Tales of the Rampant Coyote

Adventures in Indie Gaming!

Advice From Experienced Indie Developers…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 9, 2011

‘Tis very sound… though I think the quotes at the beginning of the article are a little bit misleading.

Indie Revelations from Experienced Developers

These guys do manage to smack around a few stereotypes, though.  The bottom line is that unless you are making games as a pure hobby (and that is completely awesome in its own right), being an indie game developer is still a business. And – at it’s heart – it’s making stuff for other people.


Filed Under: Biz - Comments: 3 Comments to Read



  • Felix Pleșoianu said,

    Unfortunately, my reaction to that article was tl;dr — which doesn’t happen to me often!

    I’m one of those people who does it as a pure hobby (for now). People seem to like my games, though. And here’s the trick: I play them myself. That’s why I made them in the first place. Some people don’t “get” them, or find them too difficult, or too easy — but enough others find them great to make it worth the effort. And the only reason that happens is because my games are tailor-made for one particular type of player: myself. Maybe if I had to live off game development the situation would be different, but I kind of doubt it. You just can’t get to truly know other people; if you don’t know yourself you don’t know anyone, and money can’t change that.

    Perhaps the only useful advice in there was to have a well-defined art style. I developed one for Buzz Grid before even realizing it, and it shows.

  • Bad Sector said,

    The problem with such advices (not only from these people – or from indies in general) is that they’re random. Most people do not know why they were successful, they just make assumptions and you get conflicting advices (f.e. in the indie case there are many people telling you to make what will make you money and making only games you like is pure idealism that will not work, on the other hand there are many others telling that you should always make only games you like).

    That doesn’t mean that there are no good advices, but the good advices are about more practical stuff like what to look for in a press release, how to make a site, what to look in a payment processor, how to organize your development, etc. Even those won’t have single solutions and some (like the organization, press release, site, etc) will depend on you and your game but still are more defined than feel-good (or feel-cynical) advices such as “make the game you like” or “team play is more important than passion”.

  • Felix Pleșoianu said,

    There’s an easy way to tell good advice apart from the bad: look at the reasons given. “I think you should do that because… and it would work because…” is good. “Do this, period” is not good. (For example, I explained pretty clearly in my first comment why IMO making the games you like is a good thing.) Even then, a piece of advice can be wrong, or simply inappropriate. That doesn’t mean advice in general is useless.

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