How much money do you make?

I've always been a game designer at heart ever since I found Dungeons and Dragons as a kid. We played plenty of D&D, but we also loved to make up our own games. I had taught myself BASIC by going to the local Radio Shack every day after school, and I was enamored with the idea of making RPGs on the computer ever since!

Fast forward to college, I was making my own MUD with some good friends of mine the same time TinyMUD hit the scene. This group was known as TEAMCTHULHU. Funny tidbit, originally TinyMUD only had "say" but in the MUD we were working on we additionally had an "emote" command with the colon shortcut. James Aspnes asked if he could borrow this idea for TinyMUD, I said sure! and so now pretty much every MUD and MMO ever since have included it, including SL. We tried to talk someone at GEnie if I recall into paying us to complete development on our MUD, but nothing stuck.

One of my room mates at the time interviewed for Origin Systems, working with Richard Garriott would have been a dream come true for any of us I think, but he came back and told us the job would only pay $28K I think, plus of course there would be a perpetual crunch time.. So as alluring of an idea of being a game dev back then was, I was hoping to do a little better than that with my shiny new degree from Purdue. Back then distribution was a big enough issue that being an indie dev just wasn't feasible like it is today. So instead I went corporate and got to work on AI stuff back before AI was cool !

So a bit long winded there, but Second Life being a virtual world was of like a home coming back to my MUD days. Originally I came solely for entertainment. After a couple years of scripting random stuff for everything I wanted for myself, I had a pretty good handle of how to make efficient scripts. I met my original two partners and we were all at a place we wanted to make something BIG in SL. That was our goal. The first few times we met, we tossed out all the ideas we thought might take off. I don't even really remember what the other non-breedable ideas were, and to be honest I was pretty skeptical of the breedable idea in the beginning. I had not played any myself. I was shocked the business model worked how it did and how hugely popular some of the other systems out there were when in reality they had basically no game play involved. We voted unanimously to make a new breedable and rolled up our sleeves.

So it took about nine months from start of development until launch, and the whole time new breedables were popping up and most tanked after about a month from what I could tell. You need to hit a critical mass of players to have staying power. I was convinced (hoping?) that it was because of they either didn't look very good, had no interaction/breeding rules, or both. I knew our artist was doing top notch work on the look of them, and I was trying my best to squeeze in as much as I could in a limited number of scripts. I think Meeroos were a one two punch of cuteness to pull people in and then a more intriguing game play to keep interest level up. Our preorder sales were very encouraging and they seemed to be really well received in our beta program, so I was cautiously optimistic!

I was made very aware by my team and all the beta participants that every prior breedable crashed or otherwise had a rough launch, so I was determined to have enough hardware to support us and we tested like crazy. While having a rock solid product may not make everyone rush out and buy it, having a buggy one will certainly make people quit. I had done some estimated projections for how many servers we would need based on how many meeroos in world there would be. It was after about three months after launch I think when I realized we had a hit because we were already blowing way past even my most optimistic estimates for an entire year. However this meant I still had scaling issue I had to address on the servers that first summer.