Chapter 17: Expansion
After Ronan finished eating with Jake in his house, he went back to his mother's house and stayed for a few days, during those days he would mostly sit downstairs and code instead of staying in his bedroom and because he was good at listening he could talk to his mother while programming his new game.
After those couple of days, Ronan went back to College, he spent the next couple of months getting the key mechanics down, his income increased to $13,000 a month now from his messaging app, he hired some specialists in advertisements to get him decent advertisements for his messaging app, it had over 1 million downloads now and it was popular in the surrounding county, but not so popular if you get any further outwards.
They had managed to secure him some radio time and a couple of larger billboards on the outskirts, so most of the people who came into the city for work would see them, unfortunately he wasn't making enough for tv advertisements, he could afford some in the dead of the night but it wasn't long and the people who would see it would be too tired to remember it.
His game was getting along, he now had 3 others helping him with the code and everyone who worked on it had access to the app in the alpha stages to find bugs, he had contacted several animation and graphics companies, it would cost around $30k to get all the animations down which was at least 3 months worth of money. He made a contract between them, he would pay $32.5k but instead of paying for them in bulk he would be able to spread the costs out over time.
He still needed an economist, he had talked to several students who were studying economy but they all recommended that he should find a professional, it was one of the key parts of the game so if a student made a mistake it could have disastrous consequences.
The only thing left was the sounds, he was 75% done with the code, 15% being the economy, 7% bugs that needed fixing and the last 3 % was last-minute tweaks, such as damage/defence value changes.
He also made sure to talk with his sister for 1 hour a day, just to keep in touch, Ronan often put the phone on speaker so he could code while talking, he wanted to make sure all the time he had was focused 100% onto his game.
...
2 Months Later.
"Finally." Ronan had just finished with the coding aspect, his graphic and animation designers had gotten back to him last week, the designs took a few attempts, but he got there eventually, his messenger app went up to $15k a month, with a total of 1.15mil downloads.
He was suffering from a serious set back though, an economist, they were expensive, in a world ranking company they would earn easily over $400k a year, and the cheapest he could find was $60k, he was at least someone decent, but he just didn't have the money, although he could afford $60k a year he just couldn't afford it with everything else, he still had to set up the servers for the game and they would cost a lot.
He spent most of his time going over and over on how to raise the money and the best way was for him to expand the messaging app, but that wouldn't be up to him, he could only advertise more online since T.V. advertisements were so expensive, several seconds could easily be worth over $50k and that's on the less popular channels.
...
For the next 3 months, Ronan went over everything again and again.
He fixed 90% of the bugs, he only had 1 person helping him with the game now, the others were either not needed or stopped working for various other reasons.
He managed to contact an economist, he was called John Chandler, he was willing to work for him on the basis that he would start out with a salary of $70k a year, and if the game took off his salary would go up to $120k a year, but for now the payments were slightly lesser, he had to give up more than 3/4 of the money he had available, he still had some stockpiled away so he could afford to keep sending money home but that wouldn't last long until the messaging app made at least $15k.
...
The economist spent the next 3 months making the economy, it took countless attempts of trial and error, nothing could be done perfectly in one go, everything else was completed, the sound, graphics, coding everything was completed now, Ronan was also close to finishing his course.
His game was already fairly popular, he released an alpha version that people could download on campus, they were required to use alpha keys to get into the game to prevent people from spreading it everywhere, it had around 1k people playing it, and countless bugs that were previously unknown to Ronan were found and fixed, he also received some good feedback, bad feedback was abundant, but there was at least some good feedback.
He had secured enough server space for 150k people, he had paid for advertisements for his new game and made some to put on his messaging app, he was 90% ready, he was just waiting for John to complete the last tweaks to the economy which would take roughly 2 weeks, and then the game would be 100% ready to launch.
...
2 Weeks later and the game came out was officially in a release candidate state, it was ready for release and if nothing goes wrong then it will be released within the next 2 days, he just had to sort some small bugs out before the game could release.
Ronan spent the next 2 days thoroughly playing the game, using all mechanics, making sure there were no major bugs left, he wouldn't stop playing until he was 100% happy with it.
...
2 Days Later.
It was 23:55, 5 minutes before he would release the game, he was ready to release, nothing major had happened, no bugs, no nothing. He was 100% satisfied with the game and himself, he put his all into it and it took a couple of months longer than he thought but he was satisfied.
Weekly Power Status
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Ranking 
-- Power
stone