...To make games full-time.

Yes, this is going to be one of those posts.

My name is Ricardo Moura, Once a Bird is made of myself and my cousin. I do the programming and "art" and he does the music and sound effects.

I quit my job at the end of July but only left it mid-September. It had been making me sick for years and seemed to be going nowhere. The job consisted of programming various pieces of the back-end of a stock-broker / bank, It was well paid but I very rarely did any interesting stuff.

If you have been following this journal, you're probably wondering at this point how can this guy quit his job when all his games so far were commercial failures. If you didn't, now you know all the games we made so far were commercial failures.

The answer is, I've been working as a programmer for 12 years now and for about 5 years I've been doing games in my spare time. I consistently enjoyed making games more than programming "corporate" software. When you reach a certain point in life you realize that it's very easy to spend most of your waking hours working on stuff that you don't like (and doesn't really matter much to you) just so you can make a living (this realization probably comes earlier for most people).

Also, I realized I could survive some time with the money I saved.

So, games. Fold was our latest and best-selling game, it was released in June for iPhone and sold 1016 copies so far. If you want to take a look, the app store link: https://itunes.apple.com/pt/app/fold/id645248522

Although it didn't sell much, Fold had very positive reviews, including a glowing review by tuaw.com: http://www.tuaw.com/2013/07/13/daily-iphone-app-fold-is-the-most-original-ios-puzzler-in-years/...

In September I entered the Ludum Dare 48-hour compo alone and made Twitchy Thrones, a real-time strategy game parodying Game of Thrones. Here's a link to the post-mortem: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2013/09/12/twitchy-thrones-post-mortem/.

For our first full-time game, we decided to remake Twitchy Thrones for iPhone. Right now I'm doing pixel art for it:

A map:



A knight's death animation:



Thanks for reading, let us know what you think! Art critiques in particular would be very welcome. :)