Thats cool. How many hours do you think you spent on it? I often hear iOS is more profitable to develop on than Android, has that been the case for you too? Where did you find your artist?
1. I don't know the exact numbers, but it was a
lot. I worked on the game (in its various iterations) on and off for over two years. There'd be months where I forgot about it entirely, and months where I spent 15-20 hours a week outside my normal job working on it. The vast majority of this was done before I decided to monetize it at all, because I'm the kind of masochist who finds coding 60 hours a week great fun. In terms of profit made vs. hours worked, my hourly profit is still very low, but at this point it's almost entire passive and has been maintaining a steady sales rate with minimum additional work for two and a half years. (About 80% of the time I spent was on the very tedious process of testing and tweaking every available piece of art, of which there are hundreds, to work with every modification option and with each other. I will admit that I hated that part of the whole thing.)
2. I've heard that too, but I don't have enough sales information yet to be able to judge. I figure it'll take at least six months to get a good idea of how things are playing out.
3. The artists actually came to me. I released a beta of the online game with most of the final functionality but limited art. The beta got way more popular than I ever expected, and I had lots of people contacting me specifically to ask me to put their designs in the game or offering to help in other ways. I also started a blog after releasing the beta documenting my progress on the final version of the game, and made some good contacts there. Over time I became friends with some artists who were fans of the game, and when I needed new art they became my go-to resource.
This all sounds like a very complicated process for a game about making ponies, but as it turns out people
really like making ponies!