Confessions of a failed indie developer

I think as a developer, the easiest thing to screw up is the understanding of what a business is and how long it takes to build (and how much it costs to run).

Say you are making $50,000 a year. The owner is probably paying more like $75,000-100,000 when you include insurance, rent, taxes, equipment, etc.

Now, imagine you are on a small team of five - an artist, game designer, 2 devs, and a qa person. That is an outlay of about $500,000 a year. So, shipping a smallish game in 6 months is about $250,000.

The author seemed to think that building the whole thing from scratch was "saving money", but it was costing him a tremendous amount of time, which was in fact costing him A LOT of money.

So, if you are trying to start a business, understand that it costs some combination of money and time, and if you are short on one, you probably need to substitute the other.

If you are short on both, you're screwed.

A couple of observations.

You probably shouldn't think that you can get your indie game done in a year, release, and ramp up revenue so fast that you'll soon be self-sustaining. Sounds obvious, but most guys starting out actually believe that there's a chance of it playing out like this. Starry-eyed optimism is probably a precondition for going anywhere near this business in the first place, but it must be tempered and kept in check at all times.

If you are building a game of substance (rather than a simple puzzler/platformer mobile app - which is a lottery ticket more than a business model), the game will likely take way longer to develop. As it should. Good games take time. This means that you should either be very well-funded, or have extremely low costs of living, or be working on the side of another income (in which case it will take even longer). This is not the way to instant riches, but since when did that ever work? Double down, dig your heels in, this will take years. But the end result is an awesome game.

Further to the point, you should probably not think in terms of the release that ends the project and where all your efforts either pay off or fall flat. Instead, the game should be put in front of users continually, gathering feedback, going back to the lab to improve it and repeating the cycle until momentum starts to pick up. That's when you know that you are near the final shape of the game. Don't even think about talking to the press before this. Luckily, if there is one community that is ready to try new things at any and all times it is gamers, so you shouldn't have much trouble getting this feedback. (Conversely, if even the ravenous internet hordes are indifferent to your project, you might need to tweak the formula).

While a long and hard road, a game developed this way actually stands a chance of success in the market, unlike the 'overnight success' stories that play well in the press.

> you should probably not think in terms of the release that ends the project

Yes. I want to stress this some more. I know several people who are/were working on big ambitious projects in a kind of stealth mode, citing concerns that their idea will be stolen, or emphasizing that it isn't "ready yet". I suspect this is usually rationalizing a fear of criticism.

A single-person personal project shouldn't be worked on in isolation for more than a few months. You'll lose perspective. Feedback is extremely valuable. It'll help you grow your idea, and it'll help you abandon something that's not going anywhere. (The same probably goes for small teams.)

If you don't have an artist, you need to be able to do art+code. Even if you're making as simple puzzle game, your game is going to look a hundred times better with jewels/blocks drawn by someone who knows what they are doing, compared to something you hacked up in MSPaint.

And don't go super-cheap on the artist. It might take them a few hours to do just a few simple icons/items, so pay them what you'd want per hour for a contract job. Don't pay them $10 an hour or offer $100 to do an entire replacement of your development art.

The same goes for music. Even an original theme song is going to take 10-12 hours of work. So asking for a $50 song isn't going to yield good results.

Doesn't this guy realize that asking for money they way he did with flex funding defies logic. If you only raise some of the money, how were expecting to finish the project, and what about the people who gave you money - you just scammed them. He still hasn't paid them back yet, instead saying he owes them a game!

Trying not to be harsh, but this guy is obviously clueless - built his own game engine - maybe he should've started by wiring together his own circuit boards and then building an OS.

And another thing slightly disturbing about a lot of game devs - in your teens or early twenties I can understand the desire to make Indie games, you're young and retarded. But later on in life, late 20s and on - can you not find something more worthwhile to do?

Sure, a side hobby making games, or your main job working as a game dev to pay the bills, but for that be the focus of your life? Can you not open your eyes to the multitude of problems that exist out there, in the REAL WORLD, and fix those?

You could say the same about other artists like writers and musicians - and thankfully, almost all of them suffer financially for their insanity. As time progresses, Indie gamers will also realize that they are just the starving artists of modern times (minus the groupies that writers and musicians get).