Over the last year I’ve been designing and developing the VR title, Cosmotic Blast. The team size is one and I am all in. No day time job, all in. Am I nuts?
In 2017 I successfully ran a KickStarter for the game, The Cosmotic Mission. It was a success in that I was able to bring my first game title to market and sell it on the Oculus store.
I learned a ton from that experience, to the point that seeing someone else go through that process is a huge bonus in reviewing portfolios and resumes. I gained experience that I brought to the design go this new game, Cosmotic Blast.
Cosmotic Blast brings an arcade-style asteroid shooter totally realized in the new VR paradigm. Stand in space like never before and blast asteroids out of the sky with your ship. It is unadulterated fun as you upgrade with more and more power to overcome the waves of procedurally generated asteroids.
… but I made it by myself. No kickstart, no publisher , nothing but savings.
I was asked when I made The Cosmotic Mission by Dr. Andrew Williams, the Game Design and Development program director at UW-Stout, how many hours did you spend to make this and I could not answer besides, ” a lot.” That was not sufficient.
So I kept records when I made Cosmotic Blast …
Without telling you too much. I am making $0.00 per hour on this project at the time of writing this. I must be nuts to do this.
To be fair, the game just launched on January 28th, 2020 and sales numbers have not come in yet. I will post once in awhile on this subject, as I get sales and as I spend more time developing it, it’s bound to fluctuate. Luckily, as of now, it can’t go lower! If it is lower, that’s expenses, and that’s a whole different bag of stats.
If you want to know more details about the ins and outs of what it took to make an arcade-style VR game as a solo independent game developer for the Oculus Rift, we better have a pint or two in front of us, because it’s a lot.