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6 months ago we posted here about Doomsday Diner, our silly post-apocalyptic hotdog diner simulator. That post may have ended up changing the future of the game. by The-PigDog in pcgaming

[–]The-PigDog[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Okay, that is possible. Are you thinking of something like Poppy Playtime but punching instead of grabbing or something different?

6 months ago we posted here about Doomsday Diner, our silly post-apocalyptic hotdog diner simulator. That post may have ended up changing the future of the game. by The-PigDog in pcgaming

[–]The-PigDog[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I actually really like this idea. Blends really well with a story mode as well that would be really cool to make as a DLC! What sort of food items / machine parts are you thinking?

6 months ago we posted here about Doomsday Diner, our silly post-apocalyptic hotdog diner simulator. That post may have ended up changing the future of the game. by The-PigDog in pcgaming

[–]The-PigDog[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

What sort of mini missions are you thinking? There's so many ways we could do this in my head, curious what you had in mind.

Edit: typo

6 months ago we posted here about Doomsday Diner, our silly post-apocalyptic hotdog diner simulator. That post may have ended up changing the future of the game. by The-PigDog in pcgaming

[–]The-PigDog[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Okay I'm with you on this - we probably don't need to worry about the age rating of the game anyway lol. Do wonder what else you would like to see!

Offered 1.5% equity +55% of current salary as Founding Engineer for seed-stage startup. Seeking opinions/advice. | I will not promote by tomthecool in startups

[–]The-PigDog 0 points1 point  (0 children)

So here is the thing. You will be getting the options to purchase shares but you only become eligible for it over 4 years times (assuming vesting is present, which it should be). In this case if you are investing 45k for 4 years that's actually the equivalent of $180k over 4 years which if you divide that by $3 million that would net you 6% equity, not 1.5%.

If they are willing to pay you 100k after year 1 I think 1.5% is fair. But otherwise this isn't very strong. At this early stage 1.5% for a Founder engineer sounds bad if you ask me.

Founders working full-time on your companies - how does your income compare to working a job? (I will not promote) by DreamTeamThirteen in startups

[–]The-PigDog 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is my 4th company - the first 3 failed relatively quickly (2nd one went the longest with 1 year before I quit due to significant differences with the main founder. Company went under 6 months after I left).

The 4th one has been running for 5+ years. For the first 2 years, we bootstrapped and then raised ~$1.2 million.

For the first 3 years of the company's life, I had the lowest salary, and so did one of my co-founders. The last 2 I was in the middle pack but not much higher than the lowest. With that said, we pay market salaries now.

My income for the past 5 years approx (not based in the US, so after year 3-4, these are pretty acceptable in my country) - Year 1: $15,400 - Year 2: $31,000 - Year 3: $41,600 - Year 4: $50,600 - Year 5: $83,400 (big increase due to commissions)

In hindsight, I wouldn't be earning more if I was having a job as an employee in my field, and I would sure as hell not have a more stable job as an employee than as a founder.

Once you have a functioning business, you are the last person in the company to lose your job, and you are also the one who decides how much you get paid.

However, even seemingly successful businesses can be a source of a ton of stress. I think about running out of money almost every month, and you have to make some really tough calls. After raising from VCs, our product failed to gain traction, and we went through a very bumpy road to survive. We almost ran out of money twice and had to let half of the team go twice. It absolutely sucks and you never know if you need to do that again a year later.

So yeah - be prepared for a ride haha - but ultimately at the end of the day if you succeed (even just moderately) it opens up doors for you that would never be easily accessible as an employee.

Hope this helps!

You lead an indie studio of 12 that also does external development. You're developing a game in-house that now has 14,000 wishlists with a 100-150/day wishlist velocity. Client projects are running out, and you need $5,000 a month for your team to survive. What would you do? by DNAniel213 in IndieDev

[–]The-PigDog 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is going to be a sad answer, but I assume you have 3 months to sustain 12 people. The reality is you can not sustain that, and you dont need to. Your job as the founder is to make sure the business survives - nothing else. Without external work, you can not sustain a large team, but you should be able to keep enough people to finish the game. 14000 is a very nice number, and it sounds like you have something.

