One of the big factors in business is to keep the costs down. Here is a ranting of sorts on how stuff costs too much, but more importantly, what are some costs involved with making an Android App, in no particular order.
Rent (apartment/house/office)
Going to need a physical place to make the product, either for yourself, or for your team of people.
Utilities - Gas
It is always nice to have a comfy place to work, and paying a gas bill is conducive for temperature control. If you're living at your place of work, and you're the software guy, you might be able to skimp on this cost by living in your room; if it is anything like mine, your copious amounts computers provide enough heat to replace the gas bill.
Utilities - Electric
Without this, you're not going anywhere in this business.
Food
Generally a good idea to be able to eat stuff. Though cutting back on going out to eat and consuming frivolous luxury foods can really add up and should be put in check if you want to keep costs down if you're working for yourself. Buy a water filter and don't waste money on bottled water or soda/pop. Rice, beans, anything that keeps a while, easy to make, and can buy in bulk, is a good idea to get used to.
Travel
Most software people usually don't go outside much, but in the freak accident of circumstance, it can happen... and it does cost money usually.
Phones, gizmos, and gadgets
An Android phone or tablet or both is highly recommended if you're serious about making apps. You'll probably want some other trinkets to entertain you as well, like some sweet binary clock or something.
License fees
Yep, these are going to happen. Google takes $25 up front for your developer license. If you want to port to iOS one day, they take $100 a year. Various software tools have license fees. Fortunately, for Android, using Eclipse and the Android SDK is free, but if you use any sort of supporting program, like Photoshop, 3ds MAX, various sounds programs, all of those are very expensive. Weigh this cost with the related contracting cost of outsourcing those needs.
Distribution fees
The Android market place takes a cut of your sale price if you decide to release an app as a paid app. Based on how much money you make, the rate fluctuates, but you may as well chalk this up to a 30% reduction of income to the "payment processing" that is associated with the marketplace.
Personnel
People need to do work to make a product. If you yourself are not personally creating some aspect of a product, it needs to be outsourced somewhere, and even if you could provide an aspect of a product, the question is should you use *your time* by providing whatever that is. For example, as a developer, I can and do make some graphics, but for every hour "lost" to making graphics, is an hour away from programming. For every hour programming, I lose to marketing -- unfortunately humans have that bad habit of existing in linear time, forcing us to do one thing, then the next, and time is what drives costs up. Carefully weigh your time versus costs involved with outsourcing. At the end of the day, paying someone else to do something for you will probably be your largest cost, and can fluctuate wildly.
Don't even bother with the idea of hiring someone else as a staff member unless you have a lot of money at your disposal. Contract anything and everything out on a per-job basis to keep costs down as much as possible.
Contracts
Anything that can't be done "in house" basically has to be contracted out. Some initial quotes from contracting houses for graphics work ranged from $2,000 ~ $50,000 for the same set of art requirements. We're talking about really basic things too, about a dozen static backgrounds, some animated characters, some promo art. Shop around for quotes as you can see the range has a large distribution, but regardless, you will be paying the costs for this, no matter what it costs.
Legal
Fees, fees, and more fees. If you make an LLC, incorporate, whatever, the federal government and the state will likely want a piece of your company or at the very least, a hefty portion of your income no matter what your legal status is. Lawyers and all that good stuff could be put in this category as well.
Medical
My advice to you, if you're in the United States anyways, is simply don't get sick or get hurt. You basically can't afford to have anything bad happen to you. In other words, don't quit your day job if you have medical benefits. At the same time, don't even bother thinking about hiring employees because, depending on your state, YOU may have to cough up cash for medical coverage of employees... the insurance of those people... costs keep stacking up going this route.
Insurance
In the US, if you hire people, your business might be subject to being forced to pay certain insurance costs -- like unemployment, workers compensation, etc... these costs can sneak up on you if you're not prepared.
Other things
Website fees, hosting fees, marketing and advertising costs -- depending on what you want to do to maximize your presence, these costs could be all over the place, but probably should be considered if you're factoring costs.
Miscellaneous
Hah, made two sections for other stuff. Seriously though, you will want to add in some buffer zone above your initial costs allocated to "just in case", things always seem to take longer than expected, or more expensive than initially discovered; either way, YOU will have to cough up the cash to make it happen; nothing worse than paying for 75% of something and running out of cash making you eat all those costs with no hope of recovering any of said costs by failing to deliver the product at all!
This isn't an itemized list, but should give you a decent idea of the general costs that could be involved with a business associated with making Android Apps. I can wager this isn't a 100% complete list either, as small expenditures like to just show up when they are least expected.
