Four years and $11K: Glorkian Warrior's crippling mistakes

Glorkian Warrior: The Trials of Glork took Pixeljam four years to create, first Kickstarted in 2010 with $11,200 and finally released on iOS in March 2014. An argument could be made that Pixeljam co-founder Miles Tilmann has spent enough time thinking about that little pink alien with the weird name, but he's not done yet. In a post on Tilmann's new personal blog, he outlines the mistakes Pixeljam made during those four years, presented with the perfect vision of hindsight.

Before diving into the post itself, Tilmann tells Joystiq that this isn't the happy-ending success story many independent developers may dream about.

"Glork hasn't really made much money at all," he says in an email. "None of our games have, actually! We had our best week of sales when we launched Glork on mobile earlier this year, but after the Apple featuring ended, sales went down to pretty much nothing. The Mac / PC release has been much less successful than the mobile version. Pixeljam doesn't actually pay its employees anymore, since it can't support itself based on our existing sales. We make money doing non-Pixeljam-related things these days."

Glorkian Warrior found success on Kickstarter before Double Fine busted down the crowdfunding doors, and Pixeljam was equally surprised and excited to get $11,200 from strangers on the internet. The team had an idea for a game, money to make it and a timetable of three months. Yes, three months – remember that the game actually took four years to develop.

In his blog post, Tilmann shares part of an email he sent to the team two months into development: "I get the feeling this is slowly going to turn into a scenario where it actually takes us 5 - 7 months to complete it instead of the 2 - 3 we thought." He was on the right track, at least.

Pixeljam ran out of cash fairly early into Glorkian Warrior's extended development.

"Three months [after the Kickstarter] the game wasn't even close to completion, for all the classic reasons: under-estimating everything, scope slowly expanding, budget slowly dissolving," Tilmann writes. "A 'what were we thinking?' period followed while we tried to figure out why things didn't go the way we planned. I'm fairly certain now it's because we didn't have an actual plan. We had an idea for a game that we got ourselves and our fans very excited about, and that was it."

Looking back, Tilmann says Pixeljam should have created a firm concept and scope for the game, and they should have asked for $100,000. "To further fund Glork's development we worked a lot of contract jobs, thinking all the money we made from them would ensure the project's completion. The extra money helped, but what we didn't realize was that the momentum of the project was worth more than any cash we could funnel into it. As most creators can tell you, once you lose momentum on a self-funded project, your chance of completing it really starts to nosedive."

He continues, "The point was reached where it simply made no sense to work on the game anymore. The money we funneled into it from contract work (and by this point, loans from banks and family) was no match for the actual time we had lost chasing the money to funnel into it."

Pixeljam ended up working on smaller games – one that was supposed to take "a couple months" that fizzled out after nine months of work, and one attempt to make a game in a week. "The game in a week becomes Potatoman Seeks the Troof, and takes about three months (and our personal credit cards) to complete," Tilmann writes.

Glorkian Warrior did eventually launch, of course, after a slight re-imagining of the mechanics. Tilmann tells Joystiq that the blog post is cathartic and a form of self-improvement, but even after all of this time, he feels he owes this written breakdown of events to his Kickstarter backers.

"The Glorkian project weighed heavier on me than any other project we've worked on. This was a way of releasing some of that weight," he says. "I did feel we owed our backers an explanation. We had done a lot of explaining in our backer updates, but it was in a very apologetic tone and was always from the 'unified voice of pixeljam,' which is often different from my own voice. This is one of the reasons I created my own blog just last week to publish it. I wanted to communicate with backers about the struggle to create the game, and also share some insight that might help other devs doing their own crowdfunding campaigns."

Backers and developers, read Tilmann's full blog post here.