Essays about game development, thinking and books

Preparing a business plan for a game on Steam

Earning millions is easier than ever. I'll tell you how :-D

Earning millions is easier than ever. I'll tell you how :-D

When I posted my final presentation [ru] (slides) for World Builders 2023 (my posts, site), I promised to tell how I made a roadmap and a financial model for the game. So, here they are.

At the end of this post, we will have:

  • A brief strategy of our company: what we do, how, and why.
  • A table with our beacons — successful games roughly similar to what we want to make. Similar in gameplay, team size, budget, etc.
  • A composition of the team we need to assemble.
  • A roadmap — a development plan for our game.
  • An outline of our marketing strategy.
  • A financial model — how much we will spend, how much we will earn.
  • A large number of my caveats throughout the post.
  • Jokes and I hope witty remarks.

All the final documents can be found here.

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Migrating from GPT-3.5-turbo to GPT-4o-mini

Guess when I switched models.

Guess when I switched models.

Recently OpenAI released GPT-4o-mini — a new flagship model for the cheap segment, as it were.

  • They say it works "almost like" GPT-4o, sometimes even better than GPT-4.
  • It is almost three times cheaper than GPT-3.5-turbo.
  • Context size 128k tokens, against 16k for GPT-3.5-turbo.

Of course, I immediately started migrating my news reader to this model.

In short, it's a cool replacement for GPT-3.5-turbo. I immediately replaced two LLM agents with one without changing prompts, reducing costs by a factor of 5 without losing quality.

However, then I started tuning the prompt to make it even cooler and began to encounter nuances. Let me tell you about them.

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Two years of writing RFCs — statistics

The number of RFCs over two years

Slightly more than two years ago, I became a Lead/Engineering Manager for Palta's payment team. I left the company at the end of 2023 for another sabbatical [ru].

It is time to sum up. I will start with my favorite initiative.

From the first month, I promoted the idea of preceding major changes with text documents — RFC — Request for Comments.

In this post, I will analyze two years of applying this practice to share the experience, summarize the results, and have convincing arguments for my next job.

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