Show HN: I got laid off from Meta and created a minor hit on Steam
I was at FB/Meta from late 2013 to early 2023, mostly working in the compiler/runtime spaces. I got hit in the spring 2023 layoff wave. I immediately started making games in my newfound free time (a lifelong interest, and I even worked in AA(A?) back ca. ~2000), and in October 2023 I stumbled upon the idea of a roguelike pachinko/plinko game inspired by Luck Be A Landlord. Things snowballed quickly, I started talking to publishers, then worked like crazy through all of 2024, almost the hardest I've ever worked in my career, and launched the game in December 2024. It's sold ~200,000 units in its first 10 weeks on Steam. So it's no Balatro, but I'd still say it did very well :) AMA?
(my game is Ballionaire: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2667120/view/5264614...)
378 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 297 ms ] threadI'm currently feeling burned out. I have an app idea and a prototype that I believe could turn into a viable project to support myself. However, I don't have the courage to quit my job—I’m afraid of the anxiety that comes with paying rent and insurance without a steady paycheck. I do have some savings to sustain me for a while, but I'm unsure if taking a break to recharge, learn new things, and build something I'm passionate about (which could potentially become profitable) is a good idea? I'm also worried about how a long gap on my resume might be perceived when I look for a job in the future.
I'm also interested in making video games, but I often get discouraged by the sheer amount of artwork required—something I struggle to handle and afford. How did you manage the artwork side of your project?
I can relate to the first thing you mentioned, and I never really took action. Layoff was thrust upon me, with the privilege of a severance, and I had been working for decades, so I figured "why not try now?" I'm not sure if I ever would have been brave enough to proactively try, but that's just me. Video games in particular are brutal, economically, and not something I would ever recommend someone take a risk on in hopes of a payday.
Regarding art: don't get distracted by art. The original prototype of Ballionaire was made using Twemoji -- you can see a video of it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwIwcGewZME Later I switched from Twemoji to images sourced from https://www.flaticon.com/ When I signed a publisher, I was lucky enough for them to hook me up with an in-house artist. I knew the style I wanted (the style you see in the game) and luckily the artist Hanja absolutely nailed it.
I would recommend avoiding art as long as possible if it's not your strength. You will go much further on making something feel really fun then making art that's one click above terrible. If you get traction, the art can come later. For future prototypes I am working on straight up text mode (or near to it, in like stock Godot UI) right now.
imho even if you can't make art, it's good to have inspirations for a coherent vision that hopefully you'll be able to articulate to someone!
When I returned to tech I had a pretty impressive portfolio of projects. Turns out unsurprisingly that not coding all day for work makes me want to code more for fun.
I genuinely love coding and often do it in my spare time. My burnout isn’t caused by coding itself but rather by poor management and working on assignments that feel meaningless.
Before teaching I did a cleaning job which was satisfying. Headphones in and end my day with the satisfaction of a clean office for the workers tomorrow. City gardening jobs were also lovely. Being out in the sun does wonders for mood. Impossible to get stressed doing the job.
But yeah, it's always scary that bad management can ruin a good thing.
During the project, what was the biggest instinct you had that was ultimately validated by its success, but still surprised you? What was a lesson you learned that you didn't expect? How was working with a publisher? What did they do right and what did they do wrong?
Lesson learned that I didn't expect - hmm. Ah, one good one: I spent a LOT of time worrying about stuff being "OP" or degenerately good. Well, turns out, people like OP stuff, or degenerately good stuff, at least in single player score attack games. My biggest lesson learned on the project: people experience your game individually. If they find something broken, in their head, they are the one to have found something broken, and it feels good. You don't have to design for the entire community at once. Don't over-balance your game. Embrace the jank.
Love this! I wish you would be been involved with the release team for Helldivers II.
I’m not a stoner and am not really into stoner culture but I’ve watched that figure dance for like 10 mins once, entranced by it. I dunno what exactly it is, but it’s just an absolute home run.
