Three years ago my wife and I created a board game as a side hobby. It did way better than we expected so we took a risk and left our jobs to make games full time. We have now created 3 games, made over $1 million in revenue, and sell on Amazon, Kickstarter, and in stores.

Ask me anything about making board games, quitting my job, working from home, or anything else!

Proof I am me: https://truepic.com/xmqa7dlu/

Link to our 3rd game: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/travishancock/deadwood-1876-a-safe-robbing-game-of-teamwork-and

Link to our website: http://facadegames.com

They really do let anyone publish anything on there, don't they?

My name is Alex(also known by my online alias, AlexHoratio) and after several years of practicing my skills, I've finally made a thing that can be actually traded for money. The game is called Mass O' Kyzt, and I'll just leave the standard pitch here:

Mass O' Kyzt is a game wherein you upgrade your enemies. Each round, you will be prompted to make your enemies stronger, faster or tougher. In addition to the arena-based 2D platforming action, you will unlock over 30 cosmetics, 15 hand-crafted maps and 3 unique environments through completing in-game challenges.

Steam Page: http://store.steampowered.com/app/713220/Mass_O_Kyzt/

Proof: https://twitter.com/AlexHoratio_/status/959799683899064325

So yeah, ask me anything! I think that's how these things go.

EDIT: There are like a billion questions here and I've been answering them for 2 hours straight but I'm not going to stop until I answer every single question, so feel free to ask! Just don't expect a quick reply>.>

EDIT 2: I'm taking a break for a little bit, I've spent 11.5 hours straight answering questions- I even answered the duplicates, for some reason. I'll be back later!

My name's Luther, I used to be an associate game designer at Kabam Inc, working on the free-to-play/pay-for-stuff games 'The Godfather: Five Families' and 'Dragons of Atlantis'. I designed a lot of loot boxes, wheel games, and other things that people are pretty mad about these days because of Star Wars, EA, etc...

A few years later, I got out of that business, and started up my own game company, which has a title on Kickstarter right now. It's called Ambition: A Minuet in Power. Check it out if you're interested in rogue-likes/Japanese dating sims set in 18th century France.

I've been in the games industry for over five years and have learned a ton in the process. AMA.

Note: Just as a heads up, if something concerns the personal details of a coworker, or is still covered under an NDA, I probably won't answer it. Sorry, it's a professional courtesy that I actually take pretty seriously.

Proof: https://twitter.com/JoyManuCo/status/939183724012306432

UPDATE: I have to go, so I'm signing off. Thank you so much for all the awesome questions! If you feel like supporting our indie game, but don't want to spend any money, please sign up for our Thunderclap campaign to help us get the word out!

Hey, there Reddit! We are Haemimont Games! Tomorrow we release our brand new management survival game Surviving Mars!

Ask us anything you want, doesn’t have to be about our journey to the red planet (though we’re pretty excited to talk about it!), but as game developers, we’d, of course, love to keep it within that scope of relevance! We have also charmed some of the lovely people from our publisher Paradox Interactive to assist us in answering some questions.

 

Haemimont Games /u/blizzardb - Boian Spasov, Lead Designer /u/boyan_hg - Boyan Ivanov, Lead Designer /u/ivanassen - Ivan-Assen Ivanov, Lead Programmer

 

Paradox Interactive /u/PDX_Niki - Niki, Associate Producer /u/PDX_RCederholm - Robin Cederholm, Lead Producer /u/Jmunthe - Jakob Munthe, Product Manager

 

Our Proof!

Haemimont Games: https://twitter.com/Surviving_Mars/status/973872061130166272

Paradox Interactive: https://twitter.com/Surviving_Mars/status/973872522700754944

 

EDIT: Thanks for joining us everyone! It is now midnight here and the Devs have to be up early for release tomorrow - so we bid you all good night. Thanks for the great conversation and many questions and for joining us on this AMA!

 

Hello Reddit! I’m Sean Murray, and I’m one part of a small indie dev called Hello Games.

I joined the industry straight out of Uni, worked for three years, became a technical director, lost my way, quit and made a game with my friends. That was Joe Danger. Tomorrow we're releasing our next game called No Man's Sky.

You can read about it here: http://www.no-mans-sky.com/2016/08/what-do-you-do-in-no-mans-sky/

It's a chill sci-fi game.

I can’t really describe in words what today feels like... but let's go with weird and terrifying.

