Happy New Year, VVVVVV!

I hope the first day of the sec­ond decade of the 21st cen­tury was good for you all. I should be writ­ing about some­thing else but the only thing I have for you today is a blog post by Terry Cavanagh, the man behind “VVVVVV” – a truly unique and styl­ish indie plat­former that I am going to review after I fin­ish it (grab it, any­way, it is sim­ply awe­some in its raw, hard­core gameplay).

Terry writes about how his cre­ation changed his life for better:

At the start of 2008 I’d taken out a loan for 15,000 euro, but that only lasted a bit over a year. I spent six months in 2009 on unem­ploy­ment ben­e­fit. By November I was utterly broke – my credit card was maxed out, my bank account com­pletely over­drawn – I was bor­row­ing money from friends and fam­ily just to pay rent and make loan repay­ments. I even­tu­ally just ended up mov­ing back in with my par­ents. Things were pretty bleak.

The only thing I really had going for me was VVVVVV. It started out as just a small side project, but I was hav­ing so much fun with it that I just kept let­ting it get big­ger and big­ger. I fig­ured it was prob­a­bly going to be my last game as a full time indie, after all, and I wanted to make some­thing I could be proud of.

(…)

Nevertheless, despite my fum­bling, things actu­ally worked out! On the first day, I sold 312 copies of the game. By the end of January, I was up to close to 2000 copies! Not only had I made enough to get myself out of trou­ble and pay back what I owed, but I had enough to keep mak­ing games for the rest of the year. Things slowed down after that, but by the time I launched on Steam in September, I was up to 3000. I don’t think I’m actu­ally allowed to talk about my Steam sales fig­ures, unfor­tu­nately, but it’s doing quite well there too.

(…)

I’m start­ing 2011 in a very dif­fer­ent posi­tion to how I started 2010, and it’s down to more than just money. Last year I was com­pletely iso­lated from fel­low game design­ers, now I’m liv­ing with two other game design­ers I hugely admire, in a beau­ti­ful lit­tle city with a flour­ish­ing gamedev scene. I’ve won an award for my work. I’m work­ing on one of the most promis­ing projects I’ve ever been involved with. I make a liv­ing doing what I love. 2010 has been a very impor­tant year for me, and I’m incred­i­bly opti­mistic about what 2011 will bring!

Good for you, Terry! Even more luck to you and every­one else in 2011!

Related Links

• “Stop and Reflect” post at Distractionware – Terry’s blog
• The web­site for “VVVVVV”