I’m not joking, I’d pay for an app that’s literally just that guy dancing to some music.
https://ai.meta.com/blog/ai-dataset-animation-drawings/
Asset packages are in the category of "things that give you game assets without you having to make them", because they give you game assets without you having to make them. The assets in the package are, by definition, stock assets.
Yes, discovering the city-per-tile problem in Civ would ruin the game for you (I never did). That clearly is the bad kind of overpowered. But sending that single chariot to the edge of the known universe before it gets constrained by phalanxes? Awesome.
"Single-player" here is key - minutely perfect balancing is often a necessity in multiplayer games, and I suspect sometimes that mentality is carried over to single-player experiences without stopping to question it.
(this basically killed puzzle / mystery box games, which survive only in a weird corner for not-very-online people playing on mobile)
One of the greatest joys in score-attack games like Ballionaire is discovering certain combos that feel brokenly good.
During one of my early playthroughs, I got some combo that would spawn a crazy number of balls on every drop. The game would seriously lag for about half a second while the playing field absolutely exploded with balls. It was incredibly entertaining!
https://youtu.be/blHxSe9I9WQ
Some developers see this happen and will nerf things into the ground to prevent them, but that's an absolute fun-destroying choice. In a PVP game, yeah, absolutely you should prevent broken builds like that. But a single-player score attack? Nah. Leave that in.
But I agree. OP, 200k is a hugely respectable number for a game or any piece of software for that matter. I’d be happy if 200 people used any of mine, never mind the k :p Congrats! :)
https://intoindiegames.com/features/how-much-money-do-steam-...
TBH I forgot the 1% was so high, even for an indie. But network effects are crazy, so getting to 700k will eventually be a thing.
Next that 7M number is for self-published games. Aka, games where the dev is listed as the publisher. OP has Raw Fury as his publisher. Next Raw Fury posted their contract publically a while ago: it is a pretty harsh contract. 50/50 split, but there is a profit ratio baked into the recoup which is super odd. If OP had held off, did his own marketing for a bit, then negotiated with publishers once he had traction, he might have gotten a better deal.
The challenge for Indie devs with publishers is how the good publishers ask a pretty high take. Meanwhile the good deals come from new publishers with poor or no track record. Personally we signed with Hooded Horse which publically offers better deals and is highly effective. The trade off being Hooded Horse is famously quite selective.
Thus honestly: self publishing is the default-best choice. We did that for our last game and effectively replaced a publisher by just spending a bunch on marketing.
>Next that 7M number is for self-published games. Aka, games where the dev is listed as the publisher.
That's fair, I can conflate "indie" in the colloquial sense with "indie" in the traditional one. I suppose 1% would be a sttretch if competing with any game with a publisher (indie label or AAA).
>it is a pretty harsh contract. 50/50 split, but there is a profit ratio baked into the recoup which is super odd. If OP had held off, did his own marketing for a bit, then negotiated with publishers once he had traction, he might have gotten a better deal.
Yeah, I figured the article was referring to gross revenue after steam's cut. Itd be nearly impossible to truly guess at all the other cuts taken out from publishers, tools, and labor. Money made =/= money in your pocket.
>Thus honestly: self publishing is the default-best choice. We did that for our last game and effectively replaced a publisher by just spending a bunch on marketing.
It's still a tough choice, and really comes down to the person. There's a lot of technical and artistic people out there that can make a high quality game but can't sell water in a desert. If money is your primary goal, it may still be worth giving up 50,70+% just so people know your game exists to begin with. From there, the momentum should either encourage to self-publish next time or lets you seek a better deal. MArketing also tends to be one of those areas where many people feel they can do it themselves and then completely corner themselves in the end (as a certain YC startup recently learned).
I think the true best choice is self-publish, but partner up with someone who knows how to sell (assuming you're getting great feedback on your game. Can't polish a turd). A singular media marketer shouldn't ask anything close to what a "good" publisher will offer.
