nightambience

If you use a game engine, it'll handle a lot of the heavy lifting, though you won't get away with not doing any programming. A solid foundation of programming (data structures, object oriented programming, a little bit of algorithm) will go a long way.

If you want to make native android games, you'll need to pick up java, read up on the application lifecycle for android, and studying a small open source game will be very helpful. Most importantly, pace yourself and keep making progress, breakdown problems into smaller ones and have none zero days.

We started off bootstrapped to the extreme and lived a very frugal life, so we were profitable after our first game, which took a year. But it was just enough to live on, it wasn't till recently that we've met our goal of reaching our previous salary.

Over the past 5 years, we've made a few hundred thousands in total.

In recent memory, The Last of Us!

But I grew up on Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VI, Earthbound, a lot of JRPG.

HAHA this was a real problem. I slept on the couch, my brother slept on the floor.

• I love the brainstorming process but often times it becomes unruly and branches off too much. The ideas we stick with are ones we brew overnight and revisit in another time.

• Definitely success is a big factor in choosing an idea and just sharing our games with the most people. We also pick ideas that's realistic with the scope of the resources a small team can provide.

• Yes. We developed our own game engine for all our Android games and while it's pretty cool and gets you the street creds with other programmers, the time spent up keeping and fixing bugs on it sucks. If you want to make a game, leverage an existing game engine and concentrate more on making games.