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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.
by 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 agoDid you do it part time or was it your main job?
- unalone 18y agoI 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".