Going Indie
polycounter lvl 18
There have been a lot of thread recently about layoffs, and insane crunch at big AAA developers. One option to avoid all this is to go "indie". This often means you code, do the art, and market your own game.
First, is it smart to go indie? Probably not. The risks are massive and you will work as hard or harder and you will not just have to learn, but master a lot of new things. To carve out your own audience takes great ideas, a lot of interpersonal interaction, and a fair amount of luck.
So why would anyone do that to themselves? Well, the alternative for a lot of us is crunching on a game you don't really care about, pigeon-holed into modeling crates and working under morons making bad calls, just so you can come to work one day to find the project you have spent years of your life on has been canceled. If you're lucky you will get to go grab the shit from your desk.
So you still want to make your own game, even though you are going to be competing tooth and nail with hundreds of other games, many of which are free, or sell for a dollar, or get pirated?
Well, ok. Here are some thing I would seriously consider:
-do you have a few years to be poor, have a trust fund, or someone who is willing to help support you?
This doesn't mean you will have zero income. Depending on how you run things, you may have Kickstarter funds, or pre-order income or ad revenue. This may or may not be enough to live on, depending on how frugal/lucky you are.
-can you model, animate, draw, code and design compelling levels?
If you are not at least great at two of the above things, I would probably not go indie. Any skill you don't have from the above list, you need to find a guy to team up with to fill in those skills. Finding the right guys to team up with is hard -- they need fit these criteria also.
-can you work fast for long hours, with little or no external motivators?
This is kind of important. You need to get a lot done. If you don't, nobody is going care. You will just fail. Almost every indie I know has been in a point where they feel like their project will literally not ever be finished. You need to be able to get out of bed and get to work on those days.
-can you gather a community around your work?
This will take blog posts, videos, interviews, and tons of one on one interaction. This stuff needs to go viral. Getting media attention is great. This requires great ideas, good video production skills and awesome writing/communication skills. Forum, blog, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook are all necessary tools.
I personally suck at this stuff, and it may be the most important. If you don't have that x-factor that lands your content on Reddit, Kotaku and RPS, then you need someone who does.
-do you have a great idea for a game?
You need something in your game that normal people will recognize is clearly better and different than what they have played before. I don't know what makes an idea great, but I can tell you 99% of ideas that people think are great are probably not good enough.
One final note: I don't know shit. My game is not even done yet. There are no rules as far as I can tell, other than maybe be really awesome.
[edit] Oops, looks like there is already a thread.
First, is it smart to go indie? Probably not. The risks are massive and you will work as hard or harder and you will not just have to learn, but master a lot of new things. To carve out your own audience takes great ideas, a lot of interpersonal interaction, and a fair amount of luck.
So why would anyone do that to themselves? Well, the alternative for a lot of us is crunching on a game you don't really care about, pigeon-holed into modeling crates and working under morons making bad calls, just so you can come to work one day to find the project you have spent years of your life on has been canceled. If you're lucky you will get to go grab the shit from your desk.
So you still want to make your own game, even though you are going to be competing tooth and nail with hundreds of other games, many of which are free, or sell for a dollar, or get pirated?
Well, ok. Here are some thing I would seriously consider:
-do you have a few years to be poor, have a trust fund, or someone who is willing to help support you?
This doesn't mean you will have zero income. Depending on how you run things, you may have Kickstarter funds, or pre-order income or ad revenue. This may or may not be enough to live on, depending on how frugal/lucky you are.
-can you model, animate, draw, code and design compelling levels?
If you are not at least great at two of the above things, I would probably not go indie. Any skill you don't have from the above list, you need to find a guy to team up with to fill in those skills. Finding the right guys to team up with is hard -- they need fit these criteria also.
-can you work fast for long hours, with little or no external motivators?
This is kind of important. You need to get a lot done. If you don't, nobody is going care. You will just fail. Almost every indie I know has been in a point where they feel like their project will literally not ever be finished. You need to be able to get out of bed and get to work on those days.
-can you gather a community around your work?
