I had been thinking for a long time about a way to reach out to indie developers and ask them about the difficulties of the industry. Are they able to make ends meet? Are they doing it just for creative satisfaction? What were their mistakes and how did they solve them?
Then I read this book by Gabe Barrett, which is a similar project but about board games. The premise is simple. He created 15 questions and sent them out to board game designers, who answered them. The interesting thing was to find out how much the answers differed between designers or had similarities, and which they were of course.
So, based on the above, I decided to keep it simple and have only 8 questions, that I believe encompass everything I would like to learn. These questions are the following:
- What made you want to become an indie dev?
- What are some misconceptions you had early on you no longer have?
- What are three things that you were expecting to be harder and three to be easier but were not so?
- What was a notable mistake you made and how you moved past it?
- From a financial standpoint, what are your professional insights? Is this a valid career path to pursue or is it reserved for success stories only?
- Any thoughts and tips on how to build a community around your projects?
- Crowdfunding. Yay or nay and why?
- What advice would you have for an aspiring indie dev at this particular point in time?
Each participating dev received the same set of questions and they chose to answer any number of them. The only requirement was that they had actually fully released a commercial product first.
The project is finished for now but if you’d like to contact us, please send us an email at: indiegamepicks@hotmail.com
You can purchase the physical version on Amazon! Also available on other Amazon country sites like Germany, UK, Spain etc.
You can also download the PDF book here!
If you liked the book, please consider leaving us a review on Goodreads.
Indie Game Picks 