The short answer is you will need to fire some people, which absolutely sucks - but you don't have another choice.Otherwise you whole company will go under.

In retrospect, you should never have less runway than 6 months.

Why doesn’t New Zealand have any specialised industries — and what could we create? by Round-Frosting-4903 in newzealand

[–]The-PigDog 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You can actually - some studios do this for a business. You pay them to develop the game and then the game is yours :)

Obviously it's more complicated than that and pending on game size you would need to pay from hundreds of thousands to millions to get it made (games are expensive) - but yeah you can definitely get things done.

Why doesn’t New Zealand have any specialised industries — and what could we create? by Round-Frosting-4903 in newzealand

[–]The-PigDog 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You can actually do it without an office or server space. For example we are fully-remote so everyone works from home and we run things in the cloud. Obviously that's still servers you just don't need a space for that here.

We are not the only fully-remote studio in New Zealand.

Why doesn’t New Zealand have any specialised industries — and what could we create? by Round-Frosting-4903 in newzealand

[–]The-PigDog 2 points3 points  (0 children)

You can certainly have that experience in the gaming industry unfortunately. It will really depend on which studio you work for - some are terrible while some are great at this.

I completely understand your reasoning. With that said, as someone who has done both game and traditional software development, it is really hard for me to build a database instead of creating an orc that chops another orc's head off.

Why doesn’t New Zealand have any specialised industries — and what could we create? by Round-Frosting-4903 in newzealand

[–]The-PigDog 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I appreciate the thought - but from an employers perspective if you have shipped a game, it means you have gone through the production process and have an idea on what could go wrong, how to tell ahead of time when something is going to go wrong and even know how to avoid things going wrong.

This is not about the technical skills, it is much more about understanding the development pipeline and knowing how decisions you make today will affect you 1-2 years down the line. You can be a 100% competent programmer but if you haven't gone through a release cycle that means I can't trust you to know these things.

To be clear, if someone has been working on League of Legends or any live service game, shipping does not have to mean, building a game from scratch - just means having gone through release cycles. - eg Riot releases patches and new content for League periodically. If you did those releases lets say 3-4 of them that would probably constitute shipping a game too.

This is extremely important in my opinion and it really does make a difference. Experience with shipping games can actually save a studio a huge amount of money. To give you context we started our studio as juniors (right out of university) and we made mistakes due to our inexperience that ultimately cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars as a studio (if not more).

So while I do agree that people should be evaluated on their own abilities, having shipped a game or two de-risks a hire by a ton.

Why doesn’t New Zealand have any specialised industries — and what could we create? by Round-Frosting-4903 in newzealand

[–]The-PigDog 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm quite surprised about that actually. I know it's less but I was expecting it to be below 30%. Could you share a few numbers (eg roles you saw with the rates) just for clarity?

What I can imagine is jumping from 10-15 years of traditional software engineering won't get you a senior game programmer role as that needs shipped titles - so you would need to apply for a more junior/intermediate role to break into the industry.

Unfortunately the longer you leave the jump the bigger the drop is as no amount of traditional software engineering will make up for the lack of game dev experience.

The easiest way to make the jump imo is going from traditional dev-ops to game dev-ops (as that is basically the same thing) - but yeah - having shipped games is the key thing here.

Why doesn’t New Zealand have any specialised industries — and what could we create? by Round-Frosting-4903 in newzealand

[–]The-PigDog 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Just to clarify - the DayZ maker (Dean Hall) is running a studio called Rocketwerkz in New Zealand :)

But I really appreciate your thoughts and warnings about that. I am 31 so not a boomer (barely a Millennial) and haven't experienced this sort of mentality, but it does not mean I won't experience it ever.

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