This will take blog posts, videos, interviews, and tons of one on one interaction. This stuff needs to go viral. Getting media attention is great. This requires great ideas, good video production skills and awesome writing/communication skills. Forum, blog, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook are all necessary tools.
I personally suck at this stuff, and it may be the most important. If you don't have that x-factor that lands your content on Reddit, Kotaku and RPS, then you need someone who does.
-do you have a great idea for a game?
You need something in your game that normal people will recognize is clearly better and different than what they have played before. I don't know what makes an idea great, but I can tell you 99% of ideas that people think are great are probably not good enough.
One final note: I don't know shit. My game is not even done yet. There are no rules as far as I can tell, other than maybe be really awesome.
[edit] Oops, looks like there is already a thread.
Replies
You give some good insights into what it takes to be an indie developer.
You ought to get it merged with that other thread so it doesn't get buried, or maybe just re-post it in there.
This one I guess, as i'm not actually looking to make a living making as an indie game, not yet anyway...
Great post. Thanks for sharing. btw,
I'm currently building up to a game i've been concepting for a few years. Luckily I think I have a coder on board (finger crossed), otherwise I was going to have to learn unity or something and doing that would probably equal "PROJECT FAIL!". But having someone else that will rely on me to do the art side will motivate me tons more than working alone would.
It'll be a project we both do outside of work and I don't really plan to make a living out of it, if anything at all. First step is to get it working. But I think the idea is pretty damn solid and theres no reason why it shouldn't be the next angry birds, at least the game in my head is that good anyway.
The other good thing about the idea is that it can be as simple or as complex as we want it to be, So it could be as simple as Canabalt or as complex as Super Meat boy or Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet. BTW, its a platformer, hence the examples. I have a pretty good idea of what I want to achieve though. Aim towards keeping it simple is key, and don't get too ambitious.
Anyway. Until the game is at a test-able level i'll not really know if the thing works. It might be a great idea in my head but playing it on a screen could be completely shite. Will see.
I've been working together with fellow artist and close friend of mine, Michael Dashow (walrus on Gameartisans) on an "outside of our day jerbs" iphone game.
The only thing I can say is, keep it simple and don't be too ambitious at all; especially for your first game. We tried creating a sprite RPG first; which resulted in a massive fail, then we simplified and went for a tile based dungeon crawler idea.
I would LOVE to do the RPG again one day, but I know for a fact that we won't be able to pull off just by ourselves.
But the one single thing that is the hardest about having a day job and working on your indie projects in the off-hours is finding the motivation for it. It will go fast in the beginning (prototyping always does). But the moment you start filling in the gaps is where motivations generally tend to drop. That and life's events can seriously slow you down as compared to working on it fulltime.
If you do end up working on games outside of your day job, and they're slightly complex, you better be prepared for a pretty long dev time. What takes 2 months in fulltime development could end up taking away 2 years of your life...
Marketing btw is always important, and even more so on the iDevices. You will have to compete with a cesspool of 70.000+ games and if you don't get noticed in the first few weeks you may end up in the basement of the app store pretty fast.
Anyway, working on your very own games is hella fun.
What about teaming up it's rare to find one person who can operate all aspects of even a small 1-2 person company. Even if they can do it all, they run up against time.
Or what about transitioning slowly so you're not taking on all the risk all at once? Maybe you start out in your spare time and as you ramp up production and run out of vacation days you cut back your day job to part time, this allows you an escape if things go south and you aren't totally destitute. The key is learning to live on half of what you currently make, which is good if you're currently full time looking to save up some cash for a possible dry spell...
Maybe look into getting a cake job that lets you work on outside projects, I hear security guards have a lot of time on their hands, but who knows if bosses are cool with you doing side work... at work... When I was doing tech support I was allowed to work on 3D when we had down time. It helped that our department had a mini-mod team going for a while working on a map.
Also PeterK's write up on launching new IP comes to mind.
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/PeterKojesta/20110224/7084/The_Pilot_Paradigm_How_to_launch_a_new_IP_more_effectively_and_cheaper.php
Very shameless plug:
I've been interested in this for some time though I do not know where to post my interests in? Garage games? too look for a team? I'm interested in helping and partaking in any game projects those that are looking let's talk, I got nothing but time.
