Post Mortem | Lost Paddle

Reflections and insights on my first ever released game, and how much money I made selling it.

I think that every game developer starts out very similarly. We watch one tutorial on how to make a game like Pong, so now we think we know everything to make our dream project: a grand adventure RPG first-person shooter racing game, with an open world and a beautiful story that brings tears to the eyes of millions.

That might be a bit exaggerated, but we’re all guilty of way over-scoping our game ideas. Sometimes it takes a few ideas or iterations before we humbly accept defeat and start over with something simpler. This is the case with the very first game I ever officially released called Lost Paddle.

Lost Paddle was released on iOS in early 2011. It was free and received a few thousand downloads and had a decent average rating (I think it was something in the 4-star range).

I won’t bother with the whole ‘what went right’, ‘what went wrong’, because looking back, it was ALL wrong, so I’ll just go over what I think are the more interesting facts, and things I’ve learned.

Disclaimer: I no longer legally own this game, and I even can no longer claim that I created it. I sold the game, any claim to it, and all resources associated with it (source code, art, project files) to an individual who will remain anonymous. I’ll get to the details.

The Gameplay

I said that with Lost Paddle, I started over with something simpler. I went to the simplest thing I could think of, Pong, but of course, I had to add a twist to it. The gameplay didn’t take long at all to figure out, I’ve always been pretty good at fiddling with gameplay code to find something I like, and the result was some mix of Pong and Breakout.

The basic idea is, blocks are falling from the top, and you can move your little pong paddle back and forth, which deflects them back, and any blocks that make it past you explode at the bottom and lower your health.

And since this would be an iOS game (because that’s all I knew how to make at the time), I wanted the gameplay to be something that could go on indefinitely, and then they would just receive a high score. I think that’s what all the mobile games were doing at the time, just quick little arcade games where you play ‘til you die. Like FLAPPY BIRD! Remember Flappy Bird!?

While the gameplay was good and was present, it just wasn’t enough. I never dug into it enough, to try to really squeeze all of the creative juice out of what was there. This is something I think a lot of games get wrong today too. Not all of them of course but there’s this tendency to create a game that throws together many shallow ideas instead of focusing deeply on a single one. In my case, I did neither, I failed to focus deeply on the single idea.

There were different game modes though. Endless mode allowed you to play endlessly until you made a certain number of mistakes and then recorded your high score. Simple, straightforward. And then there was a two-player mode. I’m actually pretty proud of this one, for it being an iOS-only game, coming up with a way for the game to have two-player touch gameplay, I thought was pretty cool at the time. Basically, there are two paddles, one for each player on either side of the screen, the blocks start falling from both sides, and they get tagged by which side they came from, or which paddle had last deflected them back. It was reminiscent of classic pong, just with lots more going on. Finally, there was story mode.

The Title and Story Mode

I couldn’t just make an endless arcade game. For some reason, I had to add a story mode that somehow attempted to explain what the hell this game was. The idea of ‘Lost Paddle’ is that this Pong paddle is somehow mysteriously lost in an unknown void-like place, and suddenly faced with an onslaught of blocks attempting to destroy it.

I’m not sure why I was trying to force a story into this game. Maybe I just played too many story-based games, or maybe I thought I was being clever, or maybe because I had just played ‘Today I Die’ by Dan Benmergui (a brilliant game) and I wanted to also evoke some emotion out of the player.

If I remember correctly there was a game over screen that said something like “Where am I?” and “This is hopeless”. And when you reach the final level there was, in the background, a pink-colored paddle in a hanging cage while you have to fend off the final boss. The pink paddle was the main paddle’s love interest and that was supposed to be a big reveal. The whole thing was cringe-worthy today, but I thought it was awesome.

I think one review said that “the game over text was a worse Kingdom Hearts script”. I wasn’t sure whether to be disappointed that it sucked or happy to be compared to a game that I was a big fan of for many years.

