I reached out to Devine after my interview with Chris Charlton from Kaiju Pop (and his recommenation of Devine's work). I downloaded all his games. His unique style was extremely compelling, I had to know who this dev was. Guys and gals, visit his site, read what he's written about. There is a lots of wisdom around "stuff not related to games" that can't be justly captured in this interview.
Aside: when you're a small time dev. Follow every recommended lead (if someone you trusts tells you to check something out, do it... every small bit helps, and you never know where the interaction will take you).
Mind telling us a little bit about yourself?
I am Devine Lu Linvega, I live on a sailboat somewhere on the shores of the Pacific Ocean, spending my days picking fights on Wikipedia's talk pages, moderating the linguistic portals of StackExchange - and sometimes making games. I have no professional background, and no schooling. For information about my life on a sailboat, go here.
With regards to Oquonie, Hiversaries, Ledoliel, and Donsol, what technologies/languages did you use to build the games? How large are the code bases? How long did they take you to make?
All of these projects use similar technologies. Oquonie was the only project migrated onto Swift, the other, Objective C. My earlier projects like Hiversaires and Ledoliel were not even using Objected Oriented structure, and were instead, based on a single massive class named Game. Oquonie took me almost 500 hours, with all 3, or 4, ports and migrations. Hiversaires took me about 3 months and the others, just a few days. Donsol was made during Train Jam, and had it's first version completed under 24 hours.
My favorite out of all of them is Ledoliel. Just a comment. I cracked up so many times playing that game.
Ledoliel was born out of a tweet in reply to something by Christine Love, I cannot remember.
What's the life time revenue for your games?
I have made about 30K per year from iOS sales since I started.
What were some of the happiest moments during the development of your games?
The Swift Language release.
The saddest moments?
The XCode 11 release.
What tips do you have for those that are just starting with programming and game development?
Make the games you want to play. Make them in less than a year.
We may have a couple of project managers reading this interview. Any tips for them with regards to managing a project/interacting with developers?
I have absolutely no idea, I am unmanageable.
Also, we may have a couple of ad men reading this interview. Any tips for them with regards to marketing a game?
No clue, I never looked into advertisement. I never download games or apps with ads in them, they ruin the experience for me.
You went with premium for all of you games. Any reasoning behind this? You are also the first person I've interviewed that has done app bundles. Is that working out for you?
App bundles are fun, they can encapsule a message that lives across multiple apps. And regarding ads, like I have previously said, I don't think that any of my app would be enhanced with a loud colourful banner that tries to upsell star wars underwear from Thinkgeek.
I think it was really cool that some of your stuff is open source (and that you've kept a developer log). What was the motivation behind that?
It was really helpful for me to learn from other developer's open source code. I am hoping that I can help others in return.
Given hindsight is 20/20, would you have done anything differently with regards to building and selling your games?
I would not have done iOS specifically if I had known that the developer tools were to keep on worsening. I would have focused on making games using web technologies instead.
Any other tips? EG: Any "must do this or don't come crying to me" kind of stuff?
Use version control, track your time, work open source, fuck ads.