The first game is probably the hardest i imagine, as you need to not only make the game, but setup your indie company, branding yourself, getting people to know you and getting all your tech sorted out. We've been spending most our time making custom tools and plugins to use so that we can avoid paying out for expensive commercial licences, aswell as adding a bunch of stuff to Unity, such as a GUI render system that doesn't use up a billion draw calls..
Indie development is however, stuck in a vicious circle. It's getting easier and easier to develop games and get them into the app store or whatever, but due to this more and more people are making indie games and the market is coming more competative. So i think having an awesome game idea or style is very important.
An extra note: Unite (service from Unity) looks like a pretty effective way of getting your game out there if you have no marketing experience, Unity take your game, along with 20% of profits and pitch it to publishers or direct sales for you. We'll probably be trying this out in the next month or two, so we'll let you know how the service is!
I think it's totally possible to start small. When building an audience, you can often substitute time for quality or quantity. At some level, it's a numbers game when it comes to getting people to subscribe to your feeds. Small games work well too. Increpare does about a game a week and is very well known among indie devs.
http://www.increpare.com/
(He did a topical game "Kettle" that went a little viral a couple months ago.)
The hardest part is getting those first 100 people. You'll probably start off with friends and family, some people you know from work and forums. You may get 10-20 YouTube subscribers from that. To go beyond that you need to provide people something they want. Putting up some kind of tutorial content always seems to work. I once read that a good blog is one that makes the reader more awesome for it.
So what do you put up? This is my personal advice for indies: Don't look at what's popular, or what you think people will like. Don't focus on other games or movies for inspiration. Instead dig deep and find the stuff that is really inspiring and cool to you. A lot my personal inspiration comes from traveling and hiking. Read really good books -- not shitty pulp. Refine your tastes in every way. Mass market tastes are already met by mass market games -- you don't have much chance competing with giant teams and marketing budgets. Superbrothers is a great example of what that looks like:
http://www.swordandsworcery.com/
My personal story-- I will try for the ultra short version:
For about 8 years I struggled to learn the basics of game art, coding, and video production. There were a few failed projects during this time, but I also got an education (in economics) and had a failed business (a LAN arcade)
I did contract art part time, and met most of the connections I have now with Mac/iPhone devs, and the Wolfire guys. I got a lot better at 3D art.
I took a job working with a bunch of Polycounters on Darkest of Days and learned level design.
I then went to work with the Wolfire guys full time. There was a little seed money that some of the other guys had from previous projects, but without support from my wife I would not have been able to do this.
David of Wolfire already had a bit of reputation from winning some Mac game development contests and having some free games already out in the wild (Black Shades for example) as well as Lugaru, which had a dedicated fan base. In large part, I am riding on his coattails.
In 2 years Wolfire made 500-600 blog posts I think. For the first year we had a blog post every day. John went to major conferences and talked to hundreds of people face to face, and wrote tons of emails to help establish his contacts. John also started making regular video updates and building the YouTube channel. David wrote a blog post that was #1 on Digg and Reddit, and a number of other posts that were featured on major gaming/technology news blogs. John and Jeff came up with the Humble Indie Bundle, largely to help sell Lugaru (considered the worst game in the bundle by some commenters) and increase awareness of Wolfire. Since then, David and I have both gone to making regular video updates. A recent video of his had over 80K views on YouTube. My blog post and video successes have been much more modest. I have had my work shown on Kotaku and Destructoid, and helped with an inteview on RPS. None of those did a ton to boost awareness or sales. I am trying hard every day to build up my connections. I will be heading down to Fantastic Arcade in Austin this year, and doing a panel at PAX prime.
If it had just been me trying to do this, I think I almost certainly would have failed. As it is, I think I may slowly learn what I need to so that I can pull my weight.
Is it possible to go indie? It is, but it's a lot weirder and harder than you may expect.
Also HIB 3 just went live a few moments ago
I wanted to share my experiences in indie dev too. 4 years ago, I started working as a 3d artist in the mil-sim industry. It was a steady paycheck, but wasn't what I had dreams of doing. However, being there led me to meet others like myself--fresh out of college artists with big dreams of making videogames, although we were in a different industry.
