Wait a minute... Roller Coaster Tycoon was programmed by one man? In assembly language!?

Wow. I get skittish using C++.

To give Paul credit, his implementation is really clever. There's an easy to use global scoreboard, and the game shows the specific playfield configuration each player used to achieve that high score, too:

http://www.handdrawngames.com/DesktopTD/Maps.asp

> Remember, this is a game mode not created by Blizzard, but invented by multiplayer game modders using the tools provided with Warcraft III.

Actually there was a bonus level in the original Warcraft III where you did this, so I guess Blizzard invented it after all, at least the single player version of it.

captcha: orange (again!)

wow, assembly... why? must have been a masochist :P

> As a hat tip to the community, Blizzard included their take on tower defense as a hidden mission in the Frozen Throne expansion.

Hehe, that'll teach me to read the whole post before I post again...

dude you are feeding the dream... I agree its possible and games like line rider, tower defense etc are a great way to rake in some dough having fun.

Actually, I remember playing several kinds of "tower defense" games in Blizzards Starcraft. Or does my memory fail me? Was tower defense truly invented in Warcraft and then recreated in Starcraft?

Doesnt really matter after all... What counts is Ive made my first comment on this blog. ;)

I'm pretty shure there were Tower Defense maps for Starcraft before Warcraft III even came out.
I remember hunting down different TD maps on Battle.net with friends on a LAN party. We wanted to play TD but noone still had the version we played before, and there were so many different versions, and almost all of them were either way too hard or laughably easy.
It's really hard balancing such a game.

The Warcraft III madness is truly viral..I spent 3 hours on a perfectly pointless game of X Hero Siege where you buff up your heroes to ridiculous (atleast by The Frozen Throne {TFT} standards) power levels and beat the crap out of everyone. No strategy, no brainwork just the silly pleasure of watching your hero attain power levels which are totally mindboggling (again, to a standard TFT player).

It's interesting how the skill level has been gradually decreasing with the huge variety of multiplayer games available on the TFT platforms. First was Footmen Frenzy where you had to command huge armies (again, compared to TFT) with heroes who reached huge levels (25! cmp to Level 6 of TFT). Lol, once you reached such levels the game was merely an exercise in genocide!

Then DotA came along with only 1 Hero control and the skill lay in finding the right items to bolster your hero..no armies, TFT became an RPG. And after DotA we have all the other games like TD and XHS.

Is it a wonder that these games appeal to the public when most of the insane skill of TFT isn't required?

I went to uni with a guy who is doing just that now, and he has made some awesome games :)

if you are into anything flash, check out his journal.

http://www.footloosemoose.com/michael_wp/

Well, only making games you can do that...

but, with this new casual games development some consoles are betting on it (xbox live market place or something like that, and the soon coming wii virtual console for home made games).

Hm, I forgot, you can actually make a shareware program and get tons of money. Admuncher is a good example, but again, a good shareware program usually is written in assembly.

I've play a lot to warcarf III tower defense. It has started with the original blizzard map at four players. For the first time of my life, i have play a LAN game with my wife with no need to play against her. That game mode changes of the usual "No! Do not attacks now! Please let me five minutes."

The team winning was a good time. I regret that collaborative games are not usual. Look at "Desktop tower defense", it's fun but honestly i haven't play more than 3 hours to it (Oups, no more than 5 minutes boss). Ok, it is not a very good exemple, DTD is just a one man conceptual game. Compare World of Warcraft and Diablo 2, the interest is the same: kill mobs, gain xp, go kill bigger monster. On the two games you have a multiplayer mode. But why WOW players never stop? Because WOW is a team game, you can not win if you play alone. Same as Warcraft III Tower Defense. At my opinion, that's the real cooperative part that make this games so addictives.

The fact that the programmers of "Desktop tower defense" earns monney is more annecdotic. How many peopple here have code their games? How many have earn monney with that? Coders do not play lotorry when coding. They programs because they like it, for the pleasure of coding, not for the money.

Well, about making big bucks as a single programmer, I still have reservations. Yes, there are examples of people that made it, but there aren't many. Let's just say it isn't a safe bet.

Btw, If you were addicted by Tower defense, then give Master of Defence (http://www.master-of-defense.com/) a Try...

Is a simple, yet addicted game of this kind.

Tower Defense was, yes, originally from Starcraft. It wasn't called Tower Defense back then... Starcraft didn't have towers. They had missile defense, maze defense, and so on. The most common one was missile defense, where players would scoot around with their SCVs madly building missile turrets.

That was fun.

The tower defense games go way, way back. One of the classics:

http://www.quicksilver.com/castles.php

Oh you poor poor one, falling for the same trap as everyone else.

