NIGHTMARE... Outsourcing for cheap app development.

[vklymenko]

@WhatItTakesGame:

ok, so the thing is:

- we have limited budget, lets say $100 and we want to be rich. Will you agree that it sounds like "hey, i'll give you $100 and you will make so i'll have $1,000+ as result?" so like you're investing very small sum and want to have very big return, on this way you're taking a year of life of a developer(s), so hitting their
time, health etc. And in result this developer(s) will get nothing cause he spent this money for food etc while developing your game, and you got now a passive incoming resource.

I want to be impartial, so i'll show another side also, but lets attack you little more:

- isn't better to spend big budgets, but make "good" games, so all players will be happy, and will not waste their money for scam, spend time to refund money etc. Its like comparing to food business: "hey, i have not much money, but i want to open a small food store, lets find some cheap bad food, but we'll make good money in short time". Well, i guess here your answer will be that mobile game appstores are amateur places, so its a place for low cost things with good chances to make money for any single developer with any quality of product.

now about cheap workers. Yes, they're also wrong, when:
- taking a project, when they see that they're not able to process
- taking projects when have not enough experience
- no any deadline and schedules
- taking lot of projects at time and not be able to process any single of them
- etc etc etc.
the answer is simple here. All people need money all the time, in some countries people taking business more serious, and in some countries another hundred dollars can save your life or health, so if you founded someone randomly on web - there is no guarantee this guy is serious and will not leave the project on half way, also there are much of scam programmers on freelance sites.

about come and meet face-to-face developer:

another question is about advices from friends (its mostly in USA):
- a lot of people following currently Trey Smith's blog, its hard to find a guy who don't know who is that. I don't want to say bad about someone, but i'll just say what i heared from a guy (his "student"): "...well, Trey showed its possible to spend $300 for coder and make a complete small game and make good money, so I thought why i can't do same, and I tried with tens of programmers without success, and later i understood that Trey have a team of "setuped" programmers, which are helping each other and thats why things happens fast and cheap at him. Thats why lot of people were smashed, spend much of money and wasn't able to release any good single game..."
- i will think more about "come and meet face-to-face devs", but i'll just describe my case: a jewish guy contacted me some years ago and we started to make games, he had much of money to invest, so we started at least 5 games and were working on all at same time. Once he came to me to Ukraine and we spent a week, we had an office running with 2 more programmers and today he hasn't released any single game with me, although all games were 90% ready and high quality. So its not working always - to meet devs.

also another thing is that lot of people see: "uh, my friend making thousands with small iphone games... why i can't"

if we want to find some solutions we should speak about issues in root. Maybe the issue is in time-management? I bet you just gave the project to your devs and was contacting them from time to time, later less and rarely? and when you wanted to push things you just wrote them "hey, is there a chance to finish the game on this date, cause there will be celebrations and its a good time for release?" or was asking again and again "can you give me estimates". I'll shock you, but your game can be done in less then week (coding), so maybe next time better to pick an expensive coder with daily updates?


maybe the solution is to make groups of "investors", which can invest "big" budget and make quality projects? So lets say Microsoft have certificates system, so its pretty hard to be a developer for xBox, maybe same should be on current mobile appstores?

p.s.: im sharing just thoughts... independent discussion.. nothing personal to any side.

[WhatItTakesGame]

Originally Posted by vklymenko

@WhatItTakesGame:

ok, so the thing is:

- we have limited budget, lets say $100 and we want to be rich. Will you agree that it sounds like "hey, i'll give you $100 and you will make so i'll have $1,000+ as result?" so like you're investing very small sum and want to have very big return, on this way you're taking a year of life of a developer(s), so hitting their
time, health etc. And in result this developer(s) will get nothing cause he spent this money for food etc while developing your game, and you got now a passive incoming resource.

I want to be impartial, so i'll show another side also, but lets attack you little more:

- isn't better to spend big budgets, but make "good" games, so all players will be happy, and will not waste their money for scam, spend time to refund money etc. Its like comparing to food business: "hey, i have not much money, but i want to open a small food store, lets find some cheap bad food, but we'll make good money in short time". Well, i guess here your answer will be that mobile game appstores are amateur places, so its a place for low cost things with good chances to make money for any single developer with any quality of product.

now about cheap workers. Yes, they're also wrong, when:
- taking a project, when they see that they're not able to process
- taking projects when have not enough experience
- no any deadline and schedules
- taking lot of projects at time and not be able to process any single of them
- etc etc etc.
the answer is simple here. All people need money all the time, in some countries people taking business more serious, and in some countries another hundred dollars can save your life or health, so if you founded someone randomly on web - there is no guarantee this guy is serious and will not leave the project on half way, also there are much of scam programmers on freelance sites.

We'll be the first to admit naivety when it comes to understanding what you could expect from a certain level of investment as we were completely new to the industry.

