Firing up the backburner
Albedo Games was founded in 2012 with the aim of creating interesting, thought-provoking games in the puzzle and strategy genres.
After university I took a look at the indie game development scene and I saw many solo or 2 person developers carving out some degree of success. In those days discoverability on Steam wasn’t a problem and the supply and demand economics were much more tipped in my favour. Seeing all thing I thought I might have a reasonable shot at making a modest income.
Thus Albedo Games was formed. It was game development a trial by fire. I learned a hell of a lot, I made a bunch of mistakes and had a bunch of faulty assumptions: the Dunning-Kruger effect in full effect. In the end I have emerged with some useful professional skills but the dream of a self sufficient game development business was never realised.
Things came to a head with the birth of my daughter. I could no longer live off my family’s good will any more and more importantly I had to admit to myself that the economic reality of solo independent game development had totally changed since that time in 2012. Supply had increased exponentially and the mid-sized indie teams had redefined and raised the bar of the public’s expectations of what indie games could be. I would need to either get extremely niche or get a lot more funding and personal to be competitive in the present market. Turning the ship around was not possible because I had a game that already had 2+ years of development sunk into it.
In addition some of the other mistakes I made were not getting enough early validation of my game ideas before committing them to production and not doing enough market analysis and general business case work on my ideas. In a nutshell I was treating the business like some sort of bohemian artistic endeavour that would somehow (????) make money eventually.
And that reality brings me to the future of Albedo Games. I still very much want to make games and if that means abandoning solo dev for a larger team or company then so be it. So that’s what I’ve done. Starting next week I’ve taken a job as a programmer at PikPok. I’m really looking forward to working with such a talented bunch of folks on some great games.
I still plan to work on game ideas in my spare time and they may or may not be released under Albedo Games, but in any case those projects are very much on the back burner now that it’s not my primary job. That means no release schedules or promises and projects like Riftgate are permanently on hiatus.
Its been a wild ride the past few years and I’ve really enjoyed it but in the end, reality had to intervene. In a way it’s been a valuable learning process akin to a PhD in game development that was self funded. To all those who supported me I can’t thank you enough.