My specialist subjects are programming, indie development, working at EA, not sleeping, maths, hype-trains, drinking tea and stressing about your game releasing... Ask Me Anything!

Proof here… https://twitter.com/NoMansSky/status/762769098614923265

<3

EDIT! Thank you everyone! I'm gonna do another half hour and then try to get some sleep :)

EDIT! Leaving now because people pointed out we might overtake Obama as the most popular AMA. If that happens someone might start to worry that the hype has gone too far ¯\(シ)/¯ - thank you all so much! Hope you enjoy the game, I'm going to try to sneak off into anonymity now

Hi and welcome to my iAMA. While I've completed the "active" response period, I will revisit this topic several times over the next few days and try to respond to as many of your questions as I can. I am the creator and former writer of Nintendo Fun Club News and Nintendo Power. Don't forget to check our my segment on the EMMY nominated series “8-Bit Legacy: The Curious History of Video Games,” available now on www.greatbigstory.com.

EDIT

Wow! We did NOT expect such a response. You guys are AMAZING! It's been really fun answering your questions, but we have to call it a day now. Unfortunately we won't be able to answer the +1200 comments which are posted at the time of writing this, but we will pop in over the weekend and try to answer some more.

Here's Szurek (the Acid Wizard dog) thanking you for all the lovely questions and comments: http://imgur.com/gallery/nODIu

Another edit!

Since many of you had questions about art-related stuff, you might be interested in taking part in the fan art contest: http://www.acidwizardstudio.com/?p=726

---

We're Acid Wizard Studio, three college buddies (and a dog) from Poland who teamed up and decided to make a game. After more than 4 years of development, we have finished work on Darkwood, a unique top-down survival horror that does not rely on jump scares.

Before Darkwood, some of us literally could not sit through some of the classics of the genre. While developing the game, we managed to slowly overcome our fear of playing horror games or even watching scary movies. We can now finally play Amnesia: The Dark Descent (at least in broad daylight ;))

We knew next to nothing about game development before starting work on Darkwood. We all had a background in animation / graphic design, but we had little idea about programming, game design or production. At one point, we sat down and declared we hate our current jobs, and instead of talking all the time about making the game of our dreams, we have to just go and make one.

After a lot of sleepless nights, we had a vertical slice (kind of) of the game in 2013. We made a gameplay trailer using it, and the reactions to it blew away all of our expectations. We thought that we could actually make a living out of making video games, and started a Indiegogo campaign later that year to help us fund completing Darkwood. The campaign was not going well, but a second gameplay trailer wich launched during its last week gave us a big boost, and the campaign was a success. We set a deadline to complete the game by 2014.

Unfortunately, our inexperience in game development led to heavily overshooting that date. We expanded the scope of the game, and made some major changes to the core design of the game late in development, which ate up a lot of time. We were forced to launch in Steam Early Access in 2014. The game was received very well by the players, and sold much more than we expected! Encouraged by this... We decided to expand the scope of the game even more!

After that, even though we committed our lives to finishing the game as soon as possible, we continued to miss every deadline we set for ourselves. Negative reviews started popping up from players discouraged by the slow development or thinking we have abandoned the game. Development was very slow and frustrating. We bit off way more than we could chew, but we knew we had something special in our hands, and we had to complete it in the way we envisioned it. After 3 years of hard, hard work, the game is finished, and we're pretty proud of it.

Proof: https://twitter.com/TheAcidWizard/status/894943579851943936

EDIT: By popular demand, here is our dog, Szurek (pronounced Shooreck) playing Darkwood: http://imgur.com/gallery/2V4Pl

Answering your questions will be:

Gustaw - programming, marketing, PR

Artur - art, sound design, music, story

Kuba - animation

To get a glimpse of what Darkwood is about, check out this trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3S3tmWfFACQ

Find out more about Darkwood here: http://store.steampowered.com/app/274520/Darkwood/

Hey guys, I'm Vasiliy Sabirov, head analyst at analytics service devtodev. I've been analyzing mobile games and apps for more than 7 years now and have been educating game developers, producers, project managers and marketers on how they can make their best decisions based on data and significantly improve their games. Feel free to ask me anything! :)

You can watch one of my presentations here.

UPD. Guys, that was awesome! Didn't expect so many questions! Thanks for all of them and will be back for more :)

Hey there! In case you're new around these parts, my name is Ben Brode, and I'm the Game Director on Hearthstone.