*g*

(i am much into http://ec2-1.playr.co.uk/onslaught/index.php in the moment, it is much more munchkin ;)

Roller Coaster Tycoon being written in assembly language is a red herring. Chris Sawyer is a damn good programmer, and he'd be a good programmer regardless of language. But he's also more proficient in tools from old-school game development, hence the use of assembly language (remember that up until the mid-1990s, games written in assembly language were common).

"Make a Flash mini-game, let people play it for free, and watch the ad revenue pour in when the site gets 20 million pageviews a month."

Better yet. Make a game that REQUIRES page loads and views. How is Kingdom of Loathing doing?

Umm... Kingdom of Loathing doesn't have ads. It's difficult to generate ad revenue without them. They are a purely donation based system, but they did make the donations useful as a player.

"No selling his soul to a publisher, no middlemen, just pure income, controlled directly by him."

Actually, I'd like to point out that the income is NOT controlled directly by him. It's controlled by the company doing the advertising, and can be taken away by them at any time for any kind of TOS violation. This income stream is a side effect of the popularity of this particular game and the (relatively recent) ability to make money selling advertising.

I'm just saying that there IS a middleman. Have you seen Google's profit margins lately? So maybe the split is a bit closer to 50/50 than 15/85 like the railroad tycoon author (which is also very close to a recording artist royalty rate, btw), but it's not a physical product either, with the additional overhead of printing, shipping and selling shrinkwrap at retail.

When that popularity goes away (as it almost surely will eventually) so does the revenue, and having one hit is no guarantee of having a second hit. Fortunately, he (the programmer) is aware of this, and he mentions in the interview that he'd probably have to make one new game a month to continue to make a full time living at it. But how many original (or even unoriginal but executed well) concepts can you come up with before burning out? 10? 20? I think the lack of graphical sophistication works for this particular game but will undoubtedly be a disadvantage for any others he might make.

Anyway, I don't see it as a business opportunity at all, really. Building it and hoping they will come is not a business model that I want to rely on. Nobody is going to quit their day job to make money doing this unless they can already afford to not work for a few years. It's a way to make some money from a hobby. Only after you get a hit, THEN just maybe you can have the confidence and financial cushion to get more serious about it. That's just my opinion though.

I also have a serious issue with the fact that the only business model available to individual developers involves doing something that attracts enough attention to sell advertising. Maybe I don't want to make a living facilitating that! Is there any way to achieve independent success WITHOUT resorting to advertising? That is a more interesting topic to me.

If many (if not all) IT companies are innefective, with many unproductives expensives and still are profitable then one-men-army company can obtain a high success without much trouble. This game is a example of it.

The risk is that a programmer can spend a lot of time in a un-profitable project.

ps :orange ... again?.

There are plenty of 1-man software companies making a decent living selling software direct to buyers on the Internet. I know, because I run one of them. Personally I wouldn't recommend writing games (or development tools) if you want to maximise your chances of a good return. The fact that a *very successful* game is 'only' making $100k per year rather reinforces this.

It's not surprise that "one man" coded a big game. Not even in assembly language. There are tools that make assembly language as painfull (or not) as C++. On the other side, during "the old days" most coders coded alone, with just a guy for gfx and sound.

_________________
Paul - http://foro.recuperarelpelo.com/viewtopic.php?t=698

Once the fad of the game fades, he won't be making $96K from it anymore.

That's the thing with stuff like this. It's the equivalent of a musical one hit wonder.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mega_Lo_Mania

That's still one of the best games of the genre though you didn't win by purely defending which you could say is just a minor variation, not something truly original.

http://ec2-1.playr.co.uk/onslaught/

Excellent Flash based single player variation, defend as long as you can. I made it to level around level 200 once.

The Game is really addective

The community had TD maps for the original Starcraft. WC3's map editor is a lot more powerful though (while being easier to use to boot).

Yeah, it's an interesting new question that's coming up more and more: just how much money can you make by giving away your product?

DAMN YOU, ATWOOD! DAMN YOU!

I just burned up an hour... :-(

in starcraft, as terran u can put houses in front of turret (where 4 privates can get in) and towers

it's weird that houses have so much hit point compared to turret and towers, therefore it's a good shielding to incoming zerglings

but things may change/tweaked, i haven't played it for years

Clearing $8,000 a month and still asking for donations, nice!

http://www.handdrawngames.com/DesktopTD/News.asp

And stupid me sent him $10 when he was going through the server troubles at the beginning of April. I enjoyed the game so don't have a problem paying $10 for the entertainment, but don't be asking for donations while you are making money hand-over-fist. I feel like a sucker.

