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Three Tips For Getting Started In the Indie Gaming Biz

21 points by gcheong 17y ago

patio11 17y ago
I would add, for the benefit of sixteen year olds like myself: you will almost certainly not ship a game as your first well-done piece of software. Get some experience and come back later. (cough Or never. cough Games are a terrible industry to be in for the overwhelming majority of programmers. Starting a business is hard enough without handicapping yourself that way and competing with a virtually infinite population of people willing to work for nothing. But I didn't want to hear that at sixteen either.)
- chipsy 17y ago
  Seconded. If you're in gamedev(as I am), you're essentially going into it as your lifestyle. You can make it a reasonably sane, healthy one if you can find a niche and make it as an indie, but good money won't ever be the motivating factor, and working in the studio environment is harsh and essentially requires migrating to find new work every time you're taken off a project. When new segments take off, like casual gaming did a few years ago, or social gaming more recently, you have a better chance of money and stable employment, but it'll fade away when the market saturates. That said, the bar to make it is really high. It's not as impossibly high as making it as a musician, I think, because the variety of situations and skillsets is exponentially larger in the interactive multimedia context - so you always have less competition for your particular skillset - but it's definitely harder than "business programming" because you can add as many technical challenges as you want(soft real-time simulations, physics, graphics, audio, world persistence, networking, tools+scaffolding....) and still have only scratched the surface on what the computer is potentially capable of as an entertainment device. If you take pains to avoid technical challenges you can make games more quickly, but you have to take on at least one or two to have a game, and adding more usually helps quality. Plus, the code alone doesn't make a game. The final game is the result of code+assets+design+player feedback - and lots of meticulous details. Game design isn't terribly different from business in that you have to make tons of hard decisions with little information immediately available. And like in business, you can get more info, but you have to work at it.
benologist 17y ago
I would suggest anyone interested try their hand in Flash, it's quite a powerful tool for rapid prototyping and even fully releasing games, and a good platform to learn about rich interfaces on. There's also a ton of tutorials, and if you're good at it you can make some pretty decent cash upfront + residuals. Failing that, Visual Studio + XNA is by far the best you're going to get your hands on for free.
- NickPollard 17y ago
  For those interested in learning, Epic now provide the UDK (Unreal Development Kit) for free to those who wish to use it in non-commercial capacity. This means that whilst you can't sell anything you make with it, you can get your hands on the full Unreal 3.0 engine that powers many modern games (eg. Gears of War, Bioshock 2), and do whatever you like with it. Great for prototyping, experimenting and generally learning about game development.

21 points by gcheong 17y ago

I would add, for the benefit of sixteen year olds like myself: you will almost certainly not ship a game as your first well-done piece of software. Get some experience and come back later. (cough Or never. cough Games are a terrible industry to be in for the overwhelming majority of programmers. Starting a business is hard enough without handicapping yourself that way and competing with a virtually infinite population of people willing to work for nothing. But I didn't want to hear that at sixteen either.)

chipsy 17y ago
Seconded. If you're in gamedev(as I am), you're essentially going into it as your lifestyle. You can make it a reasonably sane, healthy one if you can find a niche and make it as an indie, but good money won't ever be the motivating factor, and working in the studio environment is harsh and essentially requires migrating to find new work every time you're taken off a project. When new segments take off, like casual gaming did a few years ago, or social gaming more recently, you have a better chance of money and stable employment, but it'll fade away when the market saturates. That said, the bar to make it is really high. It's not as impossibly high as making it as a musician, I think, because the variety of situations and skillsets is exponentially larger in the interactive multimedia context - so you always have less competition for your particular skillset - but it's definitely harder than "business programming" because you can add as many technical challenges as you want(soft real-time simulations, physics, graphics, audio, world persistence, networking, tools+scaffolding....) and still have only scratched the surface on what the computer is potentially capable of as an entertainment device. If you take pains to avoid technical challenges you can make games more quickly, but you have to take on at least one or two to have a game, and adding more usually helps quality. Plus, the code alone doesn't make a game. The final game is the result of code+assets+design+player feedback - and lots of meticulous details. Game design isn't terribly different from business in that you have to make tons of hard decisions with little information immediately available. And like in business, you can get more info, but you have to work at it.

benologist 17y ago

I would suggest anyone interested try their hand in Flash, it's quite a powerful tool for rapid prototyping and even fully releasing games, and a good platform to learn about rich interfaces on. There's also a ton of tutorials, and if you're good at it you can make some pretty decent cash upfront + residuals. Failing that, Visual Studio + XNA is by far the best you're going to get your hands on for free.

NickPollard 17y ago
For those interested in learning, Epic now provide the UDK (Unreal Development Kit) for free to those who wish to use it in non-commercial capacity. This means that whilst you can't sell anything you make with it, you can get your hands on the full Unreal 3.0 engine that powers many modern games (eg. Gears of War, Bioshock 2), and do whatever you like with it. Great for prototyping, experimenting and generally learning about game development.