The entire game was only 4 levels in total. One level of normal gameplay, one boss level, a second level of slightly harder gameplay, and the final boss. The boss fights were a mess, you have to avoid a laser beam filled with blocks that kill you in one hit, and then when the boss is idle, tap with your finger frantically on its face. Here is what the first boss looked like:

Most players couldn’t figure out that you have to tap on the boss. That makes sense as it was never hinted at in any of the other gameplay previously. I couldn’t figure out a way to deal boss damage with the current gameplay of just sliding the padding back and forth. The final boss was an even bigger mess, as you had to swipe the paddle up as if aggressively attacking. This one I got the most flack for, as there’s no way anyone could figure that one out. I thought that maybe players would get creative, but in reality, they just got frustrated and quit. There was never a sign that this game was looking for creativity from its players. The big lesson here is set up. If you ever expect anything from your players, make sure that they experienced it previously in a way that was simpler and more obvious, and that the next time, there’s something to remind them of the previous.

The Music

The soundtrack was pretty great. I found an individual on Newgrounds.com, and he had a collection of chiptune tracks that I thought were perfect. I sent him a message and as it turns out he was more than happy to let someone use his music in their game.

Here’s a link to the main track that was used: https://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/391867

If the positive reviews didn’t speak well of the gameplay, they were complimenting the music, so I feel a bit lucky to have found something that did fit so well with the game.

I tried making my own music. I opened up GarageBand for the first time, and thought, that just maybe I can put something simple together. I started mixing a few sounds and after about a day of that, I very quickly realized I was in over my head. Not wanting to spend months/years learning music, the idea was quickly scrapped and I made my way to Newgrounds.

No Android Version

This one is kind of annoying, but for me, at the time, it felt like there was nothing I could do about this. I was using a game engine called Cocos2d iOS. It was a game engine created to specifically work with iOS, and it was the only engine I was trained in at the time, and I’d never even thought about what it would be like to write my own game engine.

There was another version of the engine though, Cocos2d-X I think it was called, which was a multi-platform c++ version. However again, I was too intimidated by learning so many new things, knowing it would set back being done with the game. So I kept myself fairly stuck.

Making That Money

I made exactly $1,000 from this game. How? I released the game for free on the iOS app store, with no ads and no in-app purchases (they didn’t exist yet). I had 0 experience in how to monetize anything. How the hell did it make any money?

I sold it. I don’t mean that I sold it as an app on some platform. I mean that I literally sold it, the source code, the art, and any claim to ownership. It was all sold to a publisher who then subsequently re-launched the game under their own store.

I came up with the $1,000 number by estimating the hours it took me to make the game (probably underestimated), and then multiplying by a reasonable hourly rate (too low, but I was inexperienced). But also I wanted to make sure to sell it quickly because I was moving in a few months, so I was a little worried about setting the price too high.

How was it sold? I found a platform called something like sellmyapplication.com, I don’t remember exactly, but they had the option to post work like this for sale. It seems like most people used it to sell product review WordPress blogs and other software. I put the listing up, basically saying that the game gets lots of downloads, and has good average reviews, I just have no marketing or monetization experience so it would do better in someone else’s hands. It only took about a week before someone reached out. I had a contract made up, he paid, and I handed everything off.

I’m pretty sure I can’t even claim today that I did create the game, but what the hell, it’s been 11 years, and the other publisher seems to have abandoned it, and they surprisingly left my name in the credits, which I thought was generous.

Finally

While I don’t think the game was objectively ‘good’ in any way, I’m proud of what I was able to come up with and did a good job keeping it semi-simple overall for a first game. As I said before I probably would have avoided making the other game modes, especially Story Mode, and tried to dig into the simple gameplay more and get more out of just that. I also would have used a multi-platform game engine or taken the time to port it, to release it on Android as well.

Looking back would I have still sold it?

Probably not, I like to hold to everything I create these days, but, if I could fantasize just a bit, then hell yes I would have sold it because in 2011 $1000 would have gotten quite a bit of Bitcoin, and then I would just buy it back without breaking a sweat.

Let me know any questions you have, and share any similar experiences, have you ever sold the rights to anything you’ve created?

Links:

Archived App Store Link: https://apprecs.com/ios/451503468/lost-paddle-story

Original Release Review : https://www.nineoverten.com/2011/03/31/lost-paddle-iphone-game-review-fantastic-8-bit-action/