So, I’ve been hacking away at my game series for a few years now. I started off on my own, made a mod for Half-Life 1. It wasn’t the greatest thing since sliced bread, but it was a decent start. It was a partial conversion, single-player FPS with an original story and characters. To my surprise, a lot of people really enjoyed it - PC Gamer even covered it, and to this day, people are making “Let’s Play” videos and uploading them to YouTube. Not bad, so then I decided to take all of my experience, get a team together, and really dig in - I planned it out, wrote up a GDD, wrote the story/screenplay/script, handled sound design/music, texture art, level design, concept art, scripting, and even had to take over 3D modeling.
This title was a continuation of the previous with all the favorite characters, and tons of new ones, and was total conversion this time 'round. Fast forward a bit - the open beta was featured in Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s “Top Mods of 2016” list, and it ended up getting Greenlit. Here we are nearing the release time on Halloween, I have a “legacy department”, handling the polishing of the final release version with my oversight, while I simultaneously have the “Project MOPAT” team I put together, developing the front end for what will be our first commercial title in the series on The Unreal Engine.
Since 2014, we’ve/I’ve been going strong, and the new members are doing very well. We’ve got quite a bit done so far, but we’re a long ways off before we have a working prototype, and we’re still very understaffed. We operate on a volunteer basis for the most part, but I have been saving bits of money from my factory day job, and giving out little bonuses when I can. Obviously, this is not enough. What can I do to get a little jingle in the coffers? I don’t like the idea of crowd-sourcing, though I have tried it without much success, despite having a ready-made player-base.
Any insight would be appreciated.