4 ms·

Ask HNL: tips for new indie game-developers?

• oscardelben 18y ago
  http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2009/03/so-heres-how-many-games-i-sell.html http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2009/03/so-heres-how-many-gam... comments here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=521416 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=521416
• stonemetal 18y ago
  What kind of games do you want to make? For web based games there really seem to be three models ad supported like urban dead, freemium like mech quest, and portal paid like anything on Yahoo games. In non web games it seems to mostly be try to get carried by enough third party distributors to make enough money at the 10-20 dollar price point.
  • ido 18y ago
    I would rather do non-web games (I've released a couple of small roguelikes) - think diablo on a smaller scale, with simple 2d graphics but more complex and interesting game play. My older games were all several man-weeks of effort (1 week off from work to develop each + a couple of months of bug fixes and polish in my free time) and were received reasonably well. If I do it full time and bust my ass I think I can produce fairly viable small games for about 6 months man work each. I have enough money saved up for surviving ~1 year of zero income.
    • stonemetal 18y ago
      In that case look at the major inde friendly platforms. Most of the current consoles offer a market place for downloadable games, maybe the iPhone, green house, steam. I can't think of any other distribution channels off the top of my head but then I don't follow indie game development that much.
      • ido 18y ago
        Thanks, steam was my first thought too (as well as the XBox store). I haven't heard of green house and a quick google doesn't seem to bring up anything about the right type of green houses ;) Do you have a link handy?
        • stonemetal 18y ago
          playgreenhouse.com Another that just occurred to me is startdock.com (the guys behind sins of a solar empire and GalCiv)
          • ido 18y ago
            playgreenhouse seem awesome, thanks a lot!
• unalone 18y ago
  As a former indie developer who made games for free, here's the one thing I think you might take from my experience: There are a lot of people who make games. Pretty much any basic idea you can think of has been done before. The best way to stand out is to polish the stuff you make, because otherwise you'll be looked over. If something's polished it can rise above a more-featured game because more people will take the time to play it.
  • ido 18y ago
    Did you do it part time or was it your main job?
    • unalone 18y ago
      I was a student: I did it entirely as a hobby, and I didn't do it particularly well. My advice comes not so much from learning how to develop a good game (in the time I thought of myself as a developer, I made nothing above "bad"), but more from playing lots and lots of indie games, and trying to figure out which ones were standing out the most in my mind. Polish is tricky, but generally it entails playing over a game again and again trying to make things perfect. This showed up most in RPG development: when the battle system in every game is the same, you learn that what matters isn't your system, but rather how you manage to use that system to constantly grasp attention. (In fact, if you ever have time to develop games without worrying about it for money, I'd suggest you download a standard RPG development kit: that'll teach you how to make addictive games despite having almost no control over your basic systems. That way, when you begin making your own games, you'll have a feel for what's going to get at people and what they'll ignore as "yet another game system".