A while passed and I decided to lead 5 of us to develop for the iPhone. It only took one meeting of all of us after work to realize I did not want to work with 2 of the individuals. We were down to 3. We started out each investing about $600 and bought a game engine license, the apple dev license, registered as a business partnership, and a macbook off craig'slist.
We were all on the same page for a while, but things started falling apart. I was coding the entire project myself, while the others made art and sounds. This would have been great, but it soon turned into a 2 man show. The third guy wasnt as good at sound design as he told us, and his art and ideas were nowhere near the same page as the team. We let him down softly, and moved on.
Time passed, we got laid off from our jobs, and the gamedev took a backseat for a while. A year and a half later, our apple dev license was up, but we were ready to give it another go. We worked tirelessly on a game for a while, but soon became overtaken by feature creep. We were trying to do too much. After scrapping that, and salvaging what could be, we planned and prototyped for a month on our 3rd game, still never releasing anything.
Third time was the charm, or so it seemed at first. I was doing all the programming, he was doing majority of the art. That didnt last long. I happened to be a better 3d artist then him and I soon took over modelling and texturing everything in the game, as well as coding the entire thing. He did the main UI, which I then re-worked to be useable.
It didnt take long for me to see a problem, but him and I were good freinds. I had tried dropping hints to him many times about us going seperate ways, but it was like breaking up with a clingy girlfriend. I basically had to wait for him to realize it wasnt working, and we finally split off. I sold him the mac back and the iPhone portion of our game engine license, while I retained the main engine license--free to develop on windows/mac, whatever.
Now I am by myself, but my life has changed drastically in the past 4 years. I now live 45 minutes away from work, I am married, and own a house. When I get home from work, the last thing I want to do is work on anything, and that's where I'm failing now--motivation. Most recently though, I have been getting back into it and have found some time! Things are going fairly well right now, but I'm still just planning things out, and my mind flutters from idea to idea at this point. I dream of having a little office space with a few people under me, and I even fantasize about having pizza parties as we work into the night on the next big hit.
I have the dream and the will, I just need to stay focused, which is what I find to be the hardest part.
Take what you want from this, just sharing my experience! It isn't easy, but things that are worth it seldom are. I still plan on being a millionaire, so I will keep you all updated. Will be hiring artists in 2025. I'm not stopping, and my 9 to 5 supports the bad habit.
-Memory
My business model is bootstrapped by freelance work. My titles are built using my graphics / design / marketing skills then I outsource the coding.
The first project I did made more than $30,000. Actually it sold more than most indie games.
I've spent the best part of this year bootstrapping to pay the rent and learning my shit when it comes to coding. Working on 3 titles that are actually games, 2 of those with another guy who has joined me as a partner in the business so we can expand. We also took on an accountant and several more contract freelancers.
We've had to shut down a few prototypes pretty quickly, but on the whole the projects are looking healthier all the time without pressure to release before they are ready.
I know not of any advice I can give but my own daily routine and tools, hopefully anyone looking to go indie can relate, learn:
Essentials:
- lots of note pads, jot down every idea.
- long baths, help you plan.
- at least some skill in making your idea.
- a decent income from other work, but not something that overshadows your time.
- a rented desk somewhere, away from your house.
- "me" time for thinking and note taking.
- plenty of exercise.
- don't snack.
My day:
- get client work out of the way
- indie work; manage projects, make lists, work on game, study code etc. Try to get at least 1 problem solved, check off a few tasks from any list I have going.
Try to take a walk each day, this helps you plan out projects, schedules. A good bit of cardio each day (I walk about 5km a day, nothing crazy) helps the blood flow, helps your mood and prepare you for sitting at a desk for the rest of the day. Lack of exercise + lots of snacks / soda can lead to depression.
And I really wouldn't recommend this to anyone without at least half a decade of experience.
To anyone who is willing try it I wish you the best of luck, you can read more about my story and how I almost crashed and burned here: http://www.hawkenking.com/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-ios4/
Remember; security is just an illusion. If you want to do it for yourself go ahead, the worst that can happen is you fail and get a job.
