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Is a man-month 30 x 24 hours of work?(30 days of 24 hours)
Or is it something more like 4 x 5 x 8 hours of work? (4 weeks at 8 hours a day 5 days a week)
The Wayback Machine's first cache of the ultratron page on your site is dated June 20th 2005.
http://web.archive.org/web/20050620013523/http://www.puppygames.net/ultratron/
You had a demo available at that time, so you'd already coded the core of the game by then.
It's been almost 8 years since then, but I've got no way of estimating how much time you spent on it over that 8 year period.
Ultratron took 24 man months to develop, or if you want to put a financial figure on it, about $120k at ordinary salary rates. Ultratron has so far made a loss of $100k.
Titan Attacks took approximately the same amount of time. Titan Attacks has just broken even after 7 years, so that's cause for a can of lager in celebration.
Droid Assault took quite a bit longer - about 36 man months, or $180k ish. Droid Assault has so far made a loss of about $120k.
Revenge of the Titans took about 7 man-years to develop, or about $420k. It's only just broken even. Sandbox mode took 12 man-months and has so far cost us $56k.
For most of the last 10 years, I subsidised all the development of the games by working as a menial contractor in the IT industry and effectively putting every spare hour of my life into them.
So now you know why a) you don't really want to be an indie game developer if you can help it and b) why we're not making any more arcade games :)*
This is such an interesting post now I read it back to myself I think I'm going to blog it.
* probably. Unless a genius can think of some way we can make them for about a tenth the cost that's palateable.
Is it a lack of marketing, high development costs, not enough popularity in retro gaming? All of the above?
1. We spend at least 3x as long as we should on the basic development because we really care about perfection. Let's face it, on the very surface of it, Ultratron looks to a lot of people like they could just bash it out in 3 months flat. And you could, maybe, if you were astoundingly talented, didn't have a family to appease, and crucially already knew the perfect game design in advance. We spent several months just trying out ideas until we got it right in the end.
2. We support the games intensely, listening to pretty much every bit of feedback on the entire internet (hurrah for Google Alerts), and we take everything very seriously. Unfortunately this takes a lot of time. Look at me now - I've spent about 2 hours answering replies on the community forums on Steam today, which has earned us precisely $0.
3. We go on supporting the games for years and years and keep them updated. In the case of Ultratron for example we've basically written a completely new game and given it to all our existing customers for free instead of selling it as a new version. We put in free DLC for the games like the special Christmas Modes in Revenge of the Titans and Droid Assault, which cost us months and months of time but actually earn no money at all.
4. We are total failures at marketing :D
5. Despite all the glowing reviews and fans ... there aren't enough glowing reviews and fans. Think about this: despite being on Steam with a very well targeted userbase of over 40 million people, we have, for example, only sold about 8,000 Droid Assaults, even at ridiculously low prices.