Proper planning for costs will increase the chance you have in creating and finishing a product by giving you an idea of how much money and resources you will need to go from start to finish.
Sunday, February 5, 2012
Saturday, February 4, 2012
Design to Product on Android - Resources (2 / 17)
Before we start going over what we want to make, we need to assess what kind of production power we have, and figuring out if we need more of something. Usually, more money pumped in to a startup means more money coming back from the return investment -- the formula sounds good on paper, but doesn't always reflect reality because there's an assumption that all money invested has any return at all.
The most important resource to business is money, liquid cash. Your purchasing power is what will ultimately drive your business to success or failure. The trick is to acquire/accomplish a lot, while using little. Time is money, so if you can create a product or service yourself, you won't have to pay others to do it for you -- though sometimes "outsourcing" things that save you time can be worth the money!
For our intents and purposes, we're making Android apps, so how do we go about doing that. Obviously we will need someone to *make* the product - a software person that specializes in Java programming, specifically for Android OS. Someone that can make pretty graphics is a plus, and possibly making some sounds and/or music. Ideally someone should also create a design for the game, and put it all together as well. If you're the business-type and cannot or will not fill any of these roles, you have a large financial obligation already since "high-tech" workers, especially in the USA, are not cheap. Plus, things usually tend to take a lot more time/money than people expect, which would translate to much higher costs than expected.
Personally, I'm operating as most of the required roles myself, and I recommend doing something similar. If you don't like it, this business probably isn't for you. Remember, at the end of the day, you have to make money from this to at least cover your costs of production!
So, you have an Android developer picked out and working with you (or is you).
One of the first questions is, do you need some sort of Android hardware to make Android products? Well, technically, the answer is no, but I will attest that buying an Android device was overwhelmingly useful during development and testing in earlier products. The emulator is free, so the business side of me wanted that, but the techie in me demanded a "real device". The reasons behind this can be long and complicated, but suffice to say, if you want a good end product, you need to target what you're making stuff for. You can get by with the emulator, but ultimately we settled with buying a device, while using the emulator to test specific versions of the Android OS other than the version that came with our actual phone. This topic warrants its own article and will be linked later.
We now officially have a burden of making enough money to pay for this device, at least, and ignoring the fact that we're not even paying ourselves! However, we now have our first asset for the business, and this should be considered one of our resources.
As a point of reference, our business started with approximately $6,000 of "disposable cash". In other words, our business has taken the acceptable risk of losing 100% of the cash in this endeavor. I cannot stress enough that Android development is very risky in terms of money spent, versus money earned. To any other prospective or current Android devs out there, if you can't risk at least several thousand dollars to make your products (assuming you're the dev yourself), this probably isn't the business to go in to. If you aren't the developer, this figure can easily get in to the 10's of thousands of dollars.
Let's recap, you will probably want a bit of cash to get things started and pay for the ongoing production of your apps, an Android device (phone in our case), some people to make products, and a hunk of time to produce the product. This will put a large dent in your startup money and is the subject of the next article, the costs involved with producing apps.
The most important resource to business is money, liquid cash. Your purchasing power is what will ultimately drive your business to success or failure. The trick is to acquire/accomplish a lot, while using little. Time is money, so if you can create a product or service yourself, you won't have to pay others to do it for you -- though sometimes "outsourcing" things that save you time can be worth the money!
For our intents and purposes, we're making Android apps, so how do we go about doing that. Obviously we will need someone to *make* the product - a software person that specializes in Java programming, specifically for Android OS. Someone that can make pretty graphics is a plus, and possibly making some sounds and/or music. Ideally someone should also create a design for the game, and put it all together as well. If you're the business-type and cannot or will not fill any of these roles, you have a large financial obligation already since "high-tech" workers, especially in the USA, are not cheap. Plus, things usually tend to take a lot more time/money than people expect, which would translate to much higher costs than expected.
Personally, I'm operating as most of the required roles myself, and I recommend doing something similar. If you don't like it, this business probably isn't for you. Remember, at the end of the day, you have to make money from this to at least cover your costs of production!
So, you have an Android developer picked out and working with you (or is you).
One of the first questions is, do you need some sort of Android hardware to make Android products? Well, technically, the answer is no, but I will attest that buying an Android device was overwhelmingly useful during development and testing in earlier products. The emulator is free, so the business side of me wanted that, but the techie in me demanded a "real device". The reasons behind this can be long and complicated, but suffice to say, if you want a good end product, you need to target what you're making stuff for. You can get by with the emulator, but ultimately we settled with buying a device, while using the emulator to test specific versions of the Android OS other than the version that came with our actual phone. This topic warrants its own article and will be linked later.
