I consider myself as an Indie Game Developer, well part-time only, as my main full-time job is Producer at Million Victories.

Why does it matter to qualify as an indie game dev?

Independent video game development, or indie game development, is the video game development process of creating indie games; these are video games, commonly created by individual or small teams of video game developers and usually without significant financial support of a video game publisher or other outside source.

taken from Wikipedia Indie game development

The video game industry has evolved a lot lately. Now big blockbuster games (aka AAA games) needs millions and millions of dollars of investment to be developed and published, and each title requires 5-6 years in order to be releasable, and for some games, they won’t reach anyone and will fall into the limbo of “never-ending game dev land”.

We are far from the time where things were cheaper and faster to do.

The chart above taken on the Venture Beat website from 2018 forecasts how the video game industry cost will evolve for 2020.

The quote above from Wikipedia mention that being and indie game developer means you are a small team without significant financial support. Well it’s very “vague” in my opinion.

In my vision of indie dev team 10 people is already too much. When you reach 10 members on your team you will start dealing with things that are not about your product and more about people and management. You are no longer spending time working on your game.

The ideal number, as Jason Fried and his teammate from Basecamp mentioned in their book Getting Real is 3. At least to ship the version 1 of your product.

3 is perfect. And I would say from the experience I had working on many projects, the most successful ones are when I was part of a team of 3. Each time the team grew it was a disaster.

The advice from the Basecamp, and Ruby on Rails, founder, could be applied for indie game development. You don’t need to have an army of game designers, gameplay programmer or concept artist, 3D modelers, animators, and so forth…

Keep it small and simple. That’s the indie spirit for me.

Small will be also your financial support if you decide to follow the indie game dev path. If you have investors and people ready to lend you or give you money, you are no longer an “independent” game developer. You have to report to your investors what you are doing with their money.

Try to be as independent as you can. Especially when it comes to money. That’s the point of this article. Get a full-time job to pay your rent and basics expanses, and commit your self to work on your video game project every day at least a few hours a day but something: just cleaning some code, or optimizing some assets.

Try to keep your motivation, and this is the hardest part of being an indie game dev. When you could afford to have a good salary to some big or medium-size company and you start to get involved more and more in the company life, it’s hard to find the motivation to work on your side project when at home. Maybe the right balance is not to have a good position or salary.

I work full-time as a producer and very happy with this job, the company and the bosses. I am also teaching game development processes at some schools. I worked as a freelance on web dev and other contract work in order to invest that money on the development of Scarce Tactics, our big failed prototype. After a few years of investing money in the development, I was not able to find any publisher. Thus we have decided to put on hold this project. It’s hard but sometimes it’s better to cancel or pause something rather than being stubborn and close your company. We have refocused our projects to be again small, and sustainable. More on that subject may be on some other post.

To wrap-up: Stay small and try to finance everything by yourself, don’t go for a loan, or anything that could put you in troublesome month or years later. Being small is an advantage that all big companies will envy you.