The up side is my quality of life is very high, and I never have to worry about money. (day job pays plenty, and covers insurance) The biggest drawback is that I have significantly less time to devote to game development. Just something I will have to deal with going forward.
I'm working on making my own games. I know I cant do the games that I want to on my own. I'm going to focus on making my own test/prototye games. See how much I can do, see what I like doing and what I'm good at. Then hopefully find others to team up with.
Yes! Yes! Yes!
I personally think this is the single most important part of teaming up with someone!
You need to find someone who is a) just as driven as you are, b) seriously kickass at what he/she does and most importantly c) someone you can build a good relationship with.
Points a and c are the hardest to find out because they take time and experience, but it is well worth it if you can find someone you can really trust and is good at what he/she does.
I think we all have had that dream. I know I sure as hell have, in fact; I still do! There's a bunch of awesome ideas (at least in my mind) that I want to try out, but they are far too complex for me to code or too large for me to handle on my own or in a two man team.
Fuck, I'm even dreaming of someday having a 3D version of MageMaze on PSN or XBLA!
Ah, the indie dream!
We both had "day jobs" and thus worked during evenings and weekends. It was a lot of fun, but we discovered, after three games, that we were not making enough money to grow to the point that we wanted (i.e. hiring a couple of people and not having to do all the work ourselves). I had an opportunity to do some freelance programming for a couple of firms that paid five times what we were clearing from all the games combined. We decided to get into the computer consulting and support business and dropped game development. But over time running a small business required 60 - 80 hours a week. I eventually took a full-time job with vacation and benefits. I did develop and program an educational game from 2008 - 2010 (did not really do it for profit). It was fun to do something unique that you had total control over the process and that people enjoyed.
Moral of story is that running a business (and indie game dev is a business) is not something to take lightly. If you enjoy programming, modeling, animating, etc. you may not enjoy the business end of equation. Yet someone must handle the business end (accounting, marketing, planning, taxes, etc.). If you can grow a business to the point where you can survive and hire people it can be rewarding, but over time it can wear you out. The experience was invaluable for me. The primary lesson I learned (after long reflection) was that our games were developed too much based on what we wanted to see in a game. We took pride in our games and the people that bought them liked them, but in order to grow you must develop games that a larger audience likes. It is not as easy as people assume to develop a game that many people will like. It takes experience and mistakes before you start to catch on. You need to catch on before you burn out.
If you are up to it--go for it! The current indie situation is really similar to the early roots of gaming (cottage industry independents). A good idea, well-executed, good timing, and some dedicated people and you might make the next hot seller and break into the big time.
If one likes money, invest in toilet rolls. Or water. Or cemeteries, things people need.
Building apps and games as an indie there is no "get rich" mentality, this is what makes the big studios so unappealing.
Sorry to spam but just read this and it's incredibly relevant:
http://www.examiner.com/pc-games-in-salt-lake-city/dungeons-of-dredmor-interview
===========================
The most important bits:
20. What advice would you give up-and-coming indie PC developers who are trying to break into the business?
DGB: To someone wanting to get into game development there are a few insanity checks that need to be passed: You need to love making games, not just playing games. You need to realize that games are not just the stories in games. You need to realize that your skills, if adequate, could earn you a lot more money in other fields. You need to have interests outside of games lest your design sensibilities become inbred. You need to be able to make yourself finish projects without outside motivation. I could go on like this and sound pretty negative, but if you love making games enough to overcome all of it, youll probably be doing it anyway.
NV: Build a work ethic. Shipping video games is hard, and the only way you *can* ship a video game is by forcing yourself to do it, tuning out all distractions, and getting it done. This is a very, very hard skill that great developers have. (John Carmack is particularly legendary for this.) Its hard work, but at the end of the day, despite the amount of effort required and the emotional rollercoaster having your work out there can be, its very rewarding.
Also, playtest the heck out of things. Im a big fan of Valves iterated software development methodology for game development, and well be looking more towards doing that in the future.
