How to Be an Indie Game Developer

I'm in the process of finalizing all of the paperwork for the business and hope to have our game in testing by the end of the month. The bottom line is it's way more work than I anticipated. I'm not inexperienced either, this my third company.

I've been running a software business since the beginning of 2011. The amount of work in one game dwarfs the amount of work in a utility app. There's just no comparison. I'm confident we're making a unique and fun game (iOS first, later Android) and I am paying a lot of attention to promoting the company and our game, but I really don't expect to make much money this year on it.

Two years before the company is paying off seems about right. My first company (bricks and mortar) took around two years before we were out of crisis mode. I think the app stores give people a false impression of what it takes to build a business and see your hard work turn into something meaningful.

The upside is there is incredible upside potential in the video game market, especially if you're running a lean shop. Having said that, I'm not doing it for the money as much as I'm doing it to build something that I'll be happy working on 5 or even 10 years from now.

I don't think people should approach it (unless they are just hobbyists) because making games is fun. It's not really fun after the initial conceptualization is done. It's mostly just hard work. Dull, repetitive, never-ending work. I get through it by exercising religiously and paying attention to my diet. I also take off at least every other weekend to relax and hang out.

[promo] If you're interested in hearing about the game's progress, please follow us at twitter.com/rapidfirestudio [/promo]

- Make a game, release it

How To Stop Being an Indie Game Developer:

- Procrastinate, ever

- Let the marketing "take care of itself"

- Have poor version control, then "take a break"

- Finish only one game, ever

- Let someone else handle your finances and shield you from the sense of urgency you should feel as you approach the end of your runway without taking off

- Fail to realize that games are mostly a hit-based market, and plan accordingly

- Sell your one non-hit game for 99¢

- Never update your one game

Anyway, an anecdote is just useless data with a sample size of one, but I'm pretty sure I read this story plenty of times before I went and lived it myself.

Still, in my case it's kind of nice that Blizzard left my name in the Diablo 3 credits. I can pretend I spent the past year being a part of something productive!

But way too long as a blog post: I would would suggest to break it into many posts, or even publish it as a free ebook and just link it in the blog.

"I believe it will take a skilled person with a strong work ethic starting from scratch a minimum of two years to get any kind of significant financial return from making indie games, probably longer."

I know it's impossible but I'd love to see actual statistics for this. Especially on the average time and not the minimum time assuming all the planets align correctly.