What factors led you to seeking out a publisher, was it mostly getting art for the game or did the publisher bring more to the table that made you decide it was worth it?
What advice would you have given yourself just starting out knowing what you do now?
What did you get stuck on the most when making the game? I know a lot of people who have great ideas for games but a lot of the ideas don't translate well into being able to realistically do them in the game because of complexity. Did you ever have ideas that you thought would be really cool to do but it ended up being too hard / time consuming to do?
How close was the functionality of the game when you released it to what you had envisioned at the start? Did you go through any major design changes while developing it?
They don't. But they do sometimes prohibit talking/writing about their work, the nature of it or anything remotely connected to it.
My current employer explicitly prohibits us from blogging about technical topics, creating learning material or even teaching anyone on technical subjects(e.g. on weekends at nearby school) outside the job for free/money.
In the case where your company does have a policy that that prohibits you from discussing the nature of your work, it’s likely completely unenforceable beyond them firing firing you.
The prohibition from teaching or blogging is definitely unenforceable.
https://www.whitecase.com/insight-tool/white-case-global-non...
Of course, that was the FTC in 2024. Who knows what the administration will change this year?
Sure, I can't talk much about company games I worked on outside of "I worked on this", even after release. But they sure as heck can't prevent me from making a tutorial on C++ in my free time.
no, thats not what I said.
Large companies that pay generous severance generally want a non disparagement agreement in return. This means that yes you can say you worked there, you might even be able to say what department you worked in.
What you can't say is that you worked on x,y or z, your opinion on the company direction or anything else that might be related to the company or is actions.
If you even speak of this NDA/non disparagement agreement to anyone other than the listed highly limited number of people, you'll have to pay back all the severance, plus legal costs.
So OP might want to tell you about their time, but they don't want to because it'll cost them a house worth of cash.
A certain amount of talk about previous projects is routine in interviews. As long as it doesn't get too detailed or makes the previous employer look bad in public nobody will complain.
(Seriously, I think a lot of devs distract themselves with this stuff. Just make your damn game.)
[1] https://press.stripe.com/the-making-of-prince-of-persia
Well you clearly don't care for society's survival, so Let's put it selfishly: I want more good games. I'm not going to make the next katamari or Baba is you or Papers Please or Orba Dinn. I accepted I do not have that kind of auteur mindset when I approach art.
But I do have technical skills and a lot of tech discourages a lot of would be artists. If I can make those parts easier, less buggy, and more performant while bringing in more people to make games, that's a win-win.
And claiming to have technical skill while also claiming that technology is stopping you from creating is a contradiction. An artist would have the technical skill to make something, by definition of the concept of an artist. If within your epistemology you're separating technical skill from an artist's creativity, then you have a perception of art and engineering that is tainted by something unrefined and harmful like liberal democratic society's lowest common denominator preference. In other words, there should not be a difference between an artist and a technical engineer.
Furthermore, it's strange that, with all the current software out there, you said you are at an impasse when it comes to game creation or game development. Everything already is easy, not error prone, and performance acceptable. What are you waiting for, exactly? An artificial intelligence aid that will do all the work for you?
And, lastly, an increase of the development population does not necessarily mean a good thing. Because, why should a bunch of people always be a good thing? Why not cull away those that are unfit for some task too? Unless realizing the philosophy of globalist liberal democracy is what you're aiming for? In which case I can see why you're repulsed at the idea of reality encroaching in on your fantastic ideals. Ethno-genetic Malthusian filters and reality should now be recognized as being synonymous with each other, or two faces of the same coin.
Not particularly. You're free to interpret and navigate as you see fit.
>And claiming to have technical skill while also claiming that technology is stopping you from creating is a contradiction
You misread my comment. I'm not held back by tech, I'm held back by artistic creativity. It's a lot easier to make tech more accessible to the creative than to figure out how to expand my creativity to comjour novel ideas. I'm helping the other with my knowledge.
