Seven Truths About Indie Engineering

This is a translation of an article from a blog of an indie developer who has been creating games for several years, gained some experience, comprehended disappointment, but continues his work. I think, basically his opinion on indie development will be useful only to people who have embarked on this path. So, here is the article:

1. No one knows anything.

Developing a game within a large firm stimulates people to specialize, allows them to develop skills in some area. An indie developer should be good at everything, he needs to constantly evolve. You may feel ready for it. So, it is not. Every day you will learn something new, everything will constantly change and, of course, from time to time something will go wrong.
')
Approximately 30 percent of your time will be spent on the actual creation of the game. The rest of the time you need to spend on other things. In fact, you are lucky if you spend 4 months a year on the game itself. You probably do not know much about how to conduct business, about marketing and the like, but you have to do it. And, of course, you know nothing about the future, for example, about what platforms will be in 5 years, how technology or audience will change.

What to do?

You need to listen and hear your customers, respect them. Let them teach you. It's impossible to please everyone, but you need to understand who your audience is. It should be some specific people with understandable needs, tastes and preferences. It may come as a surprise to you to understand what your audience wants, since their desires can be very different from your plans. But, in general, you must find your audience, not you. Nobody is really looking for you and is not waiting for you.

Be prepared to quickly change your plans, adjusting to the audience. You are not a huge corporation, and changing your plans will not be a problem for you. It makes no sense to have a business plan for the years ahead - every week everything changes, and it's like trying to predict the future. It is better to know at the very beginning what you generally go to and understand how to achieve this ...

Once again - yes, any developer can know a lot, but he will never know quite a lot.

2. To get a plus you need from 3 to 5 years

Yes, for most indie developers you need at least 3-5 years to become profitable. After all, indie development - this is not an oil well. This is the same business as the others. Even Tesla Motors will not have a profit for the first 10 years.

Creating each game is a risky venture. There is a large amount of luck in how a game becomes successful. As a result - very few people whose first game brings a lot of money. There are no guarantees. And the thing is that - even if you start to get money, then, of course, you will want to reinvest them to reduce the risks. You want to get on other platforms, make your game more people see (that is, invest in marketing), spend money on software, hardware, etc., that is, spend money on what you need to get out of your business. to a new level. Of course, all this costs a lot of money, and you will need to reinvest. Your salary is the last thing you want to spend.

At the same time, you need to have a roof over your head, and some money for food. There are a lot of ways to solve this problem. For example, you can try to get investments, get into some kind of incubator, go to Kickstarter, take a loan, use savings (if any), or just do a project in your spare time. Some simply live from hand to mouth. This is also a good option.

3. No one knows who you are, and you are not interesting to anyone.

The bad news ... nobody knows what you are. You will have to earn a reputation from scratch, and you will need to somehow attract the attention of people. All this takes time.

As previously stated, great success is often the result of luck. But you can affect this very luck. To do this, you need to establish relationships, communicate with different people - all these are important conditions for success to come to you. You have to constantly ask yourself a lot of questions, for example - “What is important for our customers?”, “What do we sell to people in general - features or something else?”.
Do something for people so that they can get an idea about you and give you feedback.

Good news ... no one knows what you are.

You are not limited by anything! You can do all sorts of things, experiment and try.
You have nothing to lose, you have no fans, and you can not disappoint anyone.
You can release a beta version, albeit with bugs. Even have to! Because when people do not play your games, you yourself do not learn anything.

In the meantime, no one expects anything from you. No one wants to steal your ideas. No one knows you.

4. You need to rethink how you measure your success.

Too often, I see people evaluating the value of a game for its sales. People mentally spend their money before they get the money. Many are convinced that their first game will be a breakthrough, and they will receive a good income. They see that some kind of similar game has brought a lot of money. Their game is also very good, and even the talented team. Of course, in their opinion, this means that they will be fine.

But sales forecasts do not work very well. Guessing on the coffee grounds is sometimes more reliable. Especially if these predictions are based on the sales of games that other people have made. In general, it is not a good idea to count on success based on sales of other games. This is the way to frustration. Instead of spending time on such predictions and calculations, it is better to spend it on creating games. That's when you release your game, and you get real information from the real world.

In general, I have not yet seen that in the case of copying some games by developers, this would give similar results.

Success is a consequence of certain conditions. Every game and every situation is different. Of course, you can look at the results of other people’s activities and, perhaps, understand how they did it and draw conclusions, for example, which platform to use, but in general you need to understand that you are playing the game in other conditions.

Everyone knows that there are more important things in life than money, so why do we sometimes hold a different position for games? My opinion, you need to think first about how to make a good product that will make people happier.

My game is not selling very well right now, I just released it. Nevertheless, I think that this is a good product, it makes people happier, and this is the main thing I was striving for. I would not do what I could not do well. And, by the way, the lack of initial sales is not necessarily an indication that there will be no future sales either. Well, on the basis of this game you can do something else.
As I already wrote, I believe that the path to success takes at least 3-5 years, and my criterion of success is not only money. I measure my success also with the knowledge I gained and progress towards my final goals.

And the goals of creating my last game, for example, are:
1. To prove to myself that I can make a game that people would like.
2. Create a game that you can then use to sell various products and other games.
3. Get the necessary knowledge on the results of the launch of the game on different platforms.
4. Promote information about us to Google.