I'm responsible for the overall design of the game, as part of a team of badass folks. I started at Blizzard in 2003, and started working on Hearthstone in 2008. Nowadays I spend most of my times in meetings, talking about the sick designs that our talented team comes up with. I tend to stay pretty active here on Reddit and on Twitter (@bdbrode), but I am excited to solicit questions directly – Reddit /AMA’s format is super cool. Having a dialog with the Hearthstone community is very important to me and the development team, and this is one of the easiest ways to facilitate that. I think Hearthstone is at its best when we work together to improve the game. Let's chat!

Proof: https://i.redd.it/7owq7dbu5g9z.jpg

EDIT: Thanks for coming everyone! Lots of great questions! I answered as many as I could in 2 hours, but HOLY CRAP There's like 1500 questions!! I tried to hit the ones with the most upvotes. Sorry if I didn't get to yours! Thanks again! :)

EDIT: Hello everyone! We are packing things up. I believe we actually successfully answered almost every single question between me and Danny! Sorry if we missed yours! Thank you all for the support and for throwing some light on the game. We will do our best to support the game in every way we can and live up to your expectations! We're out, thank you!

Hello. My name is Charles Webb. Three years ago, while working IT for a small software company and binge playing Samurai-Gunn with my closest friends in much of my off time, I started working with one of them (Daniel Crockenberg.) Inspired by the wonderfully crafted combat mechanics of Samurai Gunn, we set out to make a punchy, fast paced dungeon-crawler with the depth and complexity of a fighting game!

Over time the community around the game grew enthusiastic enough that we decided we had to take the chance. We quit our jobs and began working on it full time. (Note: This is certainly usually a very bad idea!)

We decided to call the game 'Ruin of the Reckless', mostly as a reference to our sorry financial situation and the foolishness of our decision to make it. Hehe, get it!?

About two years later, we planned and launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise the funds necessary to complete the game 'for real.' It was successful, largely due to the strength of our playable 'Backers Only' Build, which became popular with streamers like Tietuesday.

Edit: We've gotten a lot of questions about this whole thing specifically so I want to put this in OP for more clarity...

"Sorry, there is a slight lack of clarity in my post here. We worked on the game for about 2 years part-time BEFORE the Kickstarter. After the Kickstarter we worked for about 7 months before the game was released. ALL of our living expenses were paid out of our own finances/savings, Kickstarter money was only spent on game assets, contractor fees, etc... We certainly didn't live for that entire time without any income!"

Since then it has been non-stop work up to today putting the game together for our backers and the community at large. Over the course of development we have been through Steam Greenlight, conducted a successful Kickstarter campaign, been featured on several popular streams and youtube channels (including Tietuesday, DreadedCone, and TotalBiscuits wildly popular Co-Optional Podcast), met with major publishers, built a humble following of almost 2000 indie die-hards on twitter, signed on to and maintained contracts with almost 20 artists and musicians, been featured on many indie-gaming and videogaming news sites including Co-Optimus and well, a LOT of other stuff! It has really been quite a ride to get to this point!

I am also very proud and excited to say that we were recently accepted by GOG.com and will be included in to their curated store. To me this is a great honor and a validation of all of the hard work we have put in so far!

On release day we were featured on the front page of gog.com as well as the front page of the itch.io store. It remains to be seen whether we can crack the top sellers list on Steam but i'm crossing my fingers! We spent the first day on and near the top of the popular new releases page on Steam so release has gone well so far! (proof: https://twitter.com/FauxOperative/status/857426940889767936)

Want to know more? Here are a few resources.

VIDEO REVIEW: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGt7EAtdYUY

STEAM PAGE: http://store.steampowered.com/app/516430

TRAILER: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5G2i6rbavEY

( EDIT: For everyone asking, YES, SCREENSHAKE IS FULLY ADJUSTABLE. (We humble ourselves before the reddit gods of screenshake and beg forgiveness! We are already in the process of having a new one made that has much less screenshake. Thank you all for warning us that this was such a big issue!))

It is my sincere intention to answer EVERY SINGLE QUESTION asked, no matter what the context is. So if you really want to, feel free to lay in to me and try to make me feel bad! I'll do my best to answer you to the best of my ability! :p

Here's proof that I am... me! https://twitter.com/FauxOperative/status/857998815663538176

For proof of the rest of my claims you can check out our steam store page, or our official website at www.ruinofthereckless.com

Ask me anything!