>Everything already is easy, not error prone, and performance acceptable.
You have not seen modern games if that's your perspective. AAA games are buggier than ever (whom I'm not interested in assisting), and there are still some surprisingly unoptimal games. We're far from post-scarcity performance.
>Because, why should a bunch of people always be a good thing?
If you stagnate, you lose developers. If you lose developers, the odds of good games decrease. I like good games.
I'm not even convinced I'm making "more developers" so much as trying to slow down the decrease of developers. The youth of today are shifting from old media production to being self-made content creators. Playing video games is much more enjoyable than making them, after all. I've long given up on the western AAA development, so I still want to inspire future indies to potentially make more Hollow Knights or subnauticas or even Balartro.
>In which case I can see why you're repulsed at the idea of reality encroaching in on your fantastic ideals
Once again, you clearly misinterpreted something. I'm still working on games and planning on making my own mid-scale game. But making my own games is not my end goal, and I highly doubt I'm going to make anything close to profitable.
But making games is not the only way to succeed as a game developer. Just ask Valve, Epic Games, or the Blender Foundation.
What is more ambitious would be something like incubating or founding a small province of dedicated developers who aim to fulfill your wish. Exclusivity, selection, and culling ineffectiveness would definitely be essential here, rather than being tolerant to policies which would want to try to cram a bunch of diverse individuals into a melting pot of a future failed empire of creative ideas and technology that only serves as an ironic example of what not to do in building your own development industry and securing your own game production economics. Caring one bit about the ontological time of today and its youth, a mere phenomenological axiom which leads to concerns about some content creator crisis, is the tendency you need to abandon, if you want to start your theoretical project and see its successful completion.
Not with bills to pay, and family to care for. It's not something I can do on the snap od a whim. I plan to take art classes to understand the fundamentals, but I'm not sure I can just "gain artistic creativity" the way I can "just learn 3d modeling and color theory". At this stage in life it's probably easier to help out other inspired creators with objective hoops.
>Making tools for nobody or nobody in particular is aimless unproductivity.
Sure, that's why evangelism has to be a part of this type of marketing. Help those who remain so far and have them inspire. If you get to advertise your tools on the way, it's 2 birds.
And yes, I worked at Unity at one point. I've seen firsthand the consequences of not dog fooding your own tools to make sure the pipeline fits with what an actual dev would do in production. I will still make games with such tools just to make sure I'm not disconnected from the audience. Something more than just a fancy tech demo with horribly mangled code that no one can learn from. A sub-goal is to encourage best practices and make sure my documentation is well covered (I'd say "better than Unreal/Unity", but that's a very low bar).
>What is more ambitious would be something like incubating or founding a small province of dedicated developers who aim to fulfill your wish.
I won't lie, I've thought about it. You're essentially saying to either found up a small studio or to make soke form of masterclass. To mold future students or employees to that vision. I'm not going to actively pursue such a dream, but steps in that direction does help with that mentality.
I need at least a decade more experience and a lot more capital before I could really pull thst off, though. So yes, that will still be a decade of me proving I can launch useful tools and well-made (not necessary profitable) games to gain that trust. I gotta do one to accomplish the other.
>Caring one bit about the ontological time of today and its youth, a mere phenomenological axiom which leads to concerns about some content creator crisis, is the tendency you need to abandon, if you want to start your theoretical project and see its successful completion.
Perhaps. I'm not claiming I can change an entire generation's mindset on what to pursue in life. I simply want to show the path for those may have been interested but are put off by entire avoidable factors of the industry. I was simply rejecting a notion thst somehow the industry of devs is becoming bloated.
How did you go about validating the game is fun? Did you end up having an intuitive sense for it, or did you need external feedback to refine the mechanics?
My steam deck might as well be a billionaire/balatro machine.
