How I made an iOS game that got 500K downloads, but decided NOT to earn money from it.

Back in 2012 the App Store landscape was still fresh and unspoiled by evil in-app purchase plots. That’s when I decided to make an “artsy” game without thinking about earnings.

HungrySquid intro image painted by my wife.

I used to briefly worked in “games” in 2001 making 3d level designs for Quake first, and then at PeopleCanFly (where I worked on the later scrapped and restarted Painkiller project — so I had nothing to do with the final, released game).

After that I went back to UI’s, UX’es and all that fun stuff of arranging rectangles within rectangles.

Another part of the intro. We actually knew that the creatures in the game were Octopuses, not squids but decided to keep the title intact ;-)

The idea to make my own game came in 2011 so it was a matter of finding the right team and just start. I had a back story in mind (it should still be in Apple’s iBooks Store, available for free) and made some initial sketches.

It was going to be an “atmospheric” puzzle game. A bit mellow and “calm” with only a little bit of arcade elements. We had a team of three: me, my wife who did all the illustrations and one of the more…