However, we produced and extremely detailed specification (100+ pages including wireframes and other diagrams) which covered in intricate detail exactly what we expected in terms of functionality and quality. We took this to the developers and asked them to quote for it expecting that they would carefully review the documentation, ask questions if they didn't understand, and use that to build up an estimate of the effort, and hence a quote. Naturally there was some negotiation but we could only assume that they had fully read and understood the document and that we had agreed a price that was fair and reasonable for both parties.

Incidentally, as it turns out, the devs we chose did not understand and probably didn't even read the document we spent months crafting and even when they didn't understand they never bothered to ask any questions.

This is not about cheap workers or big budgets, it's about being confident that your developers understand what you want, how much effort it will take, and how much it is going to cost to deliver. Our mistake was assuming that all developers would take the time to understand what is required before they quote and sign themselves up for the project.

Originally Posted by vklymenko

about come and meet face-to-face developer:

another question is about advices from friends (its mostly in USA):
- a lot of people following currently Trey Smith's blog, its hard to find a guy who don't know who is that. I don't want to say bad about someone, but i'll just say what i heared from a guy (his "student"): "...well, Trey showed its possible to spend $300 for coder and make a complete small game and make good money, so I thought why i can't do same, and I tried with tens of programmers without success, and later i understood that Trey have a team of "setuped" programmers, which are helping each other and thats why things happens fast and cheap at him. Thats why lot of people were smashed, spend much of money and wasn't able to release any good single game..."
- i will think more about "come and meet face-to-face devs", but i'll just describe my case: a jewish guy contacted me some years ago and we started to make games, he had much of money to invest, so we started at least 5 games and were working on all at same time. Once he came to me to Ukraine and we spent a week, we had an office running with 2 more programmers and today he hasn't released any single game with me, although all games were 90% ready and high quality. So its not working always - to meet devs.

I'm sure that are many pros and cons when looking at face-to-face versus remote working. Our remote working experience with our Sound Engineer and Graphics Designer have been nothing but excellent.

Originally Posted by vklymenko

also another thing is that lot of people see: "uh, my friend making thousands with small iphone games... why i can't"

if we want to find some solutions we should speak about issues in root. Maybe the issue is in time-management? I bet you just gave the project to your devs and was contacting them from time to time, later less and rarely? and when you wanted to push things you just wrote them "hey, is there a chance to finish the game on this date, cause there will be celebrations and its a good time for release?" or was asking again and again "can you give me estimates".

You bet wrong. Almost immediately we realised that we would need to be on to the developers constantly. They were unable to manage their own time so we had to do it for them. But it went further than that. With some of the trickier bugs it was often quicker and easier to find the solution on the internet and send them examples of code and tutorials that would address the problem (e.g. how to do a Facebook SSO integration - that's right, these developers agreed to do the project which clearly included a Facebook SSO integration in the requirements and they didn't even know how to do it - we had the provide them with the relevant tutorials and documentation!). So not only were we managing their time, we were mentoring them too.

You can find more about what we were faced with here: http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?t=171794

Originally Posted by vklymenko

I'll shock you, but your game can be done in less then week (coding), so maybe next time better to pick an expensive coder with daily updates?

As a highly experienced developer myself with nearly a decade of experience I respectfully disagree. At the end of the day, our game is on-par with the quality and richness of features found in Zynga's Scramble with Friends, for example. If you think Zynga knocked that together in a week, even with an entire software house working on it, you are sadly mistaken.

No doubt our next game will be developed much quicker. Because we've written our code properly, rather than doing a rushed hack-job, I estimate we could reused over 60% of it in a similar game. However, we'll never developer a game in a week, or a month for that matter. We'd rather spend the extra time thinking everything through, documenting the specification and making sure we have the perfect concept before writing a single line of code.

Originally Posted by vklymenko

maybe the solution is to make groups of "investors", which can invest "big" budget and make quality projects? So lets say Microsoft have certificates system, so its pretty hard to be a developer for xBox, maybe same should be on current mobile appstores?

p.s.: im sharing just thoughts... independent discussion.. nothing personal to any side.

That would depend on what you want out of your business. It's certainly not something we would be interested in.

[vklymenko]

@WhatItTakesGame: thanks for the explanations, I got your point. Well, I think you're a good employer and wish you to find "right" people to work in your team

[WhatItTakesGame]

@vklymenko, you are welcome. Good luck with the video. Let me know if there is anything else you want to know.

[ThreeCubes]

Why did you not make it an iPad game? Don't you think this could restrict your sales? Some of the graphics are retina quality and look great on the iPad some of the text looks bad. You not the only company on here that seems to just ignore the iPad. I think that was mistake. It's a shame as it does look nice on the iPhone

[WhatItTakesGame]

We've just released (today) a Universal App upgrade that adds iPad support with full retina HD graphics. Enjoy!

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/what-it-takes-free/id584331176?mt=8