3 Gamedev Ideas

The difficulty of making a financially successful indie game on your own doesn’t usually come from hard technical challenges.

You’ll more likely struggle in:

The project management aspects (hitting deadlines, motivation, discipline, time management, finances…)
The sheer amount of content you have to create
The amount of different skills you have to learn and be good at
The business and marketing aspects (letting people know your game exists and making them care)
… and putting it all together to make a good polished game that actually has a place in the market.

It’s why being an excellent programmer doesn’t automatically translate to being an excellent indie developer.

II.

The design choices you make at the beginning of a project have more impact than you think.

Say you decide your player shoud be able to attack up or down in your 2D platformer.

This alone can represent weeks of additional work and can limit how creative you can be with your level layouts.

You’ll have to make sure the player can’t cheese enemies by attacking them from below or above without them being able to defend themselves.

Your enemies will need more attacks (which also means more animation work) and more complex behavior patterns to deal with it.

Be aware of what each of your decisions entail.

Ask yourself if it’s really needed to achieve your vision before burdening yourself with more work.

III.

When looking for YouTubers to promote your game, bigger is not always better.

Things to consider:

Some of them have a lot of subscribers but a very tiny view and engagement count. (bad)
Are they focusing on games in the same genre as yours (good) or do they cover a broad range of unrelated games (bad)?
Are people watching these videos only for the host personality (bad) or to look for games to play (good)?

Do note that I’m absolutely not saying channels centered around their host are bad.

I’m just pointing out factors that have an impact on what kind of exposure and financial results you can expect from working with them.

If a creator posts only no commentary gameplay videos and still gets a lot of engagement, you know those people are here for the game.

All of this to say: don’t overlook small channels that have a targeted audience.

A channel with a qualified audience of 6K can generate more sales than one with 250K subscribers. (happened to me)

Until next week,