went insolvent. For the next year, I struggled with token payments and getting financial control of the game back. In short, between Q4-2017 to Q3-2018, I made $0 from working on GC. And I had no chance to recoup it.

    When I finally got full control back of the game, they hit us with the “October Bug”. If you haven’t heard of this, in short, Valve changed Steam Algorithms to favor better selling games, then tried to spin it as a bug when the press got word of it. GearCity’s revenues dropped by 40%. So not only did I not get paid for almost a year, when I get control of finances again, the revenues tank. Talk about my luck.

I’ll save the financial charts, graphs, and tables for a future blog post.

    Over the last year, Valve has made tweaks to the algorithms, more games have crowded the market, there is more competition in this niche with better graphics, newer engines, and lower time costs. I am developing GearCity on a tired 10-year-old engine. It’s pushed to the max, held together with duct tape, and barely runs on modern OS’s. Technology is moving faster than I can keep up with on this game. I’ve had to get other sources of income and cut expenses. This, in turn, cut my GC work hours down from 80-100 a week to 40-50, mostly 10 pm to 4 am and weekends. Luckily, GearCity is almost finished.

    In the next couple of months, I’ll be launching GearCity out of Early Access. Will it be premature? Probably. But I can’t justify working on it as I used to anymore. Does that mean I’ll stop? No way! I imagine I’ll be stuck with this game for another decade. I guarantee bug fixes and technical support for many years to come. I’ll also be attempting to crowdfund some additional features for the game post-release. If that’s successful, who knows, maybe I can add another decade worth of features to the game. More details on that will come soon.

    In the meantime, I am launching this blog. As mentioned above, I’m not a social media person. A nice static HTML page, with a link to a forum for comments, is all I need. Speaking of which, until I reopen the official forums for our “Feature Bounty” (crowdfunding) system, the commenting forum will be on Steam. Sorry about that.

    And so that is a little summary of the last 10 years I have spent working on GearCity. Over the coming months, I will provide more details about this journey. We'll touch on both the economic and technical aspects of making the game. I'll point out some things I did well and some things I should have done better. For those of you who have been playing or played GC, thank you much. I was broke when I started working on this game, and I am still broke now. But your enjoyment and thousands of others made it worth the while. Thank you again.

Eric B.