CD: Like just about anything, you need to love the work. Find a way where you can pay the bills and enjoy putting in your time every day, and any success that comes your way is a bonus.
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Was trying to hold back posting this as development is so preliminary but I recently made the indie jump myself and with all these indie threads, not posting it was driving me crazy. My Environment Artist contract is up, I have some money saved up and I'm incredibly excited to work on a project with massive creative control with my talented programmer buddy who i first worked with on a mod a few years back. We're both splitting the role of game designer and the more concessions we each make the stronger the game doc becomes. It's liberating to work on such a small team knowing everyone will pull their weight and politics are not such an issue. If we bring on more people they will be on to make the game better, not to suck up pay, not to consider their own game taste as gospel, not to power trip, not to play politics, but to work in a relaxed environment with other people who are great at what they do making something we think is pretty special.
We've got a fairly big scope for an indie game, but our game idea is very modular and iterative, we both have done projects with big scopes before and found at least moderate success. I can't go into too much detail obviously at this point, but I can say it showcases our strengths and incorporates some of our better ideas and design practices from previous projects. We can do it and we have some support from some pretty experienced developers in the indie community.
Over the past few years we both shared multiple failures. One was developing a game for an unproven platform, another was joining a small team putting out what's turning out to be a great game, but... well it would be unprofessional to say what went wrong, but just heed the rest of the advice in this thread. When you're indie developing anything that can go wrong WILL go wrong. As others have said before, minimize your risk as much as you possibly can. Choose your platform wisely, don't expect funding any time soon, don't do anything you can't actually do, and most importantly choose your team wisely! It's so incredibly rare to find the right talented hard-working people with a laid back mindset who are interested in the kind of game you'd like to make and whose primary concern isn't the money but the game and who aren't already burned out working their job at a major company.
Edit: Oh yeah! Remember this guy?
His name is Nate and he's actually on board for our project luls.
Just have to focus when you can and get down to it. Good days and bad. Some days are just monsters and the reason is because you're tired and missed that bit of code that caused the player to spin when you wanted it to jump. You spent 9 hours on it only to see it was just commented out... shit like that. Keep goals in reach. Keep motivated. Don't be embarrassed with your first shitty game.
It took me 8 minutes to write this because I am falling asleep between every few sentences. Tired. Always tired and sleepy. Good night.
Wanted to ask what are the main indie resources/sites/forums you visit? Found few indie podcasts, forums, but wanted to know your own favourites?
Also Wolfire blog has become my new favourite game dev blog. Keep up the good work!
If nothing is happening in your area, you can always try to start something with local people.
I know a few people that have done it the other way around though; build up steam and then retreat.
That's what we have the internet for, but if you mean building a team, then yeah, that becomes hard.
There's still solo-indie though, a route many takes.
We actually just setup a production pipeline for a tabletop wargame with miniatures, completely independent.. It's been a huge learning experience so far.
Was going to start a thread on the progress.
Does that count?
I think you can build relationships with other devs online, but it's just harder.
There are some personalities who have been able to bootstrap a community. Derek Yu and Adam Saltsman come to mind, but that is a lot of work, and there has to be some talented people around who are willing to help.
Indie Development and Money
+1
Lots of resources at:
http://www.pixelprospector.com/indie-resources/
The starting-an-indie-biz megathread on TIGSource:
http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?PHPSESSID=54493a9a8e66074db05b3dd51b3e08a9&topic=18.0
eCommerce payment processor stuff:
http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=257.0
Business and Law section over at gamedev.net:
http://www.gamedev.net/forum/5-the-business-and-law-of-game-development/
Wolfire PR .pdf - making noise from day one
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1012494/Effective-Marketing-For-Indie-Game
Game Developers Should Love Their Pirates, by Tahdg Kelly (On "seeding" relationships as a businessmodel, basically building relationships and looking at income over time as opposed to a traditional, one-shot model):
http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2011/02/opinion_game_developers_should.php
Keep 'em coming!
I haven't the time to learn and TBH haven't really got a codcers mentality, though I wish I was good at it.
So yeah i normally end up with a demo which you can run around in, but not much else