[akrotkov]

Huh, this is fun!

I built Genfanad (http://genfanad.com/) as a browser based game with similar inspirations to yours a few years ago. A lot of the technologies you mentioned are very similar. It's surprising how easy getting something up and running is these days!

We ended up shutting down a few months ago as I couldn't figure out how to take it to profitability. Do you have plans for that, or is it just a fun side project?

[onemandevteam]

Nice job with Genfanad! That looked like a really neat game. I don't have a good plan for profitability other than try to keep my expenses as low as possible and see if I can find some way to scrape by in a year or two.

[Moru]

IknowIknow! You could have some lets call it "lootboxes" that people could pay real money for to open. And in them they would find items to use in the game! :-)

A bit more serious, I haven't seen many attempts at just making a donation bar showing how much it costs to keep it running per month? Let people donate until the bar is filled, when it overflows it goes to next month. Very visible on login screen. In this bar ofcourse include your salary for keeping it running after developement is doneish.

Maybe stretch-goals for donation to make new functions?

And please use Ko-fi for donations, much friendlier and less cutting into your profits :-)

[onemandevteam]

Do you have any suggestions? Your game seemed very popular. Anything you wished you had focused more on?

[akrotkov]

Set your expectations accordingly.

Coding is the fun part, but it's less than 5% of actually launching and making a successful product. If you don't think you want to spend most of your time not coding, don't try to make it a business!

Marketing is more important than making something. You will get a small boost from things like this (I was always too embarrassed to post here!), but it's an endless pit of time and money! To do it right, I've heard all sorts of numbers, but a good rule of thumb is every dollar/hour you put to making your game, put a dollar/hour to marketing it as well.

From a technical perspective, your stack is fine. You want to make sure you host all your assets behind cloudflare/s3 or similar, the $5 server is fine for gameplay but if you also try to make it send all the stuff, it's gonna die. (As evidenced today!)

Most of my other experience and advice is about how to run a team and set budgets and goals. If you're going about it as a hobby (and that's probably the best way to go!) then just keep doing what you're doing, write some blogs and foster a community instead.