When you've spent 4 years at Apple, it gets noticed and many headhunters offer you jobs. But not wanting to repeat the employee experience, I prefer to start my own company. I begin by building a stock portfolio management tool (Personal Trader) with no commercial success, then I get interested in the RSS format. I have fun developing an RSS news reader — a trendy format at the time — that also handles audio and video podcasts. As usual, the problem is that nobody is willing to pay.
By chance, I run into Benoît Hozjan again, a Cryo colleague, who has started his own video game studio, Kheops Studio, and asks me if I'd be interested in making Mac versions of his PC games — but this time as a co-producer. I fund the Mac port, handle marketing and distribution, and pay royalties back to the other co-producers, who provided the IP and assets (game design, graphics, sound). He's already made 5 games on the same 3D engine and 3 more are planned. Interesting — this lets us build an "adventure games" line for the Mac and spread the 3D engine and production tools development costs.
For this, I'll need help. I look to hire and stumble on Wilfried De Kerchove, my former intern at Cryo Interactive who's looking for a Mac dev job. Off we go. From the 3rd game on, our production chain is well-oiled (and especially well-debugged), and a port takes us barely 3 months. Between 2006 and 2010, we shipped 8 games on Mac:
- Au cœur de Lascaux
- Cap sur l'île au Trésor
- Cléopâtre, le destin d'une reine
- Da Vinci Secrets
- Dracula 3
- Nostradamus, la dernière prophétie
- Retour sur l'Île Mystérieuse
- Retour sur l'Île Mystérieuse 2
In January 2007, the iPhone is unveiled, but it takes a full year before Apple announces an SDK and an App Store — somewhat forced by developers. We're tempted to ship our games on iPhone, but it requires a lot of game design work, and especially the first-generation iPhone's CPU and memory (128 MB RAM, 8 GB storage) are anemic. Maybe enough to do a Tetris clone, but Au Cœur de Lascaux, our smallest Mac game, weighs 1.6 GB and consumes 1 GB of RAM at launch. So we need to find tricks and squeeze every drop out of the iPhone. And it'll take far longer than planned. While a Mac game cost us around €20,000, Lascaux for iPhone cost about €90,000. But no big deal — I figured it shouldn't be too hard to sell at least 100,000 copies at 99 cents each. Also, because of the iPhone's massive memory constraints, we decided to split the game into 4 episodes, the first one called "Man vs Wild"; Bear Grylls fans will catch the joke. Well, in the end, we sold about 10,000 copies across all episodes. €80,000 in the red for a 2-person company hurts. A lot. We had also planned to ship Cap sur l'Île au Trésor on iPhone, but I'm not very keen, even though we know it would cost much less since we've already built all the tools and know where we need to go.
Early 2010, Apple announces the iPad and for us, it has 2 huge advantages:
- its technical specs are very good (CPU and RAM)
- it has a large 10-inch screen (compared to the iPhone's 3.5 inches) and its 1024 × 768 resolution matches a standard PC, which makes gameplay considerably simpler.
So we move on to adapting our Mac titles for iPad. Technically, things go pretty well and honestly, the games are much more playable than on iPhone. Sales-wise, average — but at least, they didn't cost us much. In the end, we still end up with 7 games on iOS:
- Au cœur de Lascaux, iPad & iPhone
- Cap sur l'île au Trésor, iPad & iPhone
- Cléopâtre – le destin d'une reine, iPad
- Da Vinci Secrets, iPad
- Retour sur l'Île Mystérieuse, iPad
In 2010-2011, the video game market is in bad shape and many studios shut down. Kheops Studio is not spared but manages to produce The Fall Trilogy, a 3-episode game, but without a publisher. Since they're based on a new version of their game engine, I'm not too keen on porting them, because it means spending money on an uncertain future. Early 2011, Wilfried leaves the company and I tackle the episode ports as best I can. In 2012, Kheops Studio closes its doors and I discover the joy of negotiating with the new owner, who has fun digging through the co-production contracts looking for loopholes. Some time later, after several rounds of pleasantries via our lawyers, we reach an agreement for a modest sum and Coladia hands over rights and source code for all the games to Anuman. Sales had become very low anyway.
Early 2014, it's the end of the video game adventure for Coladia. I still keep the company around to invoice some contracting work. I notably worked on the Mac client for MeetLima and an iPhone app for the JDN — whose name I no longer remember — which was a YouTube-style app.
One day in April 2018, while wandering the depths of the Internet, I land on sellmyapp.com, a site where you can buy complete app source codes. In 99% of cases, these are games built with Unity, a video game development environment. For under $200, you can get a complete and functional mobile game, with sources and all the graphic and sound assets, running on iPhone and Android. Just to see, I buy 3 or 4 sources and play with them for a few days. To see what happens, I have a few graphics redone and publish the games on the App Store and Google Play. Well, I saw. Or rather, I saw nothing. A few thousand downloads and €1,000 in revenue over the course of a year. Not enough to get rich, but it allowed me to discover a new dev environment and the techniques of cross-marketing and mobile ad networks.