Interview With Carey DeVuono, Creator of Hollywood Mogul

The 3rd installment in the series has been re-branded as Hollywood Movie Studio. Any particular reason?

Yes.  I wanted to drop the price from $30 to $5.  (Note: The price is currently $19.95) Lots of games are selling for smaller amounts of money these days, making them more of an impulse item.  And there are so many games out there, I figured that a game title that was an exact description of the game itself would be easier in terms of marketing.  So I made the change.  I actually like it much better.

The Kickstarter campaign for HM4…

As I said earlier, HM3 was pretty much everything I wanted it to be. There were only a few places where I thought some improvements could be made. These were not additional functionality, but refined functionality. One was to allow an unlimited number of talent files. The second was to improve the Opening Credits to give each title card its own attributes.

Changing how the talent files were used within the HM3 code would have required such extensive rewriting and re-testing. The talent files touch almost every part of HM3 and there was no way to change them without having to change 75% or more of the game. It would have taken a year or more just to re-test everything. In the end, it was easier to just think about re-writing the whole game.

The HM3 community is fairly large, and worldwide. The game is played in more than fifty countries. So I thought I had a chance to capture the excitement of people who already play. The problem was that I only had about 2,500 email addresses that didn’t bounce. Over the years, I’ve tried to not be the least bit intrusive into the lives of my customers. I’ve never required updated email addresses, I don’t even check to see if the one you enter when you buy is valid. So though I had thousands of names in the database, only 2,500 had email addresses I could use.

I knew it would take time to rewrite the game. I knew that I really wanted to write a different game, an RPG which I’m currently working on. So I figured I’d go to Kickstarter. If the HM3 community rallied and was willing to pre-purchase 3,000 games, I would stop what I was doing and do HM4.

And it didn’t happen. Which I see as a great way of saving me two years.

A number of indie developers have used Kickstarter as a way to fund development of a game. Some have used it to develop just the alpha version, then come back and ask for more. I had a proven track record, I mean, I’d obviously written the first three, so it wasn’t a case of legitimacy. But for some reason the number seemed high: $120,000. Well, the government and Kickstarter are going to take half. And the money has to be used over two years. That left me $30,000 a year for two years to be writing code full time. Even though it’s a piddly amount of money, I was willing to do it. But it didn’t happen. And that’s okay with me.

And anyone who’s unhappy with that should sit down for a few years, ten to twelve hours a day, and write a computer game. When they’re done I’ll listen to anything they have to say. Until then, they’re just talking. They put in enough hours of work to earn the $30 purchase price. I put in two years of development time. And that’s the difference. Talk is cheap. But I do the work.

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