We now officially have a burden of making enough money to pay for this device, at least, and ignoring the fact that we're not even paying ourselves! However, we now have our first asset for the business, and this should be considered one of our resources.
As a point of reference, our business started with approximately $6,000 of "disposable cash". In other words, our business has taken the acceptable risk of losing 100% of the cash in this endeavor. I cannot stress enough that Android development is very risky in terms of money spent, versus money earned. To any other prospective or current Android devs out there, if you can't risk at least several thousand dollars to make your products (assuming you're the dev yourself), this probably isn't the business to go in to. If you aren't the developer, this figure can easily get in to the 10's of thousands of dollars.
Let's recap, you will probably want a bit of cash to get things started and pay for the ongoing production of your apps, an Android device (phone in our case), some people to make products, and a hunk of time to produce the product. This will put a large dent in your startup money and is the subject of the next article, the costs involved with producing apps.
Design to Product on Android - Intro (1 / 17)
Hi everyone,
Welcome to a large blog series about what it takes to design, plan, budget, develop, test, and deploy an Android app, in this case, a game. Over the course of a year or so, our studio has been reading countless articles, some do's and don'ts about how to get in to the Android marketplace. Super long stories short, basically, it doesn't make much sense to dump a ton of time and money in to this hoping you'll make millions over night. But, because we're persistent (and possibly borderline crazy), we're going to do it anyways.
The Android marketplace relies on independent developers to populate their app catalog. This is both good and bad. It's good because the apps released there usually do not have a large budget behind them and perform and look subpar, usually. It's bad because the marketplace is absolutely *flooded* with apps, making any release you make almost impossible to find and gain exposure, and thus popularity. On top of that, Android users overwhelmingly don't want to pay for anything, which actually makes sense because of the absolute crazy amount of free apps all over the marketplace.
I recall reading an article last year about how a businessman went in to the games industry with a bit of cash to fund his startup, so he thought, and make good on his returns for all the cash he put in to it... well, he deeply regretted the whole thing and attributed his failure to the fact that he had absolutely no experience with software, development, or really had any idea on how complicated things can get, and how long they can take... needless to say, his projects went over their time estimates, over budget, and he folded within a year. His "lessons learned" were that he wished he had at least a software developer background so that he had a better idea of how long things would take, which I'm sure would have helped his planning and budgeting.
I'm coming more from a software dev's perspective going to business. This series will focus on our journey, how we are going about this project, the business itself, budgets, ideas, some sarcasm, maybe some code, and some other stuff. This series won't be too focused on "the techie side", but more on the process itself of how to go from the idea -- I want to make a game -- to a product.
Friday, February 3, 2012
Chrome incognito mode
As a follow up to my admittance of switching over to the Chrome web browser, it would be in good order to share how to use chrome in incognito mode. No, this mode will not make you impossible to track, though it is a feature that assumes you don't want websites to track you down by remembering things about you.
To use Chrome in incognito mode, you must run chrome with a parameter. Specifically:
chrome.exe --incognitoTo launch chrome without using a command prompt, make a shortcut on your desktop with chrome, and edit the "Target" to be
C:\Users\[YOUR USERNAME]\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe --incognitoYou will see a little masked spy in the upper left corner of your chrome window if you did it right... and probably some errors or other demoralizing things if you didn't.
Conversion to Chrome
After many years of using Firefox, I think I've finally converted over to Chrome. Chrome now seems more responsive, uses less memory, and just seems to deliver a smoother web experience. The only thing I use Firefox now is for streaming videos or movies off the internet. For whatever reason, Chrome seems to puke while streaming video still.
So, I guess my "normal" browser is Chrome, while using FF as my "I'm watching movies" mode.
Oh, and I also don't quite understand why Firefox is on a version runaway train. Congratulations FF team, your version numbers are now ahead of Internet Explorer; though I'm a tad concerned that isn't really a good thing. Sure, it might convince some people that your browser must be better because it has a higher version number than IE, but that marketing ploy won't work on a lot of people.
So, I guess my "normal" browser is Chrome, while using FF as my "I'm watching movies" mode.
Oh, and I also don't quite understand why Firefox is on a version runaway train. Congratulations FF team, your version numbers are now ahead of Internet Explorer; though I'm a tad concerned that isn't really a good thing. Sure, it might convince some people that your browser must be better because it has a higher version number than IE, but that marketing ploy won't work on a lot of people.
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