Ballionaire was fun by day 3, the first time a ball dropped and hit a trigger that caused an effect. It was luck a bolt of lightning to me. I am a VERY pessimistic person. So the fact that it felt compelling that early, and like, anyone who saw it could understand it and felt the fun, was a huge sign to me. Unfortunately, not every game has a premise that allows for that. I don't think you could hope for the same kind of feeling while making a 4X for example.
But if you're making a game that ultimately should feel fun from moment to moment, like these kind of quick-play games are, well, I think you can get there quickly and with little work, if the idea is solid. And if you can't get it to feel fun, I would be wondering if the idea is solid, versus it needing more time/polish etc.
Going from Zero to Working 3d Game is very quick in Unity as long as you do everything the Unity way.
Going from Zero to Working 3d Game if you need to create functionality from scratch in Unity is a heartbreaker.
I am actually planning to take one of my old projects and rebuild it from scratch in Godot, for exactly this reason.
It's actually a bit more constrained than people realize ... Well, for desktop, you can literally use anything. But for mobile it's a bit harder because of specific platform quirks, i.e. on iOS you can't make a language that relies on a JIT compiler, so for a Java/libGDX game the best option is https://github.com/MobiVM/robovm which compiles the JVM bytecode to LLVM IR and then to native machine code.
And then for consoles (switch/xbox/ps5) it's way worse because you're relying on commercial stuff, and the only support you get is from the engine makers themselves (Nintendo/Microsoft/Sony) so there's a lot less open source options. Basically you're stuck with C++ at that point (which Unity actually compiles your C# to under the hood for non-desktop platforms).
Not what you asked, but I found out this stuff a while back and find it interesting, hopefully it's interesting to you too :)
And a more realistic-adult question lol: how did you handle not having insurance from your workplace after severance?
Normally I either scope way too big, or scope small and lose motivation because the idea is too itty bitty to maintain motivation. I have no idea how to hit the sweet spot more frequently. Some people are just really good at this, but not me.
For insurance: private insurance via ACA/Obamacare. I had savings.
- What choices did you make to give yourself more time to work on this project?
- At what point did you begin getting feedback of some sort?
- Were there clearly things you wished to include in the game but had to cut out in the interest of time? How did you decide what would be "good enough"?
I got feedback from my wife within a few days, the first time she saw the game. Even she, a non-gamer, could tell that there was something compelling about the idea. And if you look at an above response, you'll see that I explained that the prototype, about a month into dev, go streamed to thousands of people. The feedback was VERY early and very positive. I wouldn't have been brave enough to keep at it otherwise, knowing myself.
I wish meta progression was better, what shipped was a compromise with respect to time. "Good enough" was just purely just vibes and an editorial eye. No articulable criteria. Just a lot of vibes and trusting my intuition (a skill I gained verrrrrrry late in life)
Congrats on making a game to completion, and doubly so for making something that gets fairly popular. Making a real game has been on my bucket list for about as long as I've known how to program, and I haven't completely given up on it, but I would need to make friends with someone who knows how to do art and music.
Steam is just the storefront. A game publisher's role varies a lot - sometimes they're just financing the project, usually they handle stuff like PR and marketing, and sometimes they help quite a bit more with the development of the game (sounds like the case in this case based on his other answers) as in programming/art/sfx/whatever else.
1 - Before Steam take it's cut there are taxes and refunds, 15-20% depend on geography of sales.
2 - Publisher need to recouperate spendings agreed in contract, but yeah then it's likely between 40 and 60%.
For 2., I linked the page where you can find the document where the publisher claims to take 50%, if I didn’t miss something while skimming it.
Refunds on Steam can happen after a while so it's important to keep them in mind. If you sold 100 copies of your game 5-10% will be refunded.
> I linked the page where you can find the document where the publisher claims to take 50%.
I havent worked with Raw Fury and wouldn't be able to talk about it then anyway, but:
1 - If a publisher funded your game they will recuperate expenses by taking 70-100% of net profit. After that it can be 50%
2 - Some publishers also include localization, QA, LQA and even marketing budget into recoup amount.
