It’s official now! Last week, I agreed with my boss I would leave the company, and today I handed in my letter of resignation. My last day at the job will be the 6th of october, so that means only 37 days left until I’m a full time indie!

These are exciting times! Can’t wait to get started!

My first project will be the Smiley Puzzle Project. I’ve been working sporadically on the prototype of this game, and I think this one will be a good learning experience. The game is not very complex, so I’m sure I can actually finish it.

And I have several other game ideas, including one I invented in a dream!

I finally did it! Earlier this week, I quit my well paid full time job as a software engineer. I’ve been thinking about this for quite a while, and decided it’s the only way to go. The goal is to become an independent games producer, and an online entrepreneur in general!

It’s not official yet, and I’ll probably have to stay at my current job until the first week of october. After that, I’m on my own. Complete freedom to go my own way, build my own business, design and create my own games, make my own mistakes and maybe fall flat on my own face But I believe it’s worth it!

I expect it will be a great journey, whether I succeed or fail miserably. I want to learn a lot, and have lots of fun! Fortunately, I have saved some money, so I can survive the first year, even if I don’t make a cent. I want to be in this for the long run. So my goal is to create intellectual property, and set up some websites and systems which I can leverage for years to come.

My biggest inspiration is Steve Pavlina, who’s article “10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job” pushed me over the edge and gave me the courage to actually do it! And of course all the successful and less successful indie game developers, who can be found on the IndieGamer forums, are also a great inspiration.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be developing and refining my initial business plans and my ideas in general. And of course keep you in the loop on this blog!

So this is the very beginning… My girlfriend is freaking out, but she’s supportive. Some call me crazy, others are encouraging. But I strongly feel this is the way to go for me. And it seems the universe agrees, since I just sold my second Text Link Ad to Cell Phone Covers!

So wish me luck!

Yay! I sold my first Text Link Ad today! So a big thanks to my first sponsor: Mortgage Lender!

A while ago, I signed up with Text Link Ads, a link selling service that sells short text links on your site at a fixed price, and for the duration of 1 month. You can see mine at the left under the Sponsors header. I made $12.5 from this link, half of the $25 the advertiser paid. Since there are 8 spots for links available, I could make as much as $100 per month from these! That’s a lot more than I could possibly make with Google Adsense. They also have an affiliate program, which offers you $25 for referring a publisher or an advertiser.

At first, I was a bit sceptical, because my blog is still rather low traffic (but growing!). But since I like to experiment with ways to make money online, I went ahead with it. Signing up is free, so all it took was half an hour to set up…

It took a while before I got my first ad though, mainly because my site description was quite poor. But recently I read these tips on how to write a better site description. And less then a week after applying them, my first ad sale is a fact! Offering a permanent link by mentioning your sponsors in your blog, is a great help.

There are a lot of blogs using and praising Text Link Ads. But I have experienced some cons of their system. First of all, they seem to be picky about which sites they accept. They didn’t accept my Speeltijd website, although it has more visitors than this blog. And secondly, they choose the price for the links on your site, and you can not directly influence it.

But still, if you want to monetize your site with advertising, this is my top choice!

Today we started our offline promotion campaign for our Speeltijd website. We printed a couple of A4 page ads, and 100’s of small flyers, all stating our URL, logo and short description of the site.

The flyers will be distributed at a neighbourhood kids party and BBQ today, visited by 100’s of people in our target audience. The bigger ads will be displayed there too. I think the flyers will be more effective, since people tend to forget URL’s (I know I do ). But when they see the flyer at home, they will be much more likely to check out the site!

I hope this campaign will have a measurable effect on the visitor stats, which has almost doubled again compared to last month. And I also hope this will get word of mouth started!

My girlfriend will also distribute the flyers at her job, an after-school childcare. We’re still thinking about ways to promote the site to schools, which will start again in september.

The goal for this website is to reach 1000 visitors a day by the end of the year, which should be possible if we can keep the current growth rate!

As promised a few weeks ago, here’s a new screenshot of the current Smiley Puzzle prototype!

As you can see, I’ve been mainly working on the graphics and animations of the smileys. The biggest difference with the previous screenshots, is that each type of smiley has a different color. This makes it a lot easier to line them up! I also improved the rendering to make them look more reflective, for a glossy plastic feel.

The current background of the prototype is temporary. It will probably change to better fit the smiley theme.

I’ve rendered the smileys with DAZ Studio, a powerful 3D posing and animation tool. And best of all, it’s completely free! The DAZ Productions website also offers a lot of 3D models for very democratic prices. I think it’s a great tool and resource for game producers on a budget! The only drawback of the DAZ Studio application, is that it currently crashes on MacOS X 10.4. Under 10.3.9 it works fine, but I hope they can fix this issue.

There’s still a lot of work to do on the game of course, but the important thing is that I’m making progress!

Today, I discovered a nice little user review on GetJar, of my mobile game Enigmatica. Enigmatica is a puzzle game for mobile phones, that I released a few years ago, and earlier this year went freeware.

The review goes like this:

Very easy to play and a cinch to navigate. Graphics are simple but effective. Thoroughly enjoyable (a little addictive), very happy with this one.

After reading this, I think the mean problem of that game, and even more so of the original Enigmatic Movements Mac version, are the graphics. That’s why I started the Smiley Puzzle Project, which in essence will contain the same gameplay.

So now I’m seriously considering doing a mobile port of the Smiley Puzzle Project. It shouldn’t be all too much work, since I can reuse code from Enigmatica. The hard part will be selling it, unless I could find an interested publisher. And even if it doesn’t sell, I can make it freeware and use it to attract people to the desktop version!

The Speeltijd (playtime) website, a project by me and my girlfriend, is a blog with articles for children and people attending children, about creative things to do and games to play in groups.

A bit over a month ago, I moved this site from a subdomain of darkmoonsw.com to it’s own domain: www.speeltijd.net. And in july, our traffic tripled compared to june! This resulted in an average of 45 visitors a day. Which is not bad, given the fact that the site is in Dutch, it’s partly intended for children and we have done no marketing yet (besides some link swapping). We plan to do some marketing at the end of this month, during the back to school period.

During the last months, I have been adding features like a contact form, a tell-a-friend form, a newsletter, donations and a Memory java game. We also made some extra categories, like quizzes for kids. I expect these things will help the site to keep growing, and eventually make us some cash with google adsense, donations, and maybe other ways…

Also of note is the fact that I bought new web hosting for this site, namely at Dreamhost. I’m super happy with their Crazy Domain Insane plan, which gives me 1TB of bandwidth, 20GB of space, and most importantly: unlimited domains! I’m already using it for hosting 2 of my domains, and I will also move my Dark Moon website there. And if you use a promo code, like DMS75, you’ll get a $75 discount, making it super cheap! I think it’s one of the best deals currently available.