> Yeah, it's an interesting new question that's coming up more and more: just how much money can you make by giving away your product?

Followed immediately by that other, less interesting, game: how much advertising can you stuff into your product?

> Clearing $8,000 a month and still asking for donations, nice!

Yeah, I thought that was lame too. The minute you accept advertising, asking for donations is inappropriate.

You can strike gold doing this with business software as well. I've done it, and we estimate revenue of between 5 and 10 million per year - if we sell to 10% of the market. The application isn't some silly little game though. It took nearly a year of development and I did need a full time job during that time. I am still working a job "just in case" but I'm pretty confident that I'll be working from the Virgin Islands this time next year :)

What I stumbled upon was a combination of things: an industry with no software, a good understanding of the needs of that industry, and partners in the industry who were willing to help test and design the thing in the first place (in exchange for a free lifetime license for the final product).

I also opted to 'rent' the software, like many virus-protector companies do, so that people have the option of using it temporarily for a lower price, and if they want to use it for longer, they get many advantages like auto-updates and so on. I priced it so incredibly low that it would be stupid to not get a copy of it, if you are in this industry. The license is $300 and $100 each year after the first year. The average commission earned from putting one customer through the system is around $3K, and this software lets you do several of those per day, whereas the old method sometimes took a few days to process one customer. I should charge more...

Find something like that and you can clean up. There are many industries that need software.

Jasmine, what are the industries without software, today?

As another poster pointed out, there is a man-in-the-middle; namely google (the ad-provider). You're never directly responsible for providing to so many people... And if you want to investigate the efficiency of this new method of selling things, there's also the fact that people have an internet connection to take advantage of the wealth of content online. Those costs (line costs) are payed by people for your content even though you never see them (and of course they're spread over all the sites visited).

You're not selling you soul any less under this new model. It's different, more diffuse, and less obvious perhaps, but the facilitators (networking companies, browser/webserver manufacturers, advertisers, advertisement providers etc.) are still taking a large cut. And that's just fine. They're providing all the difficult work of connecting you to the userbase after all!

/bitter

I used to have dreams of programming things like that -- then I got laid off.

And went from having a fun/hip office to a soul crushing grind of outputoutputoutput where everything is rushed into production and then must be supported due to the duct tape and popsicle stick construction every day.

Add to that some phantom pain in my arms/wrists that apparently has no cause (not C.T.) -- and I can barely make it through a day here, let alone code fun little games in "languages" like Flash!!!!1

There are ways to do this successfully. What few people realize is that you don't have to be a programmer to create games for revenue.

I started out using a grid-based 2D game and app making tool and worked my way up from a free online game arcade to doing custom work for various companies that wanted product placement in games and freebies to give out. I also made good money adding adverts to games I created and selling the space to business clients.

I am using Multimedia Fusion 2 now, and sadly, they have not released the new version of the browser plug-in for it yet. With the last version, I started making a darn good living, and still do. After I had the software down, it only took about a year to get everything else going strong from game concepts to client fees. And believe me, I have connected with many other people doing the same thing and we do share ideas and resources.

So, I just wanted to point out that you don't need to know C++ or assembly or any programming language to get into this. All you need is to take the short learning curve of grid-based, point-and-click software this company makes.

Well, you need some ideas and some graphics, but I am assuming that people who are motivated, like me, would be able to consider a good creation tool half the battle.

Hell, I have not been to a "real" job in six years and working at home is always the best way to go and more profitable than anything I have done in thirty years. Good luck.

Just remember, for every one success story on the internet, there are 100 stories of failure.

I am a single programmer, and have developed some very large and useful products, completely on my own.

- Online File Backup System (servers and everything)
- Community Anti-Spam for Outlook Express (global Basian anti-spam, ala Cloudmark)
- Live Screen Saver Advertising Engine (think NY Giants screen saver, with pictures that update automatically, or for any business)

Sigh.... Those projects have taken me about 5 years of very hard programming.

And I just double checked my pockets, and I still dont have $100,000.

The success of Tower Defense is more about luck than anything else.

The guy was lucky he came up with a game that was good, and he was even MORE lucky that people paid attention, and downloaded it, and told their friends.

The guy couldn't redo this in a hundred years.

This is NO slam against the guy, but you are dreaming if you think you can whip up a game, throw it on a few websites, tell your blogging buddies about it, and expect to get more than 1 download a day.

(Yeah, u guessed right, im a little bitter. Good for Paul, wish it was me.)

Some nice ideas there. Thank you

John http://www.atlasescolar.com.ar

Jeff,

How many hits do you get here per month at Coding Horror? Why haven't you sold your soul to the devil and integrated Google's Adsense into your website?

doesn't have to be typical flash games but flash movies or side shows are pretty popular as well, even surpasses games in my opinion in terms of popularity.

