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I’ve always been an advocate for indie developers helping their collegues out in any form. But seriously there comes a point when things can be blown out of proportions and obviously that does not help anyone. As is the case with a post made on IndieGamer.com about Malathedra. So I do recommend that you take a time to read this thread and analize what happened and how to avoid conversations like this in the future.

(Hint: There is no way to avoid this type of conversation. They will always happen.)

Sometimes I question as to whether or not indie developers research into the market before they set out and make a game. In most cases I would say that they don’t. At the indie level, it doesn’t matter if your game sells, you just want to make a game. But isn’t it nicer when thousands of people actually buy your game rather than a couple hundred?

The most effective way to achieve this is to do your research. Find out if there is an audience that you’re aiming for. Is this audience large or is it niche? Niche audiences are extremely hard to find without the proper marketing so what is your marketing strategy? What will you do if your strategy fails? Are there portals/distributors who would be interested in your game? If you cannot reply to these questions with specific details then you’re screwed.

I’ve played some great indie games before but some of those never sold well. Some were even higher quality than the ones that do sell well. So what’s the difference? The ones that sold well did the research before they developed the game.

Yesturday I found another 3D artist forum so I went ahead and posted a help wanted thread for The Divine.  (http://www.cgchat.com/forum/showthread.php?t=25285)

You can see from reading the thread that members keep on questioning my intentions. I understand where they are coming from. It does make clear sense that volunteer projects could be considered scams.

At the same time I’m replying to their posts with a calm tone. It’s important that in these situations you represent yourself and your game with a clear and conscise voice. If you lose your cool, you have lost a potential market for your game.

This will happen to you multiple times throughout your career, so just be ready for it. Always avoid a flame war.

If you are serious and want your game to sell, you have to make a high quality game. Major portals will not accept any game that has poor gameplay or graphics. With a good game, gameplay and graphics go hand in hand. Developers must balance the two.

When designing your game keep this in mind. It’s much easier to make a cartoony looking game rather than something that’s realistic.

When you’re done with your game, go back and look at things that could be polished. There’s no reason why your game shouldn’t be the best that it can be. Spend at least a month tweaking as much as you can. Beta test your game and get feedback!

Mediocrity is not an option in this day and age. There are too many indie games being released every week for your game to get noticed if it looks or plays bad.

Why would you want to waste months to years of your life on a project and not have it sell well?

Remember those people in school who always used to copy anything you did? Well I sure don’t but someone here must! Anyways…

It’s ok to copy someone else’s game idea/gameplay as long as you change it just slightly enough to offer something new. If you make a game that has already been made before, you’ve just hung yourself. No distributor wants to sell a game that they just played a year ago. That’s how portals are run to the ground. Portals have to offer their visitors the good and unique stuff.

A genre that is really hot is serving tables - Diner Dash, Mystic Inn, Snowy: Lunch Rush, etc  all use the same type of gameplay but they coat it with a completely different style of graphics. Each one of these games has sold very well because they all change the formula just enough that players feel at ease with the game.

This is just how the industry works. Like it or not, it’s better to make money then waste money.

Your pitch is your website. Whether you are looking for a publisher or a distributor, the first thing they’ll see is your website. When you release your game your website will be the first thing a player interacts with. You must at all costs make the presentation of your website as simple and professional as possible, while maintaining the game’s atmosphere.

If your game is a horror game, the website should be dark and graphically run-down. If you have a puzzle game, the website should be bright and colorful.

No matter what the layout looks like it doesn’t matter if the visitor can’t find what they are looking for. Any page besides News, Forum, Screenshots (Media/Downloads), Purchase, Contact could be pointless. You want to keep things organized and clutterless. If your visitor cannot find what they want in 5 seconds your website layout sucks.

Don’t be a fool, don’t forget your roots.

Games have graphically come a long way since their birth but their gameplay mechanics haven’t changed completely. The Evolution of Gameplay is something that game designers need to know in order to further the history of events.

(Sorry playing Seaman right now…it’s a game…on the Dreamcast…really…)

Publishers are important in many respects, but that was back in the 90s when the government started to crack down on the game industry and dealing with retailers became a nightmare, right?

There are 3 things that a Publisher can do for you:

1) Make tons of copies of your game
2) Distribute those copies at retail outlets
3) Make your game known to the world

These are all very important things but since the dawn of the internet and digital distribution, you have a fighting chance if you go on your own. You have to be willing to spend the time to contact hundreds of people telling them about your game. This means that you’ll lose possibly months of development time on your next project unless you hire a third party.

If you don’t want to worry about all of this hand your game over to a Publisher. There’s no shame in it. As long as your game is good and creative it is likely that your Publisher will actually push your title more so than its other projects. That’s the worst part about a Publisher is that they have at least 50 on going projects at once so your game might not get the spotlight that you think it deserves. Oh and of course you’ll probably get a 60/40 cut, in favor of the publisher…

Design documents are a pain to create but are the best references that designers can create for the team. I’d recommend to take at least a month and write down every little design aspect. The best documents are hundreds of pages long!

During this phase you should be able to tell whether or not your game is too ambitious for your team. If it is try to cut out gameplay features. There’s always room to add those in for a sequel.

With The Divine, we built the engine before the game itself was fully designed. We knew that we wanted a space shooting game but we didn’t plan to put in special effects and the sort. Inadvertantly the coding is a little messy and locating a bug is becoming rather difficult. Now if we knew ahead of time every little aspect that we would need in-game we would have been able to write a more efficient engine that would suit our needs. But oh well we’ve learned from our mistake. Make sure that you do too.