Michael is quite correct in how I approach the games.
Basically, I build the games for all visually impaired people, most of whom do not like to play RPGs. While the games don't make much money, and certainly don't pay for my time, they do offset the out of pocket costs. I tend to re-use as much as possible in each game, to make the next game that much better. By re-using the programming code, it means I can spend my time on the differences between two games, rather than build from the ground up. And it took about two years to get there.
I now have a common infrastructure between all of the games, so simple things, like settings screens or posting to facebook, twitter or game center is just a matter of including a module. Creating the original infrastructure to post to facebook, etc. took 2 or 3 weeks spread out over a year. It's general rule of thumb that any program needs to be revised and rebuilt 3 times before you get it right. At this point, the infrastructure is a that point, and most of the games have gone through 3 generations of being re-created.
Mastering the physics engine enabled me to spin out a bunch of games quickly, but what always happens is that the details of the game take forever. For example, pool, which will be out in a few weeks, took only 3 days to convert from vee ball. However, it was another 3 weeks before the pool game was stable, and fun to play. I had slews of issues in the game, such as using the physics engine properly to allow 15 balls to move around and make their sounds, without it getting so slow that the sound was stuttering. Then I had to design and debug several ways to select and aim your cue stick. Then I had to create the game rules for about 6 different games. And do all of this with the ability to move it to a multi-player game some time in the future.
With the multi-player infrastructure, I've re-written that about 5 times, and the latest one seems to be reliable. I prototyped the latest version on crazy 8, and then moved it to wildcard. It took about 4 days to adjust wildcard to handle it, and in the process found more flaws in the crazy 8 game, and fixed those. Then I moved the multi-player ability to road trip, and that took about 3 days, and found more flaws, so I had to fix those, and re-release crazy 8 and wildcard. I'll probably make bowling multi-player next, and hopefully that will take only 2 days. Eventually, I should be able to get adding multi-player to any game in about a day.
These games could actually make enough money to employ multiple programmers, but market penetration is the killer. There are at least 20,000 blind people with iphones or ipads in the USA alone, and less than 1,000 know about my games, and 80% of those people don't buy anything.
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