Here's what happened:
1. We are already working on several other games. We sell t-shirts and toys. We learned that they want fans of our game.
2. We have data from different platforms and we want to go on three more platforms in the near future.
3. We have learned to advance through Google and now we are trying to do it through Facebook and Twitter.

In general, the game we created opens up all the new possibilities.

As a result of the creation of this game, we learned a lot of new things, met many new people, negotiated, participated in exhibitions, interviewed a huge number of users. It would be scary to think about this amount of work 2 years ago. But now we have a good idea about all this and know how to become even more experienced.

But these are still the first steps to build a sustainable business. We are moving step by step, little by little, so it is unlikely that we will turn to the wrong road.

In general, we are still on the road and we like it.

5. You must make you the best boss for yourself.

Often not very good things happen to people who work for themselves.
People sometimes work for wear, eventually break. Of course, this negatively affects their entire life, including their relationships outside of work. Sometimes people work with clients and / or employees who do not tolerate, which also leads to stress. Sometimes people forget about why they started developing games, and ultimately all their activity begins to come down to the desire to earn money, and come to what they dreamed of. People become exhausted.

Thus, it is better to establish some rules for yourself so that this does not happen to you, for example:
1. Not to work for a living, but to enjoy work, and live for the sake of life itself.
2. Work with people who understand you and who you are not indifferent to.
3. Live according to what you believe. Do not compromise with your values.

If you work for your own company, then you and cards in hand in order to create an atmosphere in which you enjoy working. It should be an atmosphere in which you can develop, learn new things and create new things, enjoy life. You need to know your goal. Even if you do not plan to hire employees in the near future, there should be a culture of your company.

What is important is the process, not the result. You can strive to create a successful game, but if you do not like the process of creation, then, in general, you should not do it.

Let's be honest. The only thing that really matters is love in the end. You started making games because you like games. You started making games because you want to spend more time with games, you want to love your work. Do not forget about it.

Stay true to what you want and what you want. It is easy to stray from such a path, especially when you have no money and you are worried about the future, but if you go astray from this path, you will definitely end up in a future that you do not want.

6. You will have to take risks

Game development is a risky business. You will have to think a lot for decision-making, and sometimes just do something based only on your intuition.

Those decisions that can have a positive effect on the development of your business in the long term, as a rule, differ from those that lead to quick good results. Sometimes you have to make difficult decisions that may seem rather stupid from the outside.

For example, we knew that the release of our game on Xbox and PC platforms was not the best solution. Our game is designed for multiplayer, but no one is playing multiplayer on the PC right now. The XBOX market is too busy. But we went for it, and, as we believe, were right.

You need to gain experience, create something like a resume for your company. You need to be able to show that you can and can make games, somehow start. For example, it was important for us to learn how to make games for the consoles, and the Xbox was quite suitable for this.

Of course, we could make a game that we thought would sell well, especially for XBox and PC. But we decided to continue to develop our existing game, because we believe that it will be interesting to someone.

We took risks, having spent 6 months on development (about 3 months combined with work, and 3 months worked together full-time). This allowed us to make a game that corresponds to the level we call Minimum Viable Awesome.
You've probably heard about Minimum Viable Products, so now - we approach the creation of games a little differently. We strive to ensure that the game is not minimally fit, but that it is as impressive as we can make it so in the planned time.

We had a million ideas, but at one point we realized that if we continue to postpone the launch, it would be too long, and started.

At first, we wanted to spend more time on learning, read more information about creating games, etc., but we now understand that the best learning is learning by doing. Therefore, we are now making small games, releasing them, and learning from them. In general, we spend time on understanding what we need to progress. We are based on our previous experience, on the lessons learned.

Sometimes, in order to get an answer to the necessary question, we simply do something, for example, such a question “What will we get if we start the game on such and such a platform?”. The answer to this question will allow you to build a business strategy in the future.

We do not know the future, but it is important to think about it and make plans based on some priorities.

7. It will be harder than you think. Even if you have already thought of everything, it will be difficult

The decision to become an indie requires both courage and a keen desire to make games. But even when you know that all this will not be easy, you will not be able to prepare yourself for every surprise. Creating a game will take a very long time, usually a lot more than you expected. So the sooner you start, the better.

It is really hard and stressful, but also exciting and fun. You will need to find ways to survive all these difficulties, because otherwise you will give up and it turns out that you did it in vain.
Well, in general, it's all just our opinion on game development ...

Do not do it for the money and success. Do it for the sake of creativity, because the creation of games is a kind of art. Believe me, it will pay off in the long run.

Of course, only time will tell how good this strategy is. We may not have huge sales, but we can enjoy what we do. It gives us the feeling that we are on the right track. No one can tell you how to run your business. Every game, and in general, every business is not like the others, and you just need to learn how to quickly, cheaply and simply find out which direction you are going. It takes time, effort, patience and perseverance.

The basis of success will be years of failure and learning from your mistakes. Starting a game development business you need to understand that this is a long time.

All you have to do is start and keep trying to become better and better in your business. Keep this course and believe that the result will be. Success reaches the one who does not give up.