P.S: We tried to do this AMA a few days ago and it went really well... but it was taken down due to an error with one of the modbots. We cleared everything up with the mods and so now we're back! Hi again everybody!

Edit: Uhh... We're on the front page of reddit right now! I didn't really expect that. I hope I can still get to everyone's questions! I will do my best!

FyrFoot is my dev partner and he's going to step in and start answering questions too.

Edit: Hi guys, I did my best but uh... there is simply no way I can answer every single question any more. My inbox is growing significantly faster than I can answer them but I will be digging through the bottom and answering as many as I can.

Edit: Someone pointed out that we didn't highlight our bands enough. These bands are awesome, you should support them!

https://slimegirls.bandcamp.com

https://protodome.bandcamp.com

https://elrad.bandcamp.com

*EDIT: People are still asking questions so I'll keep answering I guess... *

We make Cards Against Humanity, a party game for horrible people. Cards Against Humanity began as a Kickstarter project and has become the best-reviewed toy or game on Amazon.

Today we are announcing the World Wide Web Pack, available for preorder right now on our website. 100% of the profits are going to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, to establish the Cards Against Humanity Fund for Boring but Necessary Legal Battles that are Hard to Explain to the Public.

We're going to write the pack with you right here in this AMA so please pitch us your shitty card ideas in addition to your questions! The best suggestions will make it into the pack (credited to your Reddit username), and the worst ones will be mercilessly mocked.

There’s about twenty of us who make the game together, and we’re all here to answer your dumb questions: Me, jsdillon, bhantoot, DavidManque, MrMeDaniel, ehalpern, dpinsof, jennCAH, trinCAH, amycah, laurenCAH, HenryCAH, karleecah, MattCAH, siobhancah, alexcah, and mariaCAH.

Here's proof that it's really us!

This year we bought a private island, started a new company, opened a co-working space in Chicago, established a scholarship fund for women getting college degrees in science, and released the Sixth Expansion, the Science Pack, the Design Pack, the Fantasy Pack, and the Food Pack. We're happy to talk about any of that stuff or just tell you what our favorite card is.

---

EDIT: You guys! It's 7:00pm... I haven't taken a break to pee for twelve hours... I think we're going to call it a night! Thanks for some amazing conversation, and for getting this to the front page. We're going to be working on the World Wide Web Pack based on the suggestions in this thread tonight and tomorrow, and you can follow along with our progress in these places:

• http://twitter.com/CAH
• http://CAH.tumblr.com
• And also my personal twitter & Tumblr

Finally, thank you for helping us raise over $150,000 for The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Worldbuilders today! Our entire company would not exist without a free and open internet, and it means so much to us to support the work that the EFF is doing to defend net neutrality and our right to privacy.

P.S. If you're looking for something else funny to do, go listen to Hello From the Magic Tavern!

Greg and Chip began work on Fictorum about 30 months ago. With the desire to make a game where you got to play as the most powerful wizard that had ever walked the face of the planet. We ran into Leif by chance and picked up our artist.

We’ve hired various contractors throughout the development process.

Greg and Chip are both working day jobs to help fund the development of Fictorum. Leif has been working full-time as our (overworked) artist.

Ask us anything about creating our first video game, running a company, and anything else you could possibly want to know.

Proof: https://twitter.com/Scraping_Bottom/status/895665970672320516

u/VincereStarcraft is Greg

u/ElChipacabra is Chip

EDIT: Thanks for all the questions!! I'll check back in later tonight after my kids go to bed to probably answer a few more questions. Sorry we couldn't get to everyone's question.

Hi Reddit!

We are Lorenz and Rok from Proxy Studios. We are developing a 4X strategy game set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. Would you like to know anything about the game and its development?

Steam product page: http://store.steampowered.com/app/489630/Warhammer_40000_Gladius__Relics_of_War/

Our proof: https://twitter.com/proxy_studios/status/951846598996316165

Ask us anything!

CLOSED: We're going to sign off and get back to work on the game! Thanks for the questions, you've all been wonderful in sharing the love for the 40k universe. Sorry we couldn't get to all of you, but hopefully we've wetted your appetite! If you'd like to stay in touch, wishlist Gladius on Steam or keep tabs on us at https://twitter.com/proxy_studios