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Hi All,

I think the mini-flash game idea is a good one. You just need an addictive game to keep people coming back and use Adsense to generate revenue.

You may think it's lame that he makes $8,000 from advertising per month and still lets you make donations; however there are other viewpoints you have not considered.

First of all the game is free, $0 and accessible any time you feel like playing. When a game is free to play you really don't have much ground for complaint since you aren't paying for anything, you're getting something for free. The money he makes from advertisement doesn't cost you any money, it costs the advertising companies money.

Secondly there is nothing wrong with allowing people to donate money if they want to do so. He isn't forcing you to do so and isn't suggesting that you should, he's just made it possible.

Finally, it may seem like $100,000 is a lot of money; but this is only when it comes to a single person. If he wanted to start a company to make computer games then $100,000 is scarcely enough for two people full time. Not to mention other company expenses like rent and government fees and charges.

On another note;

I don't think the success of this flash mini game was luck. Luck has nothing to do with the fact that the game was fun and that he used a business model where it was free to play the game but he generated income from Adsense.

To the single programmer who worked on 3 major projects;

Just because someone can program does not automatically mean they can develop computer games and make money from it. From your list of projects there wasn't one thing in any way related to computer games. Being a good game developer is not enough however, you also need to be a resourceful businessman.

This had nothing to do with luck. It was an opportunity and he took it. Making fun computer games is no easy feat (it's sure not as easy as playing them).

Well done Paul,

Marko G.

About Warcraft III inventing the TD genre... I disagree. Starcraft has been around much longer, and TD games are commonplace on battle.net. I always hate seeing people praise WC3 as the revolutionary RTS game... bull. SC was first, and most of WC's brilliant ideas came from SC. Trace the roots, though, and you'll find yourself with Command & Conquer: the game that defined RTS as it is today.

I should try to make a good TD game for Red Alert 2... that would be interesting...

> Don't blame me if you lose an hour or more of productivity.

An hour! Ha! I wish I could stick to just an hour.

Desktop Tower Defense is great; the creator deserves everything he's making.

But there are at least 30 versions of tower defense (see
<a href="http://addictordie.com/?v=n&tag=tower%20defense">http://addictordie.com/?v=n&tag=tower%20defense</a> )

How many are making money?

jesus! assembly language!!??!??? how the hell did he DO that?? why?!! That game was hella intense to be written ground-up in asm. That's fucking crazy. GDB: <main+1157> lea %eax, 170(%ebx) :: NO LINE INFO

Nono, the difficulty is not in writing a good game in ASM. The difficulty lies in writing a complex good game in ASM.

If you wanted to be really basic about it, you could write in z80 ASM and play it on your TI calculator. For example, I still regularly play Tetris on my calculator, but it was released in 2004. It doesn't make any money for the author and it's nowhere near as complex as RCT (simpler processor, graphics, and game), but it is wildly popular.

What is up with people imagining that writing games in Assembly is the way.

Most games nowadays are written in C and slowly companies are swaying towards C++ due to its OOP capabilities. Both languages allow ASM to be used as a strap, aka for optimizing certain code. For example Quake used assembly for the tasks that were called thousands of times a second, like graphic display. In that case yes assembly makes sense, otherwise just learn C/C++ and you will make fast games.

Even then I often wonder why C. It is a low level language and sure maybe years ago there was a speed advantage, but now with modern computer languages like Python despite being high level are quite fast.

Either way, ASM isnt that amazing, it is just like any other language minus the conviniences we are used to.

So we would rather trade convinience for something working a nanosecond faster?, I Guess?

Why would anyone advertise on that game's website? Who would click on the ads if they're so concentrated/addicted at the game?

hi, its actually not that extreme. Yes the succes of dtd is mainly luck to get this popular, but I had made a simple game myself, with acceptable graphics, a few bugs and not the best gameplay. I was able to get it sponsored for 1200$ with a game portal, and uploaded it to a couple of places. I did not put ads in it, and it was a mistake for sure... it was played over 300 000 times in a few months and still get some traffic

Free mini flash games will always make money, at least for someone, off of ad revenue. From what I've seen the key is to create your own website and publish a few of your own games, but offer other peoples games to increase your selection.
It's commonplace for gaming sites to share games, and for some games to keep certain aspects available only at their creators website.
So, all you need is a few catchy ones to get people to sart playing on your site, and then a lot of them will stay on your site and continue to play other games. Most games are fully "unlocked" if you will so people will not always be redirected away from your site each time they play a new game. Usually just the really popular ones re-direct you.