To aspiring indie devs (opens in new tab)

Good advice!

On top of start small I'd add: just finish it first. Maybe consider giving yourself a deadline. I got my first tabletop RPG supplement out last year because I signed up for (and got accepted into, horror of horrors) a table at a games/comics/arts festival. I had to go from idea to printed product in three months and worked my ass off in between my day job and taking care of my family to pull it off. But I did it and I am glad: finishing something has opened up my eyes to what's possible.

That being said I also took some time off of work last year to explore making games. There's a flourishing, inclusive indie developer community in my city and that was a real boon. However I'm still not sure how/if any of them make a living from their games.

Is it actually possible to aim your sights on a career in indie game development with all the responsibilities of a mortgage and family?

I want to do more games stuff but I foresee it being a hobby more than anything.

Better advice: Pick another industry, no field is nearly as competitive and difficult to make a profit in as indie-games. Most industries you have a handful of relevant competitors. In indie games you have thousands, most of which are some combination of better funded, better connected, and more experienced. Combined with the fact that it's a hits based market, where only a few games make a majority of the wealth.... Most indie game devs would do much better salary wise working a 9-5.

/gamedev cynicism

Basically, if you accept that your first 10 games will suck, and you don't try to make your first game fantastic, then your first 10 games will suck. Worse, you might get good at developing sucky games. For most developers, not just game developers, it's likely that their first some number of projects will suck.

I always thought that the mantra about your first 10 games will suck was a way to take the pressure off you and get you to develop a game. The problem is that we psych ourselves out; we don't develop anything because we're too fearful about making a bad game, and we procrastinate, and we hem and haw and never develop anything.

This is all true, and is similar to the #1 advice that I give to aspiring indie devs, which is to make a tiny game. Like, something that can be finished in under a week. I can guarantee they won't finish it in time - it's a lesson in scope. You spent half of the time debugging some physics bug for that puzzle platformer idea? Yup. You spent a whole day working out some UI quirk? Yep. No, those ideas are all too big: you have to scope down to a Tetris clone to finish on time.

Regardless of if you finish in time, you should still finish it. A finished bad game is a million times more impressive than an unfinished cool idea. You gain priceless knowledge and experience from just completing a project from beginning to end, so do it often - and of course the easiest way to do that is to just make a tiny, finishable project.

Once you make a tiny game, make a slightly larger one. Once you get to a multi-month project, you'll encounter the dreaded motivation gap. It's when the honeymoon period of "holy crap I have so many ideas" wears off, and you actually have to implement every detail. During this phase you will HATE working on the game, and if your life doesn't depend on it, then you will quit.

This gap separates people who like the idea of having made a big game versus the people who want to actually make a big game. I've seen so many people start so many cool projects, but never get over that hump because it's soooo unmotivating to do something you hate, making no visible progress, for the sole prospect of "it will be cool after I trudge through this another 5 months".

Once you get over that hump though, it gets super exciting again, because the end is in sight, and you're just polishing the game and adding in the cool features that were in your mind before, but couldn't add yet because the framework wasn't there. The only way past that hump is to have a really inspiring team that can inspire each other when they're down on motivation, or to have inhuman Carmackian drive, or to have your life depend on it.

Nice advice! I've been an 'aspiring indie' for 6 years now [1], definitely not doing enough to promote my ideas, but like you said, I need to make something and release it.

[1] http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/author/jplur/

If you're looking to sell your first (or any) game, I make itch.io [1] and I'd love to help you out. It's a open marketplace for hosting indie games. I'm continually adding new stuff to make it super easy to help developers start selling with no hassle. The response from the community has been incredible and I'm always looking to add new games. Feel free to email me, leafot @ gmail if you have any questions.

[1]: http://itch.io

I think the idea behind prototyping first is to save your time making graphics/music for a game concept that is not fun.

That is, if it doesn't play well with boxes and circles, it's not gonna play any better with shiny boxes and circles.

If you absolutely need the graphics in place to inspire you to write the code, then sure, go ahead. But it eats up valuable prototyping time that can be used to churn through mechanic ideas and test them.

The advice also doesn't have to relate to the whole game. You might have decided you are definitely making some kind of turn based RPG. But you haven't worked out the details. That's where you prototype. You try every combination and bizarre idea you come up with, you play it, and you pick what's fun and throw out the rest. Prototyping can be as focused or as broad as you want.

I fell out of following video games several years ago. But I must say I'm quite inspired by the work of Terry Cavanagh (http://terrycavanaghgames.com/) and Stephen Lavelle (http://www.increpare.com/).

Maybe they just fit my more bite-sized appetite these days rather than for a 30-course-meal type of game, but the experimentation really captures something that, I think, drew me to games in the first place.

Notch had really similar advice in the Minecraft movie. The interview asks him for advice for aspiring game devs, and he responds in a wonderful deadpan: "don't follow any advice" (paraphrased)

Although, interestingly, the creation and growth of mine craft fit the author's advice pretty closely (untraditional marketing, huge idea, just release it)

Edit: Here's the link to Notch's advice - http://youtu.be/ySRgVo1X_18?t=1h20m36s "Do you have any words of advice for people out there" "The best advice I can give anyone is 'don't listen to advice'"

I agree with the author, but I think you need to look a bit further behind the common advices for their reason to be.

People tell you to make small games because they've seen so many newcomers try to make big ones and fail hard, NOT because it's impossible to succeed in making a big game from the first try.

Actually, one very common advice that is NOT debunked by the author is "finish something, however small it is, because there is more to learn by finishing something than by failing at doing something big".

To give a (personal) example: I have been making an indie MMO as the sole developer for 2 years now (see my profile for details if interested). I've been told about a bazillion times that it is crazy and that I shouldn't do that. BUT I want to do it, and since I've been making exactly that professionally for 5 years before jumping, I know that I know why people say not to do it (probably better than most of them, actually). But if someone very new to game making asked me for advice, I'd still say like anyone else: "don't try to make a MMO as a 2-person team".

Cool! I was just writing one of these for myself.

For me the most important thing is managing my psychology—keeping myself motivated on a project. So mine are all based around that:

    1. Work (hard) on what you love
    2. Ship
    3. Tell your story
    4. No big projects
    5. Collaborate
    6. Learn how to make money
    7. Be creative
    8. Think long-term
    9. ???
    10. Profit

Good advice in general, i don't really agree with what he said about marketing though. Depends heavily on the market obviously, but today, even if you have a super awesome mobile game it will be very hard to be successful with it if you don't know what you're doing in terms of marketing and don't have a budget for it. On many platforms, most decent games simply never turn a profit.

Interesting read! Especially since 3 weeks ago I threw myself a challenge: build one new html5 game per week.

If you're interested to look at the games I've made so far: http://www.lessmilk.com

I'm open for any feedback. Thanks! :-)

I enjoyed reading this - I wished it had gone on further! Thanks for taking the time to share your candid thoughts.

In peace, Mike