Starting around 6:35
https://youtu.be/5ycSvC0ZM0k?si=DM1V06BZ1Zxbqrzh
I think in general the uptick of sales volume more than offsets the discount during a Steam sale. There's a reason Steam sales have a cooldown, they generate marketing emails to your wishlists. So sales are always good, from what I can tell.
Thanks for the congrats, and all I can say is: don't give up, I'm an old-ass man and made it happen. Don't get stuck on art or music either, IMHO. Total distraction. You can make a game fun without that stuff. At least, fun enough to be sure the investment into the next stage is wise.
> 200K Ballionaires!
> Where do you all keep coming from?!
A good portion of those came from the publisher's efforts.
Curious if you would be up for recording a podcast about the project? I love to pick people's brains about stuff like this. I recorded one with Ange the Great about his creation of Engine Simulator, for example.
When I think about game development, these are the skills and types of work that come to mind:
- software development
- game design
- graphical art
- musical composition
- writing
- marketing and promotion
and I'm sure there's more that I'm missing. I'd be very curious to know how you navigated through all of that...like did you start on one end, like with a game engine, and then fill in the rest, or was it more of a holistic iterative process? I hope that's not too broad of a question, but frankly I'd appreciate any insights you can share.
Can you expand in the part of talking to publishers. How did you approach it, how much previous context did you have, how did you evaluate what was good vs not. I know what mobile game publishers ask for but not desktop/steam ones.
Any advice? (Not that I'm making games but just curious what form it actually takes)
Getting published by likes of Raw Fury is a huge success though, very small percent or projects get such a chance.
PS: If you wish feel free to reach me, will happily share my experience.
There's a LOT of games launching on Steam all the time, some solid games go largely unnoticed. How did you get word out about your game? Did you build an audience during development? How much assistance did the publisher provide? Additionally, did you have contacts that introduced you to publishers? If not, what got their attention? Fanbase, demo, you personally?
- How/why did you decide to talk to a publisher? When in the process did you feel like you had a good enough prototype to do that?
- What have been the pros/cons of working with a publisher? When, in your opinion, should someone do that vs. self-publishing?
- What was your confidence level throughout various stages of the project? Was there a point before releasing the game where you maybe got a glimpse of the success you were going to have? (I guess probably Steam wishlists?)
- What's next?
Congrats again on the hit!
Publishers actually came to me. In a weird coincidence, I happened to show the game in a Discord where localthunk, the Balatro dev, was hanging out, and he shared it with a few big streamers. The prototype was streamed to thousands of people like ~5 weeks into its development, and the publishers started showing up immediately. Not normal. Very lucky.
I started very confident, and stayed relatively confident, for myself, but there were some weird days where you'd get a paranoid feeling: "Wait, all you do is drop a ball in this game. Why do people like it? Are they just blowing smoke up my ass? Am I having a manic break, thinking the gmae is good? It really can't possibly be good enough, right? Making successful indie games is something other people do, not me." Needless to say the demo getting reception in October 2024 Steam Nextfest (before being released in December) was hugely validating and was like the "pinch" I needed to prove it wasn't a dream.
Next is healing and recovery ... and supporting Ballionaire. Working on a creative project intensely for a year at the exclusion of almost everything else in your life, esp. at my age -- doesn't leave you in a great state when it's over. It was self-imposed crunch mode. It's not easy to be bounce back creatively or energetically.
Thanks :)
Which engine have you used?
Also, congratulations!
The artist is Hanja Grgičević.
Thanks!
This is a huge achievement and work -- although I do not know the space.
What is the stack used? Did you end up substantially switching things in the stack during your journey?
It would be great if you follow up later with experiences like the maintenance journey post-launch. Also, what do you feel the publisher provided besides the artist and guidance?
Raw Fury I think also did a great job w/ marketing and promotion, e.g. connecting the game to streamers, and the trailer knocked it out of the park IMHO :)
Congrats on shipping a huge hit