I got started writing video games at University in England, when there was a thriving marketplace for games written in Flash, and websites would buy licenses (sometimes exclusive ones) to have your game on their site, this is back in '09. From a student's perspective some would pay really well, a few thousand dollars for a project that would take a few months.<p>Seven years later I find myself running a business making video games in the more traditional pay-to-download format, like this one, called The Cat Machine - <a href="http://store.steampowered.com/app/386900" rel="nofollow">http://store.steampowered.com/app/386900</a>. I'm sure compared to other online businesses, or even other indie game developers, comprised of one person it's not mind-blowingly successful, but my games have paid my modest (single guy) living costs while I work on my next project.<p>My games are multi-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) and I sell on my website, Steam, Humble Bundle, the Apple Mac Store and a few other places, and they write me cheques every month. Every project has a long tail with regards to revenue, and occasionally there are spikes, like the Steam Holiday sale a few days ago, and just this morning I woke up to The Cat Machine being on the main page of Apple's Mac Store in a 'Popular Puzzlers' section. Each of these bump my budget for my next projects up another month or so. The initial sales spike when a game is released is bit crazy, suddenly having your salary for the next one and a half years dropped into your bank account all in one go.<p>The reason I can do this as a one-man band is that I can program, but I also have some artistic skill, so I can draw and digital paint and animate. To speed up development as much as I can, I write within the Unity engine with C#, which has a great pipeline for art assets, which I create in Photoshop and Spine for 2D characters and textures, and The Foundry's excellent Modo software for 3D assets. The only things I don't do for my games are the music, I have an excellent composer friend who works for TV and Film, and I'd be silly not to contract him to do that. But apart from that, I do all the design, writing, programming, marketing, etc, which is part of the fun, wearing lots of different hats.<p>If you're _really_ interested in how I work, I actually do a series of high-level development videos on my current project: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsg018B0PK60ZoaNqw_inBLedtfktOSeP" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsg018B0PK60ZoaNqw_in...</a><p>Also happy to answer any questions, within